The Culture Industry: An Illusion of Authenticity

1 Cole Simpson April 18th, 2016 Senior Research Dr. Melinda Hall The Culture Industry: An Illusion of Authenticity There seems to be an alienation that occurs in modern society from the human existence in this world that we fundamentally find ourselves living within. Not only are we alienated from our own existence but from the earth as well. Throughout my time on this planet, this alienation has become increasingly more apparent. This research will attempt to identify the cause of this alienation, the effects it has on the earth, the effects it has on ourselves, how it is perpetuated, and what we can do to envision the human life as otherwise. The modern world of cities, technology, and consumerism serves as a nullifying distraction from the fact that we exist fundamentally in the world, a world that is in itself living, a world which manifests life, through which we perceive Being.1 The shift in viewpoint in our human orientation towards the world to the worldview of human as primary and 'world' as secondary has given humanity the ability to positively act in passivity to the world we find ourselves in. Through this subject object dichotomy the world becomes a mechanistic machine that is devoid of any mystery, a world of subjective objects that are to be used for their material benefit to humanity. This shift in orientation has resulted in the modern human mindset of domination and extraction of nature because of our concept of the world as separate from humanity. 1 Heidegger, Martin. "Being and Time" Harper & Row Publishers, Incorporated. 1962. 2 This viewpoint holds no mystery or understanding of the immensity of the process of life on this planet. We exist fundamentally within the world. As a species we were born out of the immensity of life that manifested its incredible form through millions of years of cosmological creativity. No longer do we view the world within this greater understanding of our place in the cosmological story. Rather, we have increasingly attuned our ourselves to the world through the singular faculty of reason. In doing this we have systematically limited our scope of experience in the majesty of the world. Our attitude towards our place in the universe has been radically skewed by the valorization of reason as the greatest mode of human understanding and awareness. Technology in its greatest form in the modern world of industry relies on mechanistic, reductionist thinking in order to continuously perfect its machines of extraction in order to keep the world of mass production and consumption perpetuated. We see this in mass factory farms, factories for products, big business, the media etc. For example, in order to ensure new products for mass consumption, we have developed factories in which the production of labor is manifested by machines that produce the most amount of production possible in order to increase profits. The media is a technology that is used to keep this the status quo. We are sold an authentic life in the form of success in this system of thought that pervades modern society. We fail to see the world through a perspective outside this understanding. As a species, humanity has systematically demystified reality by attempting to master nature. This mastery in turn results in the domination of nature. The human intellect has found reason to be its most beneficial faculty to the project of mass extraction of nature's resources to man. We have reduced the world to materialistic matter through rational reductionism, giving us the ability to dominate it for our material enjoyment and benefit. In doing so, we have cut 3 ourselves off from other ways of experiencing the world that are vitally necessary in reinvigorating our sense of purpose and authenticity in our lives. My thesis in this paper is that a singular attunement or orientation towards our understanding of the natural world through rationalistic reductionism has developed an ideology that instead of increasing our freedom and authenticity, systematically decreases freedom and disconnects us from the world that we find ourselves in. I believe that this shift in human orientation is perpetuated by the culture industry2 that pervades modern society. The culture industry sells us authenticity in the form of material luxuries and successes. 3 Our model for orientation towards the world is entrenched in the material realm of mass consumption. It leads us to believe that the only model of human happiness and success is entrenched in the technological optimism of consumption. It leads us to believe that the standard of living and luxury that mass production and consumption provides is the best way for humans to live in the world. I believe that this is a false consciousness that is perpetuated by the culture industry, giving us an illusory ideal of happiness and self-actualization that leads to not only the degradation of our own lives but of the earth as well.. In section one I am going to explicate how the subject object split between human as primary subject and earth as secondary object, that is prevalent in Cartesian philosophy, accounts for our materialistic disposition towards nature. In section two I show how Heidegger's philosophy of Dasein places our orientation of the human existence back fundamentally within the world. I show within this section how as Dasein living in the world we have the opportunity to live authentically or inauthentically. In section three, I show how the way in which Dasein lives inauthentically is through the 'they' self of Dasman. I show within this section how the 2 Horkheimer, Max. “Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments” Standford University Press. 2002. 