Chai

“Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary”
― Karl Marx

“Christopher Lasch explains the process by which the therapeutic segment of the managerial elite win moral acceptance. Despite the fact that its claims to be providing “mental health” where always self-serving and highly subjective, the theapeutic class offered ethical leadership in the absence of shared principles. By defining emotional well-being as both a social good and the overcoming of what is individually and collectively dangerous, the behavioral scientists have been able to impose their absolutes upon the culturally fluid society. In “The True and Only Heaven” Lasch explores the implications for postwar politics of the “Authoritarian Personality.” A chief contributor to this anthology, Theodro Adorno, abandoned his earlier work as a cultural critic to become a proponent of governmentally imposed social therapy. According to Lasch, Adorno condemns undesirable political attitudes as “prejudice” and “by defining prejudice as a ‘social disease’ substituted a medical for a political idiom. In the end, Adorno and his colleagues “relegated a broad range of controversial issues to the clinic – to scientific study as opposed to philosophical and political debate.”
― Paul Edward Gottfried, After Liberalism: Mass Democracy in the Managerial State

“Contrary to an assumption that arose in the nineteenth century, objectivity is not necessarily more available to those who stand at a greater distance from the events and personalities they are treating. Certain historical events and movements (and there are many) become more controversial as they
recede temporally because they engage partisan passions more intensely as we move away from them.”
― Paul Gottfried