One-Dimensional Critique: Remixing Marcuse for the Meta-Modern Mind
Challenging the philosopher who forgot humanity’s endless rebellion
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You ever feel like a broken record, but you’re stuck on two things?
I’m reading Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man on TikTok and I’ve got two tracks playing on repeat:
Track 1: Marcuse’s on critique of advanced industrial society stuffing us all into similar casings, like sausages, is pretty spot on.
Track 2: Except it ain’t.
Marcuse is annoying as fuck to me, and maybe he meant to be, but he himself seems to make a ONE DIRECTIONAL/DIMENSIONAL argument that the world is becoming increasingly one-dimensional. Allow me to remix this a little, and maybe we come out with a banger.
Marcuse’s contradiction is so obvious to me, the disharmony of his words with his overall sentiment is deafening:
He points out that technology has the potential to satiate our desires, and also make us all want the same things, and the more sated we become, the less likely we are to think of anything else.
But to this I'm like bro, have you met humans? We're never satisfied. Much like I’m not satisfied with Marcuse’s critique. I also mentioned mimetic desire elsewhere.
He calls democracy a totalitarian state and because we spend so much time and energy defending it we live in constant warfare.
Ok, sure. Now what? What would be better? Marcuse doesn’t offer solutions. He believes somehow that the oppressed people will figure it out once they can see the light. It’s like Marcuse never lived in a real authoritarian state had zero black friends. Cuz someone needed to set this man straight on the Master:Slave dynamic and what happens when it’s actually illegal to say shit.
He bitches about the post-modern sexuality of the 60s - where “eroticism” and “sexuality” are reducing to one thing.
I feel like a) he’s pretty vanilla sexually - which is absolutely fine - and maybe he has some weird guilt about it (sorry allow me an ad hom, I’m annoyed), and b) he’s reducing it to a mere reduction. He’s not acknowledging that closing a door opens another, or the potential to reopen. Like bro, I know you have thoughts about guilt, but it’s mostly a wasted emotion if you don’t channel it somewhere.
Shutting down HIStory
He goes on to croon about language and the closing of discourse making a bold claim: modern society "liquidates" time, memory, and historical consciousness. We lose the ability to engage with the past in meaningful ways because it’s dismissed as irrational or obsolete. He says the powers that be might not find it useful to engage with the past and so our history flattens into mere functionality—just another cog in the machine of what he calls the “established reality.”
He says this happens by concretizing language. He describes two types of language: dialectical language, which thrives on contradiction and judgment. It’s the language of Marxist critique—messy, nuanced, and aimed at uncovering truth. On the other side is authoritarian language, which closes discourse, validates itself, and refuses to explain. This, Marcuse argues, is the language of a society where alternatives are smothered, and the only truths are the ones that serve the status quo.
Like bro, this isn’t a Ray Bradbury novel. Music and culture still use language in subversive ways sixty years later. Even with the restrictions of social media, we still have a lot of leeway to use language how we see fit, and it will continue. This was evident as Nova explained the term “skibidi” and what it means to be an “Ohio Rizzler”. Verbatim she said, “it depends on the context”. My 12 year-old understands what Marcuse couldn’t see: that language can never be fully authoritarian. It’s too dynamic. Even if words were disallowed, we would change inflections and tones. Our human errancy will always lead to rebellion.
Opening the Status Quo
Speaking of rebellion, yesterday during my TikTok LIVE reading of this very book, I went off on a tangent about this, connecting it to a recent podcast I listened to with Brendan McCord and Joe Lonsdale where they were talking about “bad ideas” and “The Truth” when Lonsdale lamented echo chambers claiming that algorithms exacerbate the situation. McCord suggested the need for AI that challenge our assumptions and Lonsdale rightfully asked who the hell would want that. McCord, whose military background no doubt has illustrated the value of red-teaming, replied with something like ‘people who want the right answer’. He brought up Bloomberg Terminals which enhance decision-making by providing real-time data and allowing users to challenge assumptions with objective insights and diverse perspectives on financial markets.
This song and dance between two multi-millionares who represent the hegemony illustrates how people espousing Marcuse’s “authoritarian” language are naturally led to the dialectical if they actually want the truth. He didn’t think that we could take rationality up to the edge. Marcuse seems like one of these guys who believes (misanthropically) that humanity isn’t very capable. But guess what buddy, we’re getting closer to understanding that the truth may be asymptotic and we can only ever edge closer to it, but the way we do that is by asking more questions, and getting comfortable with uncertainty and incompleteness.
Marcuse forgot about the remix part of the dialectic. But I didn’t.
Virtuous Relativism: A Balancing Act
After playing these tracks over and over, a friend and I found a groove: “virtuous relativism.” This is what Marcuse was after, but never expected would be adopted. It’s the balance between objective and subjective truths—the idea that progress doesn’t come from rigidly clinging to one or the other but from their interplay. Yes, we need an anchoring beat, but we also need the flexibility to riff on subjective experiences and interpretations to make sweet, sweet music.
If Marcuse was just being a provocateur, fine - we love controversial stunt, but if not he’s dead wrong about discourse, behavior, language, and thought ever fully closing. Every attempt to silence or streamline it—every algorithm, every echo chamber, every rigid ideology—inevitably sparks resistance, opening new pathways for exploration and challenge. You can’t really own or close down the truth.
Humanity and the truth are dynamic things. We clamp down, we open up. We contract, we expand. We get closer to truth, and then whirr past it. We get annoyed with philosophers like Marcuse and we quote them a minute later. This is probably the thing he meant to get at, but maybe he needed to do a shitty job to irritate someone enough to get closer to the truth.
This is just a reminder that it’s ok to irritate, to be irritated, to play shit on repeat until you get through it, and of course to write it out.