3 Ibid. 4 'they' self is entrenched in idle talk, or the prevailing status quo of society. In section four I explicate how the culture industry capitalizes on the inauthenticity of Dasman. I show that it does this by using mass production and consumption of goods, services, media, and information to fuel our curiosity with idle talk to create ambiguity. This is done by explicating Adorno and Horkheimer's conception of the culture industry. In section five I demonstrate the way in which rationalistic materialist reductionism fuels the culture industry of mass production and consumption in order to keep the status quo of ambiguity and alienation perpetuated. I show within this section that the ideology of mass production and consumption is unsustainable. This section shows how technology is used in order to ensure material pleasure. In section six I show how rationalistic, materialistic reductionism of nature is enacted in the world in the form of 'cowboy economics'. In section seven I show how the ambiguity created by the culture industry perpetuates alienation and inauthenticity while systematically promoting authenticity in the form of mass consumption. In section eight I explicate how in order to answer Heidegger's call to authenticity we must open ourselves up to alternative avenues of understanding and existing within the world that aren't imbedded within the world of mass production and consumption. In section nine I explicate how technological optimism is the critique against my argument that puts our faith in the technological extraction of the material resources of the earth in order to keep the culture industry perpetuated. I show within this section that technological optimism is inauthentic in its unsustainable nature. In section ten I conclude that in order to live authentically as a species we must use continental philosophy in order to envision other ways of existing in the world that aren't involved in mass extraction of the earth’s resources. My conclusion in this paper is that the authentic human existence is one that lives in a sustainable, symbiotic relationship with the world around us. 5 I. Descartes: The Subject Object Split Our understanding of the world as a passive mechanistic world of objects can be found in the philosophical work of Rene Descartes.4 Descartes found that the essence of man is that he is fundamentally a thinking thing, whose mind and thoughts are distinctly separate from the world of extended stuff, the corporeal bodies that our minds perceive through our intellect.5 Here in Cartesian philosophy we find a skepticism of the world outside of our intellect. This leads us to see the world as completely other than the human being. This further emphasized the subject object dualism that is found in much of our understanding of the world. The human becomes the subject of understanding and the natural world object. Descartes was a thinker during the enlightenment, the age that gave rise to our heightened sense of confidence and interest in the projects of science and reason. By viewing humankind as separate from nature, we gave ourselves the ability to view nature as an object to be mastered, and dominated. The earth became a place for human benefit of material gain. Cartesian philosophy aligned with the idea of manifest destiny of the Christian religion, giving the colonialists the go ahead to conquer the new land of North America. The industrial revolution thus used mechanistic thinking for mass extraction of the earth's natural resources. The earth became a secondary object with no other purpose or meaning other than the material benefit for the sustainability of human kind's new life style and longing for complete control of nature and of the security of his or her life. This line of thought has thus shrouded our vision of the meaning of our human lives and replaced in our minds a shallow orientation towards the earth and our place in the cosmos. 4 Descartes, Rene. “Meditations on First Philosophy” Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. 1993. 5 Ibid. 6 The knowledge gained through a singular attunement to this faculty has resulted in the alienation of humanity from the world we find ourselves in. This results in a worldview that places the world as extended stuff outside and distinct from the human and creates a separation between humanity and the earth. The earth becomes a secondary object, the human primary. We forget that humanity evolved out of the creative force of the earth. The earth's incredible breadth of life is formed out of the story of the greater cosmos. We are the cosmos becoming aware of itself through its evolutionary process of life. This is where we see clearly humanity as existing fundamentally in the world.6 Here, the object of my study is to confront the alienation resulting by our modern mechanistic, scientific, technological worldview by drawing off the works of Martin Heidegger's Being and Time, Friedrich Georg Juenger's The Failure of Technology: Perfection Without a Purpose, and Adorno and Horkheimer's piece The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception.. The all-encompassing world of the consumer in our modern mode of technology and mechanization allows for complacency in our daily lives that is fully embedded in "they" mentality. As Heidegger says we are "disburdened" by society.7 I believe that society proposes that it needs to unburden us from the fact that we exist fundamentally within this world. The struggle against nature is satiated by the modern culture industry8. The consequences of our orientation towards nature are coextensive with the certain kind of attunement that Heidegger describes.9 This means that the way in which we learn to orient ourselves towards the world we live in affects the way in which our actions are carried out. The way we grow up today directly 6 Heidegger, Martin. "Being and Time" Harper & Row Publishers, Incorporated. 1962. 7 Ibid. 8 Horkheimer, Max. “Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments” Standford University Press. 2002. 9 Heidegger, Martin. "Being and Time" Harper & Row Publishers, Incorporated. 1962. 