Alan Watt
"Cutting Through The Matrix" Live On RBN (#235)
Poem Copyright Alan Watt Jan. 15, 2009:
Dispossessed Join the Possessors:
"And Over Came The
Frankfurt School,
With Techniques to Study, Join the Pool
Which Already Controlled Western Culture,
Marriage of Eagle and the Vulture,
Osiris and Isis Studied Their Prey,
Finding Human Fallibility Where e'er It Lay,
Gave a New Culture, Method... Seeming Variety,
Which Led to New Order, the Planned Society,
Guided Technology, Cultural Revolution
Would Speed the Process of Evolution,
Cunningly Introduced, Observing the Effect,
Changes in Consumer, Few Could Detect,
Mind-Bombed Joe Average has Dementia,
Leaving Total Control to Intelligentsia"
© Alan Watt Jan. 15, 2009
Thursday 15th January 2009
Poem & Dialogue Copyrighted Alan Watt - Jan. 15, 2009 (Exempting Music, Literary Quotes, and Callers' Comments)
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Hi folks, I am Alan Watt and this is Cutting Through The Matrix on the 15th of January 2009.
For the newcomers: look into www.cuttingthroughthematrix.com website and you'll find hundreds of hours of talks I've given through educational talks, where I've tried to piece the big picture together for the people out there. You can download them for free.
Also look into www.alanwattsentientsentinel.eu and you can download the written transcripts of these audio talks and print them up and they're written in the various languages of Europe.
And, for those who support me financially, I should keep going ahead because things are getting tough for everyone these days and everything costs money; and, you can donate, on the website. You can also see what's for sale and that keeps me going. I've got remind people every once in a while, because it trails off; and, I'm not surprised, because there's so much other stuff out there too, that will take up your attention and perhaps go off in a different direction, and that's ok as well but there's always newcomers coming in and that's what keeps me going. I don't get paid for coming on the radio, I've never asked anyone for money for appearances, I don't go through an agent, I don't have a Foundation, so, you keep me going, the listeners, so, this programme's brought to you, by you, in a sense.
This last while, I've been talking about the forms of control that have mastered us really, in a sense, they have shaped the whole western culture; and, the people who are the last to know about it, are the populations of the countries of the West themselves. The sciences of the mind were kept, especially mass manipulation, were kept secret from the people; but, these same sciences were used upon the people and there isn't an organisation out there today that doesn't go through what they call Public Relations. I've talked about Bernays, who was only one man who was taught this science; I don't believe he was the man who dreamed it up. He was taught this science, and you can find the traces of that by his associates and by books that were published in the 1800s on The Crowd - today we call it Psychology - then, they called it the Behaviourism of Crowds. They meant the masses and how people can be manipulated and many people had been studying this in previous centuries, how it worked.
We know, for a fact, that even the Jesuit Order was so successful because you might say they were trained in an early form of both individual psychology, for the individual person and the relationship of the individual to the masses. That's why it really was so effective in building up a power enterprise across the world; but, their technique, eventually, was found out by other people and used, to the maximum. We find Cecil Rhodes himself, when he set up the Rhodes Foundation and said that we'd set up a society, a form of secret society, to bring in what they thought was world government, based on the British structure, a British Empire structure and he said that they would use the Jesuit techniques. These techniques have been studied and practised down through hundreds of years and formulated / perfected until, in the 20th century I think, they came into full blossom and they've been used on everyone.
It's true, when you vote for someone, you'll never know that person; all you get is a public relations image. The person you see is an image, made by the PR specialist and incredible amounts of money are spent on creating this image. I'm going to go into this, in further depth, after the following messages.
=== BREAK ===
Hi folks, I am Alan Watt and we're Cutting Through The Matrix and I'm talking out of Canada, Ontario Canada, where there's a real deep freeze on and this'll be the third night in a row I think it'll go below the 40 degree mark, so I've got the fire well stacked-up, although my sinuses are getting a bit blocked in this kind of weather; so, if I sound a bit nasal, you'll know why.
