Critical models

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“The belief that the banal is something self-evident and hence unproblematic and that levels of more sophisticated differentiation rise above it is itself a part of opinion that must be liquidated. The banal cannot be true. Whatever is universally accepted by people living under false social conditions already contains ideological monstrosity prior to any particular content, because it reinforces the belief that these conditions are supposedly their own. A crust of reified opinions, banality shields the status quo and its law. To defend oneself against it is not yet the truth and may easily enough deteriorate into abstract negation, but it is the agent of the process without which there is no truth.”

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“Cybernetic machines are a crude example of this. They graphically demonstrate to people the nullity of formalized thinking abstracted from its contents insofar as such machines perform better than thinking subjects much of what used to be the proud achievement of the method of subjective reason. Should thinking subjects passionately transform themselves into the instruments of such formalization, then they virtually cease being subjects.”