7 alienates us from modalities of understanding and awareness that aren't given the chance to cultivate. We are constantly being deterred from engaging in the ontological aspects of our existence of living in a primordial engagement with nature. The impositions of what Adorno and Horkheimer call the "culture industry" prime us to live within a state of false consciousness.10 The culture industry proposes a greater ability of self-actualization and authenticity through the 'improved' standard of living our modern world has provided us11. The culture industry has capitalized on the 'they' self.12 The presence of the "they" as Heidegger explains is a fundamental part of our Dasein. We are always existing in a world where tradition is formed by the historical process of humans engaging together in the world. The dominant tradition of the culture industry proposes authenticity through mass consumption of products, food and information. It feeds on the 'they' mentality of society in order to instill in us a certain way in which to live our lives. I make the claim that this authenticity is a false consciousness of an authentic life. This does not however insist that inauthenticity is inescapable; rather through its privation we find the possibility of authenticity. By redirecting our orientation towards reality away from the test of reason alone, we begin to open our engagement with the world to more intimate avenues of our existence in the world. This would mean cultivating our capacities of care, love, compassion and cultivating a sense of involvement in the wonder and mystery of the universe. This move is laid out intensely in Martin Heidegger's Being in Time.13 This move is of the utmost importance in our modern time of technology and consumerism because as modern humans we try our best to convince ourselves that we are separate from nature and the cosmos.. We build cities and created mass 10 Horkheimer, Max. “Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments” Standford University Press. 2002. 11 Ibid. 12 Heidegger, Martin. "Being and Time" Harper & Row Publishers, Incorporated. 1962. 13 Heidegger, Martin. "Being and Time" Harper & Row Publishers, Incorporated. 1962. 8 production and consumption of goods in order to sustain our survival. This survival is completely stripped from our immediate experience of living in a direct relationship with the earth. Our lives are laid out before us based upon what is deemed the status quo of success and an authentic life within the prevailing culture industry. Through this indoctrination into the world of modern society, we alienate ourselves from other modalities of human understanding and awareness of the world that aren't given the ability to cultivate. II. Heidegger as a Response to Descartes The acceptance of the valorization of reason and the intellect as the true essence of being human, Heidegger believes, has allowed us to gloss over the phenomenological question of Being.14 By asserting this claim about being we only cast further shadow on the inquiry of the essence of our being. Instead of allowing us to have a clear understanding of the meaning of existence we have further clouded our vision by highlighting scientific empirical study of the universe as our fundamental faculty of understanding the world and our place in it. In order to confront this great misdirect in the human conscious mind Heidegger redirects the question of Being at what he terms Dasein, meaning "Being-In"15. Dasein is the being which recognizes its own being within what that being calls the world. "Dasein is an entity which does not just occur among other entities. Rather it is ontically distinguished by the fact that, in its very Being, that Being is an issue for it. But in that case, this is a constitutive state of Dasein's Being, and this implies that Dasein, in its Being, has a relationship towards that Being- a relationship which itself is one of Being"16. Heidegger shifts the scope of our thinking away from the ideology that the essence of human kind's being is that we are a thinking thing, and that thinking things are distinct and separate from non-thinking 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid. 16 Heidegger, Martin. "Being and Time" Harper & Row Publishers, Incorporated. 1962. Pg. 32 9 things, towards an understanding of the ontological phenomenon of the sort of being that questions its own being and the being that finds itself in a 'world'. This being is the human being and Heidegger allows us to gain a vital perspective on what it means to understand the essence of our existence. This means examining ourselves as entities existing fundamentally in the world17. A constitutive factor of Dasein is that it is the type of Being that has possibilities, a project. We are thrown into the world and the world reveals itself through its disclosure to Dasein. Truth is the medium by which Dasein understands itself as Being. Dasein lives fundamentally amongst other Beings. Being with others he terms Dasman. We find ourselves always already living within a world with others. Our lives are projects that are open to all sorts of possibilities. This means we have the capacity to care or to neglect, to live authentically or inauthentically.18 When we examine the way in which we interact with our external world through the lens of science and reason we are left with a viewpoint of nature as something shallow, mechanistic, and passive. There isn't any purpose in nature beyond its empirical means. With this Cartesian viewpoint we are able to treat nature as something to be controlled, dominated, and extracted. A worldview that promotes mass extraction only leads to scarcity and poverty. The cultivation of human reason alone allows us to view the world in this way. In order to view the world as otherwise we as humans need to be able to cultivate our faculties of conservation, care, connection, wonder, and a joy of nature instead of greed. This would allow us to live more self-actualized lives, giving us a connection and feeling of relation with the world we find ourselves in. This is Heidegger's"call to Being". III. Heidegger: The They-Self 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid. 10 The way in which we discern truth through the faculty of reason is by initiating the logic of if A then not B. This is the reductionist move of defining the world. Heidegger shows us that when thinking