I was thinking today too, which ties in with all of this, about all of the reasons that are given for World Government, because this ties into everything I've been talking about; and, the reason the League of Nations and then the United Nations was set up, supposedly to be an arbiter of conflicts. It's set up much like that of a teacher in an old-fashioned school, where you have a couple of guys fighting in the playground and the teacher doesn't go up and ask who is right or wrong, the teacher goes in and stops the screaming and sends them to cool off and then, on a one-to-one basis, try to work out the problem. It's not necessary to find out really who was right and who was wrong, because they'll both really believe they are; and, that's how nations pretty well react with each other, especially when they have long histories of conflict that flare up once in a while. And, for the ones out there who are a bit older, I'm sure we're all pretty fed up with the same wars going on and on and on, our whole lives long. We've never really had peace, although we're removed from it in such a way, we tend to forget it; but, really, since World War II, there's been conflict after conflict and we get little pieces on the news once in a while but it's always so far from us and so removed from us, it's remote; and, if you watch television for instance, it will become surrealistic. It's mixed in with the advertising and the fantasies you watch until it really makes no sense to us, we throw it out and we toss out the horror, literally, with what's happening with all of the fantasy. That's also a control mechanism, technically and legally, if people can be told that they were warned that the world is too unstable and at the same time they don't really care, they hear it but they don't really care. It's impossible, at times, to care if you're really into getting your mainstream media from television where it is so surrealistic. How can you watch something that's horrific one minute and then you're laughing at a comedy the next? That, technically, from an outsider’s point - an alien from Mars - would classify you as insane, or definitely unstable; but that is how all culture is controlled in this day and age.
Now, there's no doubt about it, there are very powerful forces and that's the term that's used over and over by historians to describe the big Foundations and the big N.G.Os that are well funded to bring in this new system, almost like the Star Trek system, with the Federation, you might say. That's the idealistic image that’s portrayed that they hope to eventually come out with. Really, there are forces that have guided us to this position and even if you could possibly, by some strange miracle, get peace on earth, those same forces would have to instigate trouble, to start it all over again; because it's through conflict and it's because of conflict that they use their pulling themselves up to the top, to be the teacher over us, the school teacher again. We can't handle ourselves, see, look what happens, you need us to give you security, but you'll have no privacy, or freedoms. That truly is the whole system that has been set up, that's where it's going. I've read numerous documents, so many that I lose count of, from mainstream, to do with the near future and, often, after you've read it, you find another article where this particular area of observation or lack of privacy has already come into use. It's so quick, it's so fast, it's because it was planned a long time ago; that's why.
We're never told the truth about conflicts; and even then, not all the truth, we're never told the truth of really went on until at least 50 years after any event; and, sometimes it's classified, re-classified for another 50 years or more. When Pierre Trudeau was the Prime Minister of Canada, the media never told the people, when he was running for prime minister-ship, that he had been the leader of the Young Communist Movement for Canada and led the party to Moscow, for their Comintern meeting, in 1952. The whole media knew, but they never bothered to mention it to the voters; and, when he got in, he and Rene Levesque both winked to each other and said we did it, they got in using the system, as it already stood. One of the last Acts he did, as Prime Minister, was to reclassify a document listing all the communist infiltrators and members, actually party members, they were card-carrying members who worked in the Federal Government in the massive bureaucracy; he reclassified it. That was first given at the end of World War II to the Prime Minister of Canada by Gouzenko; why would they reclassify something many-many years later? Why was it so dangerous? And here we are at the bottom, trying to wade through all the disinformation and get to the bottom of it, we can't, because we're not give access to it.
