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#SOCIAL AMNESIA JACOBY FREE#

The original Marxist notion of ideology was conveniently forgotten because it inconveniently did not exempt common sense and empiricism from the charge of ideology.

Exactly because the past is forgotten, it rules unchallenged to be transcended it must first be remembered.

Rather it is social amnesia-memory driven out of mind by the social and economic dynamic of this society.

The general loss of memory is not to be explained solely psychologically it is not simply childhood amnesia.

The inability or refusal to think back takes its toll in the inability to think.

Society has lost its memory, and with it, its mind.In the name of a new theory past theory is declared honorable but feeble one can lay aside Freud and Marx-or appreciate their limitations-and pick up the latest at the drive-in window of thought.The activity of thinking decays to the passivity of classifying. … The modern mind can no longer think thought, only can locate it in time and space. The arrogance of those who come later preens itself with the notion that the past is dead and gone. Today's banalities apparently gain in profundity if one states that the wisdom of the past, for all its virtues, belongs to the past.If there is a repressive tolerance, then there is also a liberating intolerance. To undo this necessitates not commissars and censors but critical intelligence loyal to an objective notion of truth.

The free market in ideas has never been free, but always a market.

The application of planned obsolescence to thought itself has the same merit as its application to consumer goods the new is not only shoddier than the old, it fuels an obsolete social system that staves off its replacement by manufacturing the illusion that it is perpetually new.

Quotes Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975)

1.1 Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975).

His fields of interest are Twentieth Century European and American intellectual and cultural history specifically the history of intellectuals and education. Russell Jacoby (born April 23, 1945) is a professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) an author, and critic of academic culture. Instead of ideologically synchronizing contradictions, or assigning them to separate halls of the academy, critical theory seeks to articulate them.

… Multiculturalism is not the opposite of assimilation, but its product. All Americans, from African Americans to Greek Americans, buy the same goods, look at the same movies and television, pursue the same activities and have-more or less-the same desires for success. … No group is able, and few are willing, to stand up to the potent homogenizing forces of advanced industrial society. Only a few historians or observers even consider the possibility that the opposite may be true: that the world and the United States are relentlessly becoming more culturally uniform, not diverse. Endless discussions of multiculturalism proceed from the unsubstantiated assumption that numerous distinct “cultures” constitute American society. Dialectical logic is loyal to the contradictions, not by the reasoning of “on the one hand and the other” but by tracing the contradictions to their fractured source. Today's banalities apparently gain in profundity if one states that the wisdom of the past, for all its virtues, belongs to the past. … The human condition for the rich is the inhuman one for the impoverished. The former suggests a nonexistent egalitarianism, as if master and slave, owner and worker, bomber and bombed all participate in the same universal abstraction. The concept of “human existence” suggests an abstract human condition “class existence” indicts bad conditions. The secret of cultural diversity is its political and economic uniformity.

From the most militant Afrocentrism to the most ardent feminists, all quarters subscribe to very similar beliefs about work, equality and success. No divergent political or economic vision animates cultural diversity. The silent agreement says much about multiculturalism. What does cultural pluralism signify in the absence of economic pluralism? … The economic structure of society-call it advanced industrial society or capitalism or the market economy-stands as the invariant few can imagine a different economic project.

#SOCIAL AMNESIA JACOBY FREE#