of the ontology of the human existence the reductionist move cannot be made because our engagement in the world is so complex and multifaceted that the reductionist move does us more injustice to ourselves as Dasein and leads us into idle talk about our existence. This allows layers of dust to form over the actual essence of existence.19 When idle talk and curiosity are exploited by the culture industry the conceptualization of the nature of our existence is perpetually kept in a promulgated state of ambiguity. This takes place in the emergent technology of the media, television, smart phones, social media apps etc. "This ambiguity is always tossing to curiosity that which it seeks; and it gives idle talk the semblance of having everything decided in it"20. This ambiguity allows us to not only neglect ourselves as Dasein, but the world that we find ourselves in. Heidegger, rather than limiting the essence of our being to a single truth based off reductionist thought that will always hold true because of its utter simplicity, describes our experience in our average everydayness as three dimensional. He describes this through falling, thrownness, and projection.21 These factors of our existence set Heidegger up for his claim that care is the essential aspect of Dasein. With this claim we see the paradox of the mechanistic, industrial world. The automatous machine does not have the ontological structure of care in its being. The mechanistic, scientific, mathematical capacity of the intellect alienates us as humans from our ontological structure. Falling is the way in which we are submersed in the 'they'. "Idle talk, curiosity and ambiguity characterize the way in which, in an everyday manner, Dasein in its 'there' - the disclosedness of Being-in-the-world. As definite existential characteristics, these are not present- 19 Heidegger, Martin. "Being and Time" Harper & Row Publishers, Incorporated. 1962. 20 Ibid. Pg. 219 21 Ibid. 11 at-hand in Dasein, but help to make up its Being. In these, and in the way they are interconnected in their Being, there is revealed a basic kind of Being which belongs to everydayness; we call this the "falling" of Dasein"22. This falling signifies us as always in the world alongside it. It is the way in which we are always being with other Dasein, existing in a world consisting of other humans. In this world we always find ourselves thrown into, always already existing. This is the sense of thrownness.23 Within this thrownness into the world we inevitably exist within a world of other Dasein who themselves are thrown and falling into Dasman. Projection is the fundamental fact that Dasein is the type of Being who has open possibilities for itself. In these possibilities we have the opportunity to life authentically or inauthentically, to neglect or to care. To neglect is to exist within the Dasman (they-self), but to care is to be fully authentically Dasein.24 Thus care is the aspect of Dasein that most fundamentally constitutes its own Being, while neglect is the primary aspect of Dasman. Therefore I believe we must re-engage ourselves in a relationship with the world that cultivates our capacities for care, love, connection, and wonder in order to live as fully actualized human beings. The world of the mass consumer does not allow for an engagement with the life sustaining force of the world. We are systematically disconnected from our existence on the earth by the dominating world views of science and technology. This is the world of the 'they'.25 It follows that in science we make our assertions on the presuppositions existing within the sphere of Dasman, what is the status quo. This means we relate to the world through idle talk. This idle talk results in thinking about the world in passivity, without meaning. We've created assumptions about reality that give us the moral go 22 Heidegger, Martin. "Being and Time" Harper & Row Publishers, Incorporated. 1962. Pg. 219 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid. 25 Heidegger, Martin. "Being and Time" Harper & Row Publishers, Incorporated. 1962. 12 ahead to use the world that we live in as a massive reservoir of resources to use at our disposal for our own material gains. IV. The Culture Industry: The Perpetuation of Ambiguity These assumptions are further overlooked by the pervasive ideology of the modern consumerist age. Adorno and Horkheimer, in their piece The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception26 explicitly details the capitalistic, consumerist ideology that has extended its scope from the West to the global scale. The main issue of the culture industry is that "culture today is infecting everything with sameness"27 . This is a constitutive factor of Dasman. The culture industry has extended itself beyond the limits of the human being. "The technical antithesis between few production centers and widely dispersed reception necessitates organization and planning by those in control. The standardized forms, it is claimed, were originally derived from the needs of the consumers: that is why they are accepted with so little resistance. In reality, a cycle of manipulation and retroactive need is unifying the system ever more tightly"28. The consumer exists fundamentally within the world of Dasman. The standardized forms are where idle talk and curiosity are combined in order to ensure ambiguity. The ‘they’ self is content and complacent in the ambiguity because of the standardized forms that are ceaselessly supplied to the consumer with newer forms of idle talk to feed their curiosity for the next thing. While the masses of humanity exist within this ambiguity, the people who are in control of this ambiguity are capitalizing off of the mass consumption. Because of our complacency in the ambiguity of Dasman29, we allow for mechanization and extraction by huge 26 Horkheimer, Max. “Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments” Standford University Press. 2002. Pg. 95 27 Ibid. 28 Horkheimer, Max. “Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments” Standford University Press. 