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

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.

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.