How did democracy and capitalism take away the right to individual thought? What happens if non-free media are banned? Does freedom of choice exist today? And why did the solution of material problems lead to spiritual disaster? We turn to the philosophical work "One-Dimensional Man" by the German sociologist Herbert Marcuse and understand what "neototalitarianism" is.
Technological progress, which overnight turned the lives of millions of people in the late 19th - early 20th centuries, for many years inspired positive hope for the liberation of the inhabitants of the planet from class dependence and direct slavery. With the development of technology, the world has partially managed to get rid of child labor, violation of individual labor rights and the need to work for a large part of the population almost round the clock just in order not to die of hunger.
But the rapid development of production made it possible to get rid of not only the tragic realities of the past. In the shortest possible time, the whole world became "universal": thousands of identical things appeared on the shelves of stores, filling tens of thousands of monotonous houses. With the advent of television and radio, millions of people listened to identical information and involuntarily memorized repetitive messages. For the first time in the history of mankind, the world is faced with the threat of the loss of individualism.
It is interesting that the situation that has arisen did not raise questions for a long time, because technological progress saved people from poverty and the need to survive, simplified communications and united billions of individuals through the media. Only a few decades later, leading philosophers, psychologists, sociologists, among whom were Z. Freud, E. Fromm and G. Marcuse, sounded the alarm.
Practice has shown that the exhausted person happily agreed to exchange the need for independent thinking for material wealth. This is confirmed by the results of political propaganda in any state. It is known that the voter is ready to vote for the leader who promises him a solution to pressing everyday problems. At the same time, with a high probability, he turns a blind eye to political atrocities perpetrated by the same leader. This is how propaganda operated during Nazi Germany, for example. The rule of “a radio in every home” made the Germans a slave mass who believed that the government was concerned about their welfare.
According to the German philosopher, sociologist and culturologist Herbert Marcuse, in such situations, due to the fault of dependent media, there is not a choice, but only an illusion of choice. The widespread use of television, radio, and today the Internet leads to the fact that every day a frantic stream of repetitive information is poured into a person's head. It is thanks to repetitions that a person appears to be programmed: he so often hears this or that message, whether it be advertising goods or propaganda of the actions of a political party, that he begins to consider his actions an act of goodwill.
In addition, in the reality of such one-dimensionality, in which the thinking of the individual is relegated to the background, the cult of consumption plays an important role, which is gaining momentum every year. Major philosophers never tire of saying that false needs imposed by the media and advertising overshadow the personality and force it to act irrationally. It is no coincidence that so many people work for income, which they are going to spend on unnecessary things stored on the shelves of closets. At the same time, the cult of consumption has reached such a degree that the average buyer often simply cannot answer why he bought this or that thing. According to the United Nations, a third of the world's food is wasted today. But the modern consumer brought up by advertising is not interested in such global problems as world hunger and poor environmental conditions,since it is the carrier of the so-called "happy consciousness".
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The formally satisfied rights and freedoms of the individual have led to the fact that the owners of the “happy consciousness” are ready to agree with the crimes of society, regardless of their severity. Marcuse notes that this fact speaks of a decline in personal autonomy and understanding of what is happening.
Thus, "one-dimensional people" are completely unaware that they are far from democratic reality. The philosopher called the total programming of society for false values that provide them with an excess of material wealth "neototalitarianism."
Moreover, Marcuse argues that the principles of the new reality managed to take on recognizable features not only in the visual similarity of things and objects that filled almost every apartment, not only in the predictable behavior of people, but also in human language. Like J. Orwell, the sociologist believes that mutually exclusive concepts, abbreviations and an all-consuming tautology came to modern language, which led to the impossibility of finding the truth and the absolute confusion of mass consciousness and the substitution of concepts.
Of course, it cannot be argued that absolutely all members of society agree with life in a one-dimensional reality. But critics point out that getting out of it is almost impossible. In the information age, this is due to the fact that a person is unable to cope with the amount and quality of information poured onto him. It is interesting that the more facts from the media a person learns in a day, the more empty he feels. It is not uncommon for journalists working in the newsroom to complain about their inner emptiness. Many of them claim that they are forced to work with an avalanche of information that does not concern them, exhausting and quickly forgotten, leaving no time and energy to think about their own lives.
In the event that a person decides to think independently and refuses to be a participant in global consumption, he is faced with the problem of finding information. Entering a search engine, he understands that for any request he receives thousands of claims to the truth and at the same time opposite opinions. Most people, however, completely abandon the need to seek the truth and find it convenient to trust the opinion of the federal media, advertising, and mass culture.
Speaking about one-dimensionality, political scientist S. Kurginyan notes that the modern world political system tacitly prohibits individuals from living by their own rules. After all, as long as Orwell's "stockyard" listens to the voice from the outside, you can convince him that by solving private interests, in fact, he allegedly satisfies his own. Kurginyan spoke about the attempt to understand what was happening:
At the same time, sociological polls show that, despite the external level of happiness, more and more people actually feel lost in the sea of information, empty and unhappy. The statistics of suicides and violence suggests that a “happy mind” does not save an individual from total dissatisfaction. Information garbage that has accumulated in the head for years leads to the fact that it becomes scary for a person to be alone with himself, because he practically does not have anything of his own. This is because in a one-dimensional reality, a person associates himself more with his things than with his thoughts.
In the book To Have or To Be, E. Fromm notes:
Kurginyan says that in a world of abundance, many feel dissatisfied, but not everyone is ready to go for the feat of self-discovery.
It is noteworthy that the current opposition cannot influence the situation, since it is playing on the same one-dimensional field. What to do in the world of rose-colored glasses and a consumer cult that makes you ignore global problems and the loss of individuality?
Marcuse believed that the only way out of the prevailing reality could be the "Great refusal" from the consumption of things and imposed information.
It is clear that such a conclusion is utopian and will never become reality. But it is also clear that today a way out of one-dimensionality is still possible, but it concerns a very small part of people and does not change the system as a whole.
Fortunately, the very Internet and the very protected rights and freedoms of the individual allow one to voluntarily abandon a number of norms accepted in society, such as uncontrolled consumption or the chewing of propaganda. Obviously, the only way out of a deplorable situation is self-development, conscious comparison of several sources of information, development of the ability to think, rejection of direct faith in the media. And while historical conditions allow using a wide variety of information and do not create lists of forbidden literature, the way out of one-dimensionality entirely depends on the desire and persistence of a particular individual.