2002. Pg. 95 29 Heidegger, Martin. "Being and Time" Harper & Row Publishers, Incorporated. 1962. 13 corporations to pillage and destroy the world in which we live in in order to ensure our modern standard of living. This process goes on uninterrupted because of the overwhelming force of the culture industry. "What is not mentioned is that the basis on which technology is gaining power over society is the power of those whose economic position in society is strongest. Technical rationality today is the rationality of domination. It is the compulsive character of a society alienated from itself"30. This whole system of technical organization that has replaced our human lives with an endless cycle of consumption is causing a direct alienation from not only ourselves but from the planet and the universe that we find ourselves in. This system encourages the using of the earth's resources in order to keep the culture industry moving at a steady pace so that ambiguity is always imposed upon us. We find this ambiguity imposed on us in every facet of our lives. We are raised by the modern education system which limits human knowledge and understanding to memorization and the sharpening of the human intellect. We are then indoctrinated into the culture industry by all the intricacies of our modern culture. The media, social media, and dominant social norms are constantly forming our realities to believe a certain orientation towards our existence in the world. The projects of our lives begin to be molded by the dominant expectations that society has for the new consumer. Our lives are embedded in a sense of security that the culture industry provides. This security is rooted in the depths of ambiguity and it keeps the masses of people living out their lives working for corporations and big business in order to provide for themselves and their families. With Adorno and Horkheimer's work on exposing the culture industry we begin to see how Heidegger's concept of ambiguity is fully actualized in the world. The culture industry 30 Horkheimer, Max. “Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments” Standford University Press. 2002. Pg. 95 14 thrives on feeding our curiosity idle talk31 in the form of more and more new products, information, and goods. Most of us will live complacently within the ambiguity, going throughout our lives without reaching out for a deeper understanding of our place in existence and the implications of our modern way of living. While the masses are content in the ambiguity that the culture industry of mass production provides, the small percentages of corporate interests are using the golden flag of rationalism to pillage the earth's limited natural resources for profit. Rationalistic thinking limits our capacity for understanding the immensity of the earth's life giving sustenance. We fail to see the implications of our modern industrious lives. V. Juenger and the Failure of Technology Friedrich Juenger, in his book The Failure of Technology: Perfection Without Purpose, describes how this process occurs because of rationalistic, reductionist, and mechanistic thinking. In this book he critiques technological organization of the machine and the extraction that occurs because of it. "Why does contemplation of machines give us such pleasure? Because they manifest the fundamental form of man's intelligence, because before our very eyes this constructive and combining intelligence masters and amasses power, because they win a ceaseless triumph over the elements which they beat down, squeeze, and forge. The impression we gain as we observe technical processes of any sort is not at all one of abundance"32. Rather than abundance, the world of technology through the lens of rationalism alone results in scarcity. Mechanistic thinking becomes a ceaseless endeavor to create ever more perfect extraction machines. Their purpose in progress is to become better and better at extracting mass resources from the earth and in turn converting nature into products. 31 Heidegger, Martin. "Being and Time" Harper & Row Publishers, Incorporated. 1962. 32 Juenger, Friedrich. "The Failure of Technology: Perfection Without a Purpose" Henry Regnery Company, 1949. pp. 18-19. 15 This way of orienting ourselves towards the world we live in is a direct result of the reductionist, scientific, mathematical thinking of Descartes. In the twenty first century this is the dominant way of thinking about the natural world around us. We believe that the mass extraction of the abundance of the earth's resources results in abundance for humans. What we fail to see is that where there is mass extraction there is inevitable poverty and shortage. "In every healthy economy, the substance with which it works is preserved and used sparingly, so that consumption and destruction do not overstep the limit beyond which the substance itself would be endangered or destroyed"33. Thus we see that the modern ideology of mass production and consumption that is executed by the culture industry is not sustainable. This viewpoint on technology and machine leads us to see that Heidegger's notion of care and authenticity is vitally important to understanding the detrimental effects of our selectively rationalistic thinking. If our orientation towards nature and reality was attuned to the modalities of understanding of our role in the world that are beyond the limitations of reason alone, we then would be able to see clearly the effects of our actions on the earth and how the dominant worldview of western industrialization and consumerism alienates us from broader connections, experiences, and relations to the world. We are alienated from our ability to exist in a relationship with the universe around us, from a relationship with the earth, and from an integral relationship with the life that shares this planet. We are sold a shallow worldview of the earth and humanity's involvement in the life giving force of the planet. We have systematically reduced reality to a world of objects devoid of any meaning other than its material benefit to humankind. What we believe is true about reality shrouds our vision of how fulfilled our lives could be and the value of the world of life we find 33 Ibid. Pg. 21. 