Gin’s Reviews > Lectures 1949-1968, Volume 2: Social Theory and Politics > Status Update

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.