Years ago, I said, on one of the first programmes that I was on, if you were to into every conspiracy book, or say start with one, one conspiracy book, that has its favourite target and the whole book is about that target and they bring up facts and statements made by this other person, from them over there, whoever 'they' may be, you're going to convinced that that book is correct. If you stop there, you'll probably stay in that little pigeon hole, never looking anywhere else and I said if you look at every other conspiracy book where the fingers point elsewhere, you'd think 'my god, this is correct too', well, how can they all be correct? How is that possible? Is it simply that every power group has to be in conflict with every other power group, for supremacy? Do they all play by dirty tricks, is that the whole point of it? Can there be any honesty between competing parties? Or, is the very fact that they're competing in the first place boil down to winners and losers? What I'm saying here, and the terms I'm using here, are used in big conferences at the United Nations and they were used long ago, long before I was born, by the precursor, which was the League of Nations. We know again that big people, big powerful families; have funded into existence the United Nations. We know the beginnings or some of the beginnings of these families, which is widely written about by even the authorised authors on how they got their start; but, you can go into the book The Robber Barons of the 1800s and see how the railroad companies were basically given incredible amounts of land and even took a hundred miles sometimes on either side of the track, which, years later, they'd sell off for parcels and so on. It was all given carte blanche to them, by their friends in government. You find that the Rockefellers were the same and old man Rockefeller, the one that they always give us at the beginning of this dynasty, as far as the riches go, would tolerate no competition; he'd corner the market, one way or another, or you’d get rid of your opposition, by any mean possible; it was ruthless, it was war.
Today, we live in a world of trans-national corporations, they have no loyalty to any country whatsoever; but, they do donate money to the big foundations and the foundations run the Non-Governmental Organisations, which are to become what's called the new democracy. And, I think that was the goal in the first place of the setting up of this thing called democracy, to be honest with you, because I've got very old books here where writers, when they heard the term coming, the coming democracy, the one that we're used to, for the last 100-odd years, they said this would have to happen, inevitably, you would find the biggest most powerful groups who could lobby governments, make friends with governments, often from the same schools, the old boys' schools, as those in government and bureaucracy would run nations and that's been the way it has been. That's also why we've never seen a halt in the march towards what they call this New Order or New World Order, something people used to laugh at years ago; except, when the media used the words and then no one laughed but if you used them, yes, they would laugh at you, because the public are not in on this higher reality. The sciences I've been discussing the last few nights, have worked incredibly well. The scientific indoctrination of Bertrand Russell has also worked very well in education; we've all had the same basic indoctrinations.
Now if was possible to have peace by some weird-weird miracle, as I say, those same foundations, who haven't finished their work yet for a totally managed controlled society, would have to start another conflict and they would. They would start another conflict and it would be 50 years before you found out who truly started it. You'd think you had your obvious enemy and you'd all be wrong. Back with more; after the following break.
===BREAK===
Hi folks, I am Alan Watt, we're Cutting Through The Matrix; and, just before the break, I was talking about the various techniques that would be used, and have been used, to give us the reasons for this total control, this system of total control that's been brought in, where they tell us we're just too immature, we're run by emotion and not by logic and reason and we have to be managed like schoolchildren. I also mentioned the way, I went into various accusations made in pretty well every conspiracy book, with the names there, the facts there, the statements there that you can check up, you'd have to agree that they're all correct, all of them, every side; and, if that's the case, it means that everyone, all those groups have been trying to attain power over all the other groups for an awful long time, if that really is the case. They laugh today, in fact the big boys at the top gave us the term conspiracy theory and they've advocated the use of that term and people have adopted it, who are into conspiracies, not realising that they're mocking themselves. They'll also tell you that there are no conspiracies and yet history is just one long-long story of on-going conspiracies. If you were to ask a person, working for the British Government, in the Home Office, in the 1800s-1900s, early 1900s what their function was, they'd have told you, if they were honest and you were one of them or from the right school, they'd tell you it was to, basically, create a British Empire across the whole globe. Wells called it “The Open Conspiracy”, he said everything's published, it wasn't quite true about everything being published, but a lot of it was, and their goals and aims were certainly published and he wrote about the setting up of a League of Nations and he also said this is really the end of government as people know it, because now bureaucracies, through treaties, where countries’ treaties can actually go between or bypass the politicians and the people and communicate directly through each other, through this League of Nations. That was the new type of democracy that already came in and it was to be bound together by treaties.