16 ourselves in. We believe wealth is reduced to the material accumulation of objects in the material realm. Our riches and fulfillment through the culture industry is that of money. We accumulate this arbitrary constituent of success by thinking rationalistically in order to ensure the most profit through the greatest amount of extraction and domination of the precious natural resources of the earth. VI. Shiva: Cowboy Economics Vandana Shiva, in her book Water Wars looks at one of the earth's most fundamental resources, and the resource that is most fundamental to the sustainability of our lives, water. She details how Western ideology controls water and the issues that arise because of it. She then argues how water is a resource of the world that is fundamentally not owned by anyone. Shiva then gives us a conceptualization of what she calls water democracies. She examines the ideology of the western frontier and calls this ideology "cowboy economics"34. "The current push to reintroduce and globalize the lawlessness of the frontier is a recipe for destroying our scarce water resources and for excluding the poor from their water share. Parading as the anonymous market, the rich and powerful use the state to appropriate water from nature and people through the prior-appropriation doctrine"35. The culture industry leads us to look at the natural world as the giving force for commodities. Our curiosity is met with more readily abundant commodities to make our lives better and easier. With this orientation towards reality we easily think of water as commodity to be bought and sold, owned and regulated. The limited resource of water on this planet is absolutely necessary for the preservation and continuation of life. By reducing water to a commodity we strip ourselves from the intricacy of water's importance to life’s place in the universe. Polluting and damming rivers, diverting our 34 Shiva, Vandana. “Water Wars: Privatization, Pollution, and Profit” India Research Press, 2002. Pg. 22. 35 Ibid. Pp. 23-24 17 waste into our water systems, the mass extraction of our aquifers and the immense amount of water needed to keep our massive system going are all encouraged by the power of consumerism. Technology needs water in the form of our server farms, the massive farms where our internet is sustained. Water is used in such abundance in growing the food for our mass factory farmed animals to eat. With our orientation towards reality embedded in reason and the valorization of profit because of the culture industry, the vital resources on earth become reduced to the purpose of serving human kinds material benefits. VII. Ambiguity as the Perpetuation of Alienation We live in a time where environmental destruction of the earth due to human activity has greatly affected the natural ecosystems of the world. This destruction has been fueled by our desire to live in societies of mass production and consumerism for the cessation of as many desires as quickly as we can. The culture industry is invested in the flow of modern day life of commodities and making sure that the population is working to increase production so that the few may gain as much profits as they can. The culture industry creates the ambiguity needed in our lives to keep us living fragmented, unfulfilled existences. While this ambiguity is in place, the modern industrial machine can go on advancing, producing the goods that we so cherish and take for granted. This is a ceaseless, ever more perfect project of mass extraction and consumption of the precious natural resources that have been accumulating on the planet for millennia. We are torn from existing fundamentally within the natural world and because of this we do not cultivate an appreciation, admiration, wonder, or respect for the earth. This ambiguity also allows us to not take responsibility for the destructive forces of our actions. We are given the golden flag to neglect the environment. We are triumphant in our conquering of the earth's abundances and we 18 revel in our false sense of progress. I argue that our use of technology is implemented as a tool for the culture industry to keep its well-oiled machine going. Technology is more and more prevalently implanted into our lives to keep us distracted from the direct experience of the world around us. Humankind has learned to disconnect from reality by the implementations of smart phones, television, apps, tablets, and now the dawn of realistic virtual reality. Through this technology we are able to directly tap into a new frontier of the 'they' self36. Never before have we had such instant access to a mass of information and media platforms. Many modern jobs consist of work in social media and the technology of marketing. Corporate interests are invested in ensuring the pace of the constant flux of new products and information to fill the void of our curiosity. The masses of our society become easily distracted by the demands for new and stimulating apps, advertisements, articles, videos, blogs, and social media websites. Technology thus has two dominating forces in our modern lives. Technology is used to distract us from our existence within the world, and while we are so distracted by its allure technology is used for the conquering of the natural resources and energies of the world we live in. Just as machines are reduced to their mechanical function to extract and pillage, the earth becomes reduced to its material function of serving technologies ends. We then, as the masses, become highly individualistic consumers. Our ideal is to work as hard as we can in the capitalist market in order to ensure the status and security of a bank account of supposed 'riches'37. Our goal in life becomes to accumulate as much money as we can for ourselves. This ideal heightens our sense of disconnection from the greater sphere of human existence in the world and with 36 Heidegger, Martin. "Being and Time" Harper & Row Publishers, Incorporated. 