tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16150876.post115330674194379398..comments2023-10-14T11:58:11.385-04:00Comments on Ron Schuler's Parlour Tricks: MarcuseRon Schulerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12897764795703441103noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16150876.post-55037646700005374282009-12-01T22:01:29.882-05:002009-12-01T22:01:29.882-05:00I read Marcuse very differently. How can it be th...I read Marcuse very differently. How can it be that Marcuse had benevolent intentions, when his peers at the Frankfurt Institute were working with the CIA? How can one really accept that Marcuse saw art as an essential component of emancipation When Adorno was also writing Dialectic of Enlightenment and discussing how to leverage culture on a mass scale to manipulate the public? I find Marcuse to be publishing work that is thinly veiled double-speak, especially when one sees that his One Dimensional Man is exactly what has been created in today's world.<br /><br />Quoting from the documentary, Das Netz<br />http://blip.tv/file/2843830<br /><br />Between 1946 and 1953, at the invitation of the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation, leading scientist from various fields meet in the New York Beekman Hotel. They include Norbert Wiener, Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, Kurt Lewin, and John von Neumann. The aim of these secretly meeting, later known as the "Macy Conferences" and sporadically attended by CIA representatives, is to develop a science that makes it possible to predict and control human behavior.<br /><br />This is a weapon that America desperately needs in the Cold War, on the new battlefield of the subconscious. The "Macy Group" therefore registers particular interest in the 1950 study "The Authoritarian Personality", released by the International Institute of Social Research, a new foundation of the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research, centered around Max Horkeheimer and Theodor W. Adorno. This study, then the most comprehensive social profile of a society, the USA, aimed to give a scientific explanation for religious and racialprejudice. Thousands of interviews lead to a huge collection of data, which are analyzed by the most up-to-date computers, with the aim of answering one particular question, how does authoritarian behavior as a mass phenomenon develop?<br /><br />The authors see the explanation in man's "authoritarian matrix" which offers the key to the psychology of fascism and totalitarian systems. The matrix is shaped through education and tradition, and it is apparently indissolubly linked to the metaphysical notion of "supra- naturally" created nature". How could a tendency towards fascism and racism, especially against Jews, be tracked and explained? To this end, sociologist create, among other things, a scale to measure fascist potential, the so-called "F-scale". In addition, previously concealed personality tendencies are to be tracked, using the latest psychological processes, for example, tests conceived by the American psychologist Henry A. Murray, one of the fathers of today's assessment centers.<br /><br />In order to permanently obstruct fascism and anti-Antisemitism, it seems necessary to alter the nature of man and his underlying cultural patterns so that the authoritarian matrix would be eradicated forever. How is it possible, ruling out some bloody operation, to penetrate deep into a person's consciousness with the aim of changing it? First, according to Gestalt psychologist Kurt Lewin, a member of the Macy Group, the old values and balances must be destroyed in order to make conditions "fluid". Then it is possible to establish new balances and values. These, then, must be permanently fixed by means of self-regulation... re-education will then develop into self-re-education. This would transform the world into a post-national, multi-ethnic global society, with no fixed borders.<br /><br />The Macy Group believes it can offer the tools and blueprints for this new world order. New and faster computers, system theory and model cybernetic worlds, with which it appears possible to control and direct all scientific, cultural and political spheres. This also promises the programming of "new people", "anti-authoritarian people", made to measure.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com