The big treaties we've seen in our own lifetimes being signed, for those who can remember and it's hard, there's so many of them, often sound so innocuous you think it doesn't really concern you and there's no doubt about it, that when the European Union organisation was really set up to become a union, they lied to the public, well, isn't that a conspiracy? They'll often say it's a noble lie; the noble lie, because you cannot tell the children, they don't understand, we're doing it for the greater good, to end conflict etc but it was a conspiracy nonetheless and now they've opened up their books and all their writings to do with 1948 onwards, and they said, at the outset that the public must not be told until this amalgamation is complete, meaning having a parliament. That was a conspiracy; but, it's a semi-open conspiracy because they gave you hints, they gave you clues, they write books prior to that about uniting Europe that very few people read, unfortunately. Wells, in a sense, was right, it was an Open Conspiracy, for those that wanted to find out. It's the same with the amalgamation of the Americas and Karl Marx talked about a world where three trading blocs, each trading bloc with a government, subservient to a world government would run the entire globe. He wrote that in the 1800s.
If everyone is correct about the other groups all competing for power and doing the dirty on everyone else, is it possible there's a guiding hand controlling all of them at the top, towards this one ending? Remember what they say: you cannot get progress without conflict; it's from resolution of conflict you get new organisations, a new system, a new deal set up. That's the technique we live under. The absence of conflict would make the whole plan fall flat on its face; they cannot allow peace, until they can guarantee peace. How can they guarantee peace? They can only guarantee peace where every single individual on the planet is 100% predictable, brain-chipped and eventually the next lot will be genetically-engineered and probably chipped as well so they cannot think, as they've said in their own writings, as a separate individual. All for one and one for all; all one.
I've talked about some of the techniques that have been used that work incredibly well, because we're born into a system where your grandmother or your mother or father gives you a few pennies and then you find you can buy something with these little things and you don't question it. It's just a done thing, it's like a routine you go through from then on; you don't question it. I give you this, you give me that. We're taught at school to go out and chase after the carrot of money and be successful, as much as we can; and most people find out they can't gain what they call success, because the system is rigged that way. I'll be back with more, after this break, on the same topic.
=== BREAK ===
Hi folks, I am Alan Watt and Cutting Through The Matrix, trying to get above all of this and look down on it, look down upon it, because sometimes you have to look at things from different angles altogether. I've talked before about Plato's Cave, a great story, analogy of the world in itself and how people who were brought up in a cave kind of fixed in a position they could never look towards the light in the opening of the cave, so they're facing the back of the cave and their whole philosophy, their whole reality came from the discussions they had about their world, that was their world, they had no idea of a big world outside of it. He was giving us the understanding that they already knew how groups work and he said himself that if there were people outside the cave passing and causing shadows, from the sun to the back of the cave, those who saw the back of the cave would try interpret even these shadows and have great philosophical debates about it. Then they'd just come to a resolution themselves, because we have to fix something in reality, to make it seem worthwhile. Life has to have purpose and reason, so they came to a philosophy. Then one got out the cave and saw the great outdoors, the great wilds out there and the marvels of the outside world, and came back to tell them and they sat down and they wanted to kill him, because it broke their whole idea of their reality inside that cave. All reality had to fit in with their beliefs inside that cave. That analogy holds true for nations who have succumbed to propaganda, because we see the effects of great patriotism when it's abused by very skilful manipulators; every country’s had them, every country, there is no exception. I don't think there's ever been a just society anywhere; except in novels about the golden age - and I stress novels.
