Status Updates From Lectures 1949-1968, Volume ...

“…propaganda here is primarily a technique of mass psychology. It is based on the model of the authority-bound personality… The unity lies in this appeal to the authority-bound personality. One hears time and again that these movements all promise something and that is true as a characteristic of the lack of theory.” Again, MAGA and Trump come to mind, and the most recent example of what Adorno talks about.

Third paragraph describes Trump’s US to a T.

Psychoanalytically speaking here - “Someone who is unable to see anything ahead of them and does not want the social foundation to change really has no alternative other than…’The end.’ This person, from the perspective of their own social situation, longs for demise… the demise of all.”

“Fascists movements as the wounds, the scars of a democracy that, to this day, has not yet lived up to its own concept.” - what Zizek mentioning someone saying the same thing - the rise of fascism is an outcome of a failed revolution.

“… even the people who stand within the production process already feel potentially superfluous… they totally feel potential unemployed.” Adorno refers to the production line workers but almost 60 years later in 2026, this can also apply to service/intellectual labour with the advent of AI. The form may change but the underlying substance does not.

The last paragraph of this page refers to the Nazis, but can easily describe today’s situation in many countries. Most aptly, the MAGA movement, and how Trunp is seen by them.

Personalisation of politics through idealism akin to Harvey’s notion of aesthetics as opposed to material basis of political power ( parallel the ethics domain of Harvey)?

The concept of “socialised semi-culture” which I think is key to also understanding the readiness to turn to some form of “ersatz rationality”, such as superstition or other brief structures like fascism or dialectical-materialism (diamat). In today’s context and within American society, the MAGA movement is a contemporary example.

Adorno’s concern with superstition is in how as a mechanism of contemporary mass culture, it leads and influences people in a certain way that keeps them dependent through “exploiting certain factors in the masses themselves.” For Adorno, the mass culture is the ideology of those wishing to exploit those masses. What allows this to happen is what

Second-hand superstition - ideas that are “cranked up and boosted by material interests, essentially by the interests of journals, magazines and newspapers I. Order to increase their sales and spread their influence.”

NOTE: Discusses projection here, and sees it as a fundamental mechanism of the authority-centred character:
“Process by which we suppress certain impulses within ourselves… and proceed to transfer or ascribe these impulses to other human beings.”

Substitute gratification (from depth psychology) is used here to show how stereotypes of good and evil and authoritarian nationalism fits well together. Think of present day examples - Trump’s US today, rhetoric on migrants etc.

The term refers to “the gratification that people derive by elevating and glorifying themselves, provides a kind of satisfaction that compensates for what they lack in reality.”

The authority-centred person as one who is incapable of undergoing experience, or learn through experience. The world for these people are basically material for him to work upon in a more or less manipulative manner.

“Pathic” prejudice - first introduced in Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectics of Enlightenment. ”… the kind of prejudice that is entertained by human beings who cannot be brought to abandon this prejudice even by experiences that would seem to counter or disconfirm it.”

Adorno differentiates pathic prejudice and prejudice as prejudgment here.

SEE THIS PAGE. Adorno’s citing of Freud, and ok progress, and how it fits our world today to a perfect T! The unease experienced by people “has entirely real objective grounds.”

Over-identification with the state of the world lead to human beings accepting things as they are because they cannot see the possibility for change - “the very prospect that the situation could be changed has effectively died within them.” Stockholm syndrome. Capital Realism as drawing from Adorno, and a very apt reflection of the world today apropos Zizek’s quip on the end of capitalism.

A good look at the relationship between technology and human beings. Technology is a tool performs a function - and how it does so depends on the shape of the society and whether it is rational or otherwise.

So this helplessness results in apathy, and especially in fostering political apathy, can be detrimental to us as it “ensure that everything basically remains as it is, yet drives us towards the sort of catastrophe we have to talk about if we are not to fall back into empty chatter.”

It’s not because we cannot exercise thought but because increasing insights into contradictions make life harder to live.

“Within this administered world each of us constantly assailed by the feeling of powerlessness”. This is spoken in relation to the prevalence of specialisation. In essence we are all caught up in the mechanisms that render us powerless.

“Thus the process of social control now increasingly passes over to those forms of power that do in fact reproduce the real life of human beings in society, namely the specifically economic ones.” He was contrasting this rationalisation of society with irrational institutions formerly characteristic of society - monarchy, the feudal system and churches.

On the administered world - “accommodation, adaptability, the ability to fit in, and other qualities of this kind, rather than the capacity to persevere and preserve one’s own personality.”

A timeless observation
“once a substantial need for particular cultural and intellectual goods, or indeed, for any specific goods, no longer prevails in the context of social life, these goods can no longer simply continue to exist unchallenged but are seized upon by that life, and exhibit a tendency to degenerate into little more than decoration.”

The tension between ideas about education and purpose vs why students need to know to make their way in the world - this is still the case today.

“We cannot simply focus on the individual, as such, from society, for the individual is determined, right down to its innermost composition through society, and further, that it is actually much harder to determine what is truly individuated, that which differs from the merely social, than it is to determine the opposite.”

“what matters is not the human being as such, but the concrete relations of actual living human beings and the relationship of human beings to the prevailing institutions and arrangements, to existing property relations and to objective social reality”.

Sounds like what he said in the previous chapter about the point of sociology.

“ however important it is to know the direction in which the political sentiment of the people is moving, one could only offer a reliable prognosis if one knows the specific interests and political perspectives of the key groups which occupied the economically most important positions and to a large extent are in a position to affect all direct to behaviour of human being themselves.”

On sociology: “the objective, sustaining foundation of our society… the forms of organisation through which society produces and reproduces itself today.”

Sociology “is principally concerned, not only with human being and their behaviour, but [also]… with the objective forces on which their behaviour depends… objective mechanisms which affects the social life of human beings behind their backs”

Adorno mentioning it being necessary to take what we now call an inter-disciplinary approach to understanding and diagnosing social problems.

Mentions to not just focus on administrative and managerial questions when doing empirical sociology as such an approach “ encourages us to prioritise the inessential in essential, and to conceive of human beings, as objects to be administered rather than as subjects.”

What I got from this chapter was that the built urban environment needs to reflect the existing social order and be fit for purpose for humans to live as human beans, rather than as Adorno stated on page 14, “simply as appendages of the machinery of civilisation.”