1962. 37 Juenger, Friedrich. "The Failure of Technology: Perfection Without a Purpose" Henry Regnery Company, 1949. Pg. 9. 19 others. How does this system of life that is supposed to give us the capability to live freer, more robust, fulfilling and self-actualizing lives in turn alienate us from ourselves and the freedom and abundance of wealth that we believe comes from it? This delusion of wealth and freedom that is supposedly brought about by capitalism, mass consumption, and technology is directly alienating our existence from Heidegger's "call to Being"38. The culture industry sells us the possibility of human authenticity by the means of products and information that we buy and digest. The culture industry preys on our curiosity by feeding it idle talk in order to ensure rather than authenticity, ambiguity. This is an intentional destruction of the perceived intentionality of the culture industry. In order to ensure the perpetuation of this system of mass deception in the form of mass consumption, the human project of mechanistic, reductionist thinking through the valorization of reason is solidified as the dominant modality of human understanding and relation towards the world. This materialistic rationale of the world allows us to reduce nature to an array of materialistic resources to be used for the benefit of modern man.39 The world of comfort through the higher standard of living transposed on man by the culture industry becomes the dominating paradigm of the fully authentic and self-actualized life. Profit through efficiency becomes the most revered goal of success and is the model by which we are told to live our lives. Thus a singular attunement towards the nature of reality and the human condition is allowed to be cultivated by the prevailing culture industry. This singular attunement systematically alienates us from Heidegger's "call to Being", to live authentically as a being existing fundamentally within the universe, existing in a robustness of its essence as a spiritual 38 Heidegger, Martin. "Being and Time" Harper & Row Publishers, Incorporated. 1962. 39 Juenger, Friedrich. "The Failure of Technology: Perfection Without a Purpose" Henry Regnery Company, 1949. 20 being in a relationship with the earth.40 The culture industry is invested in severing our connection with spirit and it does this in order to instill in us a false consciousness through the mastery of nature and the mastery of the human struggle through technology. Modern man is stuck in a prevailing attunement towards the world. An attunement that believes that through the faculty of rationality and reductionism we are able to alleviate mankind from its struggle against nature. This modality of awareness leaves no room for viewing the world with a sense of spirit or mystery that eludes our ability to know the secrecy and vast complexity of its processes. In order to live in a more robust and authentic manner in accordance with the greater world we are involved in, a concrescence of human modalities of understanding needs to occur in order to reinvigorate our sense of purpose in the world that transcends that of material desires. VIII. The Concrescence of Understandings This concrescence is absolutely vital in order to combat the pervasive ideologies of the culture industry. Without a reinvigoration of the cultivation of human faculties of awareness that involve direct experience with the natural world, we will forever be lost in sight of the essence of man as a spiritual being with a responsibility to the earth she lives in. The culture industry makes us overtly concerned with the material realm, systematically alienating us from broader experiences of ourselves and the universe. This can be achieved through the technological age and does not need to be negated by the presence of technology within our lives. We have failed to break from the system of extraneous work in order to free man of the struggle against survival for the cultivation of her inner light. Instead we have substituted man as a cog in a greater machine of work in order for him or her to work for the service of the culture industry. We have to open ourselves up to the possibilities of experience that Heidegger calls us 40 Ibid. 21 to in Being and Time41. The way to do this is by reorienting ourselves towards nature not by expelling technology, but redirecting its use and purpose. The rationalistic, reductionist, materialistic goal of profit for the cessation of our worldly desires needs to be transformed by the concrescence of modalities of understanding and awareness. No longer can technology be entrenched in the values of mass extraction, production, and consumption. With this concrescence applied to the realm of technology, we may be able to uproot ourselves from the singular mindset of technologies capabilities. This would involve a deeper understanding of the earth's ecosystems and life giving processes that our modern world alienates us from. The world of the culture industry allows us to live entirely separated from this type of attunement towards reality. We have systematically created a world that is devoid of meaning other than its material purpose for human kind's use. This use is heightened in our ability to create more and more complex forms of technologies of extraction and production. This progress in technology gives us the feeling of mastery over nature and its mystery. We begin to put our complete faith in the optimistic worldview of technological extraction of the earth's resources for the sustainability of the species. IX. Technological Optimism It will be argued that technology alone has the power to save us from the ills that technology has inflicted upon us. A certain technological optimism pervades our society that believes that technology has the capability to liberate us from our suffering and the implications of our destruction. It is believed that scarcity is not an issue of physical scarcity but that of economic scarcity. Technical optimists believe that we can create our own resources in the form of technological investment. Such technological optimists are that of Starr and Rudman whom in 41 Heidegger, Martin. "Being and Time" Harper & Row Publishers, Incorporated. 