If we go into Marxism, Marxism wasn't all completely wrong in the writings of Marx himself, he did point out some real truths about the conflicts to do with materialism and he came up with the theory of Dialectical Materialism; and, just like a teacher again, trying to sort it all out, the idea was very simple, but it ignored so much of the human traits itself. In other words: everyone's fighting over territory and food and things. If everyone was put in an equal position, with the same distribution of goods, and all participated in this great society they're going to build that eventually came into the Soviet Union, then, somehow it would all be ok. Very-very simplistic, but the Trotskyite faction of it was more steeped in the Engels side of things - Engels who helped Marx and did a lot of his writings and so on - and the whole idea was that communism, as we know it, became a system for what they called progress. Just like the West talks about the progress of science, by using science and the Dialectical technique, or the technique of the Dialectic, that's conflicting opposites, in a sense, they would bring out a new society. Now, it was very simple, we've all heard the theses, antitheses and the synthesis; if you want something to happen, or you make a move, someone will come up in this culture and oppose you and out of the conflict you have a resolution, or you come together and you have a synthesis, but then the synthesis becomes the new thesis, to start it all over again. Therefore, this progress they thought could be speeded up, accelerated, because they were all working on Darwin's Theories of Evolution and that was also to do with the evolution of culture in society, and the great society, as he termed it. So: on-going war; and, we saw this come out in the Soviet Union and in China. China had the Cultural War, where the youth, who were further along in their indoctrination, were killing the older ones, who they claimed had still contamination, even though they were communists and had served the system well, they were still ‘contaminated’ because they had memory of the old system. When we come down to the Norman Dodd Inquiry, with the Reece Commission, where he said they were bringing a system in, The Foundations in the West were bringing a system where they were combining communism or Sovietisation with that of the West and they'd blend, seamlessly, together, that has happened.
What I'm going to read here, is a bit about some of the groups using the psychologies and the understanding of the masses, and individual behaviour as well, of Bernays and others were used to help set up the system that we're living in today. And, that was the Frankfurt School and I'll read this document and leave a link at the end of the show, so you can look it up for yourself; and, it's up to you what you want to think of what I say. There are many ways to see the same thing, but it is up to you, if you want to know what's really happened, how it got where we are and I admit it's awfully boring trying to catch up and find how we got where we are. It's like looking the other way while the steamroller that ran over you is on the horizon in the other direction, as they rush off to the future. That is true.
The “Frankfurt School” refers to a group of German-American theorists who developed powerful analyses of the changes in Western capitalist societies that occurred since the classical theory of Marx. Working at the Institut fur Sozialforschung in Frankfurt, Germany in the late 1920s and early 1930s, theorists such as Max Horkheimer, T.W. Adorno,
That's Theo Adorno, I've talked about him before, amazing books he churned out, certainly an amazing mind. It's up to you whether you agree with him or not.
Herbert Marcuse, Leo Lowenthal, and Erich Fromm
Erich Fromm also churned out a lot of books and:
produced some of the first accounts within critical social theory of the importance of mass culture and communication in social reproduction and domination. The Frankfurt School also generated one of the first models of a critical cultural studies that analyzes the processes of cultural production and political economy, the politics of cultural texts, and audience reception and use of cultural artifacts (Kellner 1989 and 1995).
Moving from Nazi Germany to the United States, the Frankfurt School experienced at first hand the rise of a media culture involving film,
That’s movies and so on.
popular music, radio, television, and other forms of mass culture (Wiggershaus 1994). In the United States, where they found themselves in exile, media production was by and large a form of commercial entertainment controlled by big corporations. Two of its key theorists Max Horkheimer and T.W. Adorno developed an account of the "culture industry"
They called it the ‘culture industry’.
to call attention to the industrialization and commercialization of culture under capitalist relations of production (1972). This situation was most marked in the United States that had little state support of film or television industries, and where a highly commercial mass culture emerged that came to be a distinctive feature of capitalist societies and a focus of critical cultural studies.
During the 1930s, the Frankfurt school developed a critical and trans-disciplinary approach to cultural and communications studies, combining political economy, textual analysis, and analysis of social and ideological effects of. They coined the term “culture industry” to signify the process of the industrialization of mass-produced culture and the commercial imperatives
They called it ‘commercial imperatives’.
that drove the system. The critical theorists analyzed all massmediated cultural artifacts within the context of industrial production, in which the commodities of the culture industries exhibited the same features as other products of mass production: commodification, standardization, and massification.
