You are right on the spot...
Marcuse is an inferior version of Marx who is himself an inferior version of Bernard Mandeville, the real thinker BEFORE Adam Smith of capitalism-neo-liberalism historical seeds at the time of industrial revolution...
But the machiavellian genius of Mandevillle come from the abandonment of the classical education model coming from the Renaissance (Pico of La Mirandole) based on the spiritual value at the root of western civilization for an alleged more "lucid" education system based on individualism egocentrism and greed and ambition which are supposed to be the "normal" POSITIVE working of society and economy at the end (the "hiden hand" regulating the market is an idea borrowed and presented in a more "morally" neutral way, it comes directly from "the fable of the bees" in Mandeville Faustian bargain and deeper observation of mankind )..
Mandeville anticipated Freud by 2 centuries, not only Marx... Adam Smith ideas comes directly in an attenuated and less deep expression from Bernard Mandeville influence on him; the true Genius and "our master of us all "said Hayek in a famous conference in front of 8 future nobel prizes in economy in the beginning of the last century speaking of Mandeville...
The radical cut from the original spiritual Greek ideal of renaissance for the egoistic model of man is at the origin of these 3 successive perversions: nazism, marxism and Stalinism, and neo liberalism... The three ideologies pretend to educate the masses not to be independent free thinker like the Renaissant man but individual at the service of the social Hive (Mandeville) because it is INEVITABLE...Like in Marcuse discourse discriminative tolerance ONLY is inevitable...The general idea of tolerance being an illusion of an hypocrital elite which must be destroyed...
The actual crisis of the world is a spiritual war between forces who want to enslave humanity and UPROOT it complety from his cultural and spiritual history, for a mad dystopia of social engineering (transhumanism being his last mortal avatar) ... And some other cultural forces who reacted violently to this Occidental madness...Occident has forgotten his roots....His wisdom became madness...And this madness has provoked another mad violent reaction...
This world is now a sleepwalking violent theater for three great wars...
No civilization can forget his roots and survive...And no civilization can live without roots...
Like said John Cowper Powys describing a technocratic hell through de Sade mouth: they are all working on terrible experiments in "white robe clothes" but for the "common good" and only for the common good now... This technocratic hell is the children of the Mandeville ’s Hive...
Even Orwell and Huxley geniuses are anticipasted centuries before by Mandeville underestimated genius...Machiavel himself appear a children scout before Mandeville indeed and beside him ...
The work of Mandeville is thin but his thougth deep and his influence on the future thinkers who will counted in social and economic thinking will be without equal and lasting from Smith to admirative Hayek and all his disciples... And completely new...The self apponted "elite" will understand him and will derive the appropriate conclusions till this day...
i cannot go into details futher here...
rodman99999
5,404 posts
To understand the philosophy, that’s taken over a certain segment of our society: one need look no further than Marcuse’s brief enchiridion, on how to marginalize others, ’Repressive Tolerance’.
https://www.marcuse.org/herbert/publications/1960s/1965-repressive-tolerance-fulltext.html
Orwellian/Machiavellian to the core and being followed to a tee!