1962. 22 their article "Parameters of Technological Growth”42 propose this viewpoint on the qualities of technology that will save us from our issues of scarcity of the earth's resources and the degradation of its health and in turn ours. They believe that exponential technological growth has the ability to result in population decline, which would save us from the problems of overpopulation and resource consumption. This belief is weighed against what is called the Sigmoid Curve which proposes that pure exponential technological growth is able to transcend the limited resources on the planet. "Unlike resources found in nature, technology is a manmade resource whose abundance can be continuously increased, and whose importance in determining the world's future is also increasing"43. This optimism proposes the belief that the fact that our earth's resources are diminishing is irrelevant to the scope of exponential technological growth that the human race is experiencing. The exponential technological growth, they believe will always find new ways of using the earth. This is a complete valorization of the intellectual capacity of man to extend his knowledge into the limitless realms of nature. These technological optimists base all of their propositions on the empirical study of technology and the societies that use them. It is a projection based on the assumptions of economics and science. This optimistic ideology of technology puts all of our eggs in the basket of the intellect. It believes wholeheartedly in the faith of the technological savior complex. A hermeneutic circle can be seen in the fact that technological destruction of the earth in the form of machinery for mass extraction of resources will be solved by further technological advancements in the ability to extract and use other yet untapped resources. The resources that we will deplete, they believe 42 Starr, C., and R. Rudman. "Parameters of Technological Growth."Science 182.4110 (1973): 358-64. Web. 43 Starr, C., and R. Rudman. "Parameters of Technological Growth."Science 182.4110 (1973): 358-64. Web. Pg. 364 23 will not be fully eradicated due to the fact that prices on that substance will grow so high because of the overwhelming scarcity of the substance.44 This optimism gives us the comfort that things can go on without any detrimental implications. This viewpoint on technological growth is embedded in technology’s purpose for the extraction of resources for the economic gain of humankind. It is so deeply entrenched in the paradigm of the prevailing culture industry that it fails to see the limitations of its ideology. A concrescence of our understanding of the universe will allow us to look past the constraints of industrious profit and acknowledge the implications of our materialistic driven society on the sustenance of the earth and the continuation of our species. The inauthentic lives we live in the throngs of the culture industry allows for this dominant worldview to be perpetuated. The ambiguity of our part in the complex life forms of the planet that is promulgated by the culture industry enables us to deny the cultivation of valuable attunements towards nature that are absolutely vital to the betterment of our species and the preservation of the earth. Rather than looking to the future for ways that we can use technology to liberate us from the suffering induced by material focus and attention, we instead use technology to further envelope ourselves in the world of the material. This is the fault of the technological optimists. They see technology as the unlimited resource by which we can use to ceaselessly extract the earth's resources for our material gain. 45 When one material becomes scarce, the technological optimist views the technological apparatus as that which will always be able to develop a new way to extract and use a different, new material for the benefit of technology’s means of extraction. As long as we set the framework of discourse about technology within this limited scope of human experience, 44 Starr, C., and R. Rudman. "Parameters of Technological Growth."Science 182.4110 (1973): 358-64. Web. 45 Ibid. 24 awareness, and attunement, we will forever be entrenched in the project of material extraction. Technology becomes reduced to a device to extract. "One area that has not been considered is how the growth of technology will be affected by the interaction between the various scientific and engineering disciplines resulting from the exchange of knowledge and availability of technological devices"46. Starr and Rudman are only interested in this avenue of technological advancement because they are entrenched in the ideals of rationalism. "These synergistic interactions should provide additional positive feedbacks that will increase the efficiency with which new investments in technology could produce new technical options"47. These 'options' are reduced to options that will allow new avenues of technological extraction of the earth's resources. The material world by which man is so exceedingly more dependent upon is further heightened by technological optimism. X. Conclusion Technological optimism is a result of the prevailing ideology of the culture industry’s ability to give humankind a better standard of living, thus giving us the greater chance of living an authentic, fully self-actualized human life. This optimism lies in the fact that technological progress, the exponential growth in technology, has obviously resulted in an improved life for humankind. This fact is perpetuated by the culture industry, but through this research into the source of alienation of ourselves from our existence, I believe, has shown that this fact is a mere illusion. It is an illusion that is perpetuated by the culture industry to promote a false consciousness of authenticity. I have argued and shown that Heidegger's call to Being is systematically discouraged by the culture industry. The culture industