◆The Barbaric Yawp Project

PART TWO One-Dimensional Man I am Herbert Marcuse. Born in Berlin, 1898. I fought in the German army in one war and fled my country before the next, because I was a Jew and a Marxist and Hitler wanted men like me dead. America took me in, and I served it — I spent the second war inside your intelligence service, studying the Nazis for the American government. I owed this country my life. Then I spent the rest of my life telling America that its comfort was a cage. Your students read me and rose up — they occupied the buildings, they marched against the war, and in Paris they carried my name on their banners beside Marx and Mao. They called me the father of the New Left, a title I never accepted. And the answer from America came: the American Legion offered my university twenty thousand dollars to buy out my contract; the governor of California — a man named Reagan — pressed to have me fired; my phone was cut; someone fired a gun at my garage door. My own students walked me to class to keep me alive. I did not leave America. If my words are enough to disrupt society, I said, then society is in bad shape. I died in 1979. I have come back from the dead to answer the question nobody else answers. Why does nobody rise up now? Why, in all the decades since, has so little changed, though everything was wrong and everyone half-knew it? You are not free. And the proof that you are not free is that you feel free. Hear me, because this is the whole of my thought. The old tyrannies ruled by making you miserable — the whip, the chain, the boot. They were hated, and because they were hated, they were opposed. But the society I watched America become discovered something far more powerful. It learned to rule by making you comfortable. It gives you the car, the screen, the endless aisle of choices, the pleasures your grandparents were denied — and in exchange it asks only one thing, which you hand over without ever noticing you have paid. It asks that you lose the ability to imagine that things could be otherwise. That is what I meant by one-dimensional. A human being has two dimensions. The first is the world as it is — what exists, what is for sale, what is permitted. The second is the world as it could be — the power to stand outside what exists and judge it, to say no, to imagine the thing that is not yet. This second dimension is where freedom lives. Everything human is in there. And your society, more thoroughly than any secret police in history, has closed it. Understand the elegance of this. Not by forbidding the thought — forbidding creates martyrs. By drowning it. By keeping you so satisfied, so entertained, so occupied choosing among the things it offers, that you never notice the one thing it never offers: the choice to live some entirely other way. You may have any opinion you like, and there is no opinion that costs the machine a thing. They even freed your desires — and made the freeing a leash. You may have everything now. Every pleasure, every appetite, indulged and advertised. But a pleasure that arrives on schedule, sold to you, timed to keep you docile — that is not liberation. It is a longer chain with more give in it. And you have mistaken the slack for freedom. You were let off the whip and handed a screen, and you called it progress. And in one sense it was. That is exactly the trap. In part two I will tell you what I proposed to do about it — including the idea the liberals still hate me for. PART TWO The Great Refusal I am Herbert Marcuse again. In the first of these yawps I told you the trap: that you are ruled by comfort, not by fear, and that the proof you are not free is that you feel free. Now the harder half. What is to be done. The thing the liberals still hate me for. I will not take it back. I said that tolerance can be a weapon. Give the powerful and the powerless the same platform and the same respectful hearing, and you have not been fair. You have been useful — to the powerful. The lie and the truth stand side by side, cancelling each other, and nothing can be judged, and nothing moves, and the machine grinds on, protected by the very openness that pretends to threaten it. The liberals denounced me for that, and loudest of all, because it was their tolerance I was describing. They said I wanted to silence my enemies. I did not. I said something harder. Look at what your tolerance is actually doing. You do not have a marketplace of ideas. You have a marketplace. It is owned. The ideas that circulate in it are the ones that pay and are paid for. You are already deciding what gets heard, every hour of every day — you have simply arranged it so that nobody has to sign his name to the decision. That is what I said, and I never took a word of it back. Neutrality is not a place to stand. It is a place to hide. So what is left? The Great Refusal. The protest against that which is. Not a program. Not a platform. Not a movement with a logo — the machine eats those; it will absorb your rebellion, print it on a shirt, and sell it back to you by Thursday. Something simpler and much harder: the stubborn preservation of the second dimension. The refusal to let them convince you that what exists is all that could exist. To keep alive, in yourself, the knowledge that this is not the only possible world — when everything around you is engineered to make that knowledge feel childish. And now I will say the thing that indicts even this. Even me. Even now. You are watching a dead philosopher on a screen. You are feeling the pleasant glow of the critical thought. You are feeling yourself become more awake, and it is agreeable, and in a moment you will feel you have done something. Beware that feeling. That comfort of seeming to resist while nothing whatever in your life changes — that is one-dimensional too. That is the machine at its finest work. It can absorb even me. It can turn Marcuse into content. So do not merely feel this. That was always the trap, and I have just sprung it on you to show you how easy it was. Refuse. Imagine the thing that is not yet — and then go and be it. Out here. Where the screen ends. That is the one freedom they cannot manufacture. It is the one you have to take.