Now, you have to look at how far back, even in the movies, they were showing you certain brands of cars in movies. They'd tell you who made the clothes for the sets, that's the fashion industry there; and, various other features. You have phenomenons that were created, like Elvis Presley. Look at all the cars you see in each of his movies and the clothes and fashions etc. It was all planned, with all those groups together, these big groups like the ones like Bernays ran.
The culture industries had the specific function, however, of providing ideological legitimation of the existing capitalist societies and of integrating individuals into its way of life.
You don't realise that the culture that you're given is put out by guys like Bernays, a man who could, literally, con a nation to go to war with another country, because he had vested interests. He was getting paid by the main company that literally was bananas (!) that controlled that country. He wanted the guy out who was voted in and he got the US to go to war and bomb them. That's the power of persuasion; and Bernays himself, set up a movie industry to deal with that specific subject and churned out propaganda, to be shown over all the cinemas, everywhere, full of lies about this particular Prime Minister who had been voted in. That won over the minds of the people; that's how easy it is: if it's on the screen, if it's on TV, it must be true. That's how simple it is. That was in Wag The Dog, same thing. That's why Woody Allen called that movie Bananas, he knew.
Adorno's analyses of popular music, television, and other phenomena ranging from astrology columns to fascist speeches (1991, 1994),
In everything that's in your society, everything that's in the newspaper, from astrology columns to fascist speeches, everything that will influence people.
Lowenthal's studies of popular literature and magazines (1961), Herzog's studies of radio soap operas (1941),
They were even studying radio soap operas, back then, to see how it would affect culture; and, it was affecting the culture, with tremendous results and amazing information they were compiling about societies.
and the perspectives and critiques of mass culture developed in Horkheimer and Adorno's famous study of the culture industries (1972 and Adorno 1991) provide many examples of the Frankfurt school approach. Moreover, in their theories of the culture industries and critiques of mass culture, they were among the first social theorists its importance in the reproduction of contemporary societies. In their view, mass culture and communications stand in the center of leisure activity, are important agents of socialization, mediators of political reality, and should thus be seen as major institutions of contemporary societies with a variety of economic, political, cultural and social effects.
Going into the writings of Bernays and that series of videos I've got up on my site, from two or three nights ago, you'll see how they literally created a modern American culture. If you look at the movie, you can buy the movie, it's called Hollywoodism (or Hollywood and the culture industry), you'll hear the top producers of movies and the owners of the big companies in Hollywood saying we gave the Americans their culture; we created American culture. What they claimed was before Hollywood there was no real unified culture. You had different immigrants from different areas in Europe, who settled in different areas, who kept their old cultures, often a little bit different from each other. Hollywood is claiming that they helped unify the country, in the 1900s, by giving them movies and giving them a past, a cowboy past, that only lasted a few years remember before the trains came through.
Furthermore, the critical theorists investigated the cultural industries in a political context as a form of the integration of the working class into capitalist societies. The Frankfurt school theorists were among the first neo-Marxian groups to examine the effects of mass culture and the rise of the consumer society on the working classes which were to be the instrument of revolution in the classical Marxian scenario.
You see, Marxism, they knew, could not win in a society where basic necessities were available to pretty well everyone.
They also analyzed the ways that the culture industries and consumer society were stabilizing contemporary capitalism and accordingly sought new strategies for political change,
See, they were after, these guys, in this group, were after political change, a directed change and some of them, like Theo Adorno and so on, were used during World War II, along with many other well-known writers of that period, by MI5 and yet these guys were actually classified as Trotskyites, they were believers in the Trotsky perpetual revolution idea.
accordingly sought new strategies for political change, agencies of political transformation, and models for political emancipation that could serve as norms of social critique and goals for political struggle. This project required rethinking Marxian theory and produced many important contributions -- as well as some problematical positions.
Now, remember too: they wanted to separate the youth from the older using the classical techniques of Communism, because they wanted a fresh start, with new youth, who were in touch with parents. You must divide parents from the youth, to get a new idea across. You must make the parents seem old-fashioned and out of touch and that your teachers, because they went through universities primarily and schools, to reshape the minds of the young. However, the teachers were closer, generally, to you in age and importance and knowledge, where old mum and dad didn't know much at all, they were old-think; in fact, in this particular school, that's where these terms came from that Orwell used. Good and un-good and terms like that, they used these terms amongst themselves.
The Frankfurt school focused intently on technology and culture, indicating how technology was becoming both a major force of production and formative mode of social organization and control.
Well, don't we know it today, because with every invention that comes along, we're under more and more control. For every invention in fact, remember one of the definitions of technology is to alter culture, that's one definition that has been given at a top science meeting.
In a 1941 article, "Some Social Implications of Modern Technology," Herbert Marcuse argued that technology in the contemporary era constitutes an entire "mode of organizing and perpetuating (or changing) social relationships, a manifestation of prevalent thought and behavior patterns, an instrument for control and domination" (414).
As we think we're getting freed up with all the gizmos and gadgets we're given to communicate, we're actually being enslaved and monitored and watched and patterned, you have your own pattern. Back with more, after the following messages.
=== BREAK ===
Hi folks, I am Alan Watt and we're Cutting Through The Matrix, going through an article from a university on this particular Frankfurt School, they sometimes called themselves ‘The Dispossessed’. As I say, some of them were actually recruited by MI5 and 6 (MI6 were still the OSS at that time), but they recruited a lot of these guys that were called the Dispossessed and some of them couldn't get on with them at all, because they were so rigid in their views of things because they were technically (and proudly some of them) pure Trotskyite in their beliefs that they must always have continual conflict to speed up the process of evolution, rather than let it happen naturally, as they claimed. It says here:
In a 1941 article, "Some Social Implications of Modern Technology," Herbert Marcuse ... In the realm of culture, technology produced mass culture
Technology produced mass culture,
that habituated individuals to conform to the dominant patterns of thought and behavior, and thus provided powerful instruments of social control and domination.
Victims of European fascism, the Frankfurt school experienced first hand the ways that the Nazis used the instruments of mass culture to produce submission to fascist culture and society.
Now, they also knew, perfectly well, the Sovietised system, as well. They knew both of these systems.
While in exile in the United States, the members of the Frankfurt school came to believe that American "popular culture" was also highly ideological and worked to promote the interests of American capitalism.
It was to direct it you see, in a planned culture. Therefore, if they promoted the interests of American capitalism they could bring about this new blend, not quite Soviet, not quite capitalist. Remember, that was the aim of setting up the communist system in the first place, Lenin said that himself.
Controlled by giant corporations, the culture industries were organized according to the strictures of mass production, churning out mass produced products that generated a highly commercial system of culture which in turn sold the values, life-styles, and institutions of “the American way of life.”
Remember what Skinner said? If you alter behaviour, you alter something in your environment of the subject: TVs, radios, now we've got so many gadgets today. You walk along and see people on the streets, yapping away into their cell phones, oblivious of real people around them.
The work of the Frankfurt School provided what Paul Lazarsfeld (1942), one of the originators of modern communications studies,
That's a very important area, modern communication studies, it's not just how they do it, how they communicate, they're actually talking about the studies on people.
called a critical approach, which he distinguished from the "administrative research." The positions of Adorno, Lowenthal, and other members of the inner circle of the Institute for Social Research
Very important Institute.
were contested by Walter Benjamin, an idiosyncratic theorist loosely affiliated with the Institute. Benjamin, writing in Paris during the 1930s, discerned progressive aspects in new technologies of cultural production such as photography, film, and radio. In "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1969),
And I can hear the music coming in, this hour has sped by, so I'll be back with more from this particular topic tomorrow.
So, from Hamish and myself, Ontario Canada, a very cold 40 degrees below Fahrenheit Ontario, it's goodnight and may your god - or your gods - go with you.
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Transcribed by Bill Scott.
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Article: "The Frankfurt School" by Professor Douglas Kellner (ucla.edu).
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