Hi the folks, welcome to this book club of the Lotus Itas where I'm joined by Stelios to discuss Herbert Marcus's One Dimensional Man.

Now this is a book that has a kind of legend about it because Herbert Markuser was part of the Frankfurt School and everyone thinks the Frankfurt School were trying to throw Western civilization.

And that's only because they were. That's exactly what the Frankfurt School was trying to do Western civilization. And that's only because they were.

That's exactly what the Frankfurt School was trying to do.

And so as part of my effort to domesticate them, so we understand them, so we're intimidated by them, so we can pass them,

I'm reading all of their work and it's dense, say the least.

They are very, I was going to say thorough, that's not quite the right word.

Intransigent writers. They in many ways write to be deliberately impenetrable, but they are being

very specific about the terms that they're using. So they are deliberate writers.

So anyway, One Dimensional Man was published in 1963, and Marcuse is trying to drive towards

the liberal ideal, because of course he's some sort of uber communist.

And he observes that capitalist Western societies are in fact not really any better than Soviet industrial societies when it comes to arriving at the end goal of liberalism, which is communism.

And he points out that, yeah, the Soviet Union and the capitalist West, the industrial societies,

in much the same way as Julius Avola points out, a kind of two prongs of the same beast.

And like Ivola, he actually wants to overthrow them, but for different reasons.

So there's a convergence there.

Okay, so for everyone's sake, I'm going to wear the diplomats earpiece.

And whenever you speak, you say the L word, I'm going to translate it into social liberalism in my mind.

But okay, with that. So the critical theory school or the Frankfurt Theory School has the reputation you mentioned.

And I think it's a reputation that they have earned.

Yeah, it's a negative one.

It's not unfounded.

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