Repressive Tolerance as Intellectual Quackery
Never mind about QAnon; people too easily forget that real lunacy is a flaw more often than not associated with intellectuals and those who want to be like them.
It’s true you can’t fish on land for long; neither can you use a chainsaw to relieve a headache.
An intellectual may mistake bullshit for Lincoln logs and spend a lifetime building palaces; but so what; the goal is to restrict the thinking of everyone else.
Then there’s Herbert Marcuse.
Often called the Father of the New Left he was a Neo Marxist philosopher who inspired a generation of thought-police twits; and needless to say was considered a great intellectual.
He died in 1979, but his ideas are as universal today as Edison’s lightbulbs; he in fact wrote the famed bible of post liberal thinking.
But he’s best known for his essay on Repressive Tolerance.
The question is; what does repressive tolerance look like in a nutshell, well, in Marcuse’s words: liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right, even if it means they have to be suppressed by violence and toleration of movements from the Left even if they are violent.
In zombie language this translates as left good, right bad; right?
It is the classic take three blues pills versus one red pill and call me in the morning type of thing.
Like they say what could possibly go wrong with that.
You don’t need to compile or read a thesis to realize this is why we’ve arrived at a place called totalitarianism today.
I have little patience for verbose and Marcuse’s writing is probably the last word in this style; so it’s best to take it in small bites at a time, or let someone familiar with his work explain it.
His take has been described as a combination of Freud meets Marx and it just doesn’t get worse than that.
Marcuse’s views are a mass of contradictions; he blasts free societies (non-communist ones) for indoctrination that result in instilling what he calls a false public consciousness, yet wholeheartedly approves of progressive indoctrination; and has no problem with the type of false consciousness.
To him, violence is par for the course when fighting all types of oppression-sound familiar-when its justified; but under no other circumstance.
The modern-day slogan Silence is Violence comes from the take that unless an individual takes up arms against an oppressive system (first metaphorically then literally) he is complicit in that oppression; in other words neutrality is not an option.
The question who gets to define progress and regress is a bag of laughs; yes its people like him and his acolytes; who else.
Don’t you know everybody else is not fit for purpose because they’ve been corrupted by the system and don’t know what’s good for them; yay man, sorry; comrade.
Listen to this gem of a statement it’s in a league of its own: Suppression of the regressive ones is a pre requisite for the strengthening of the progressive ones.
And we’ve arrived.
Of course all this suppression means the classical liberal creed of guaranteed individual rights like free speech, et al, has to be cancelled, because we can’t let that stuff get in the way.
I know, just call it hate speech and pass a few laws that prohibit it and hey presto; problem solved.
What’s fascinating is Marcuse’s essay was published in 1965 at the height of the Cultural Revolution and its jaw dropping to witness how far we’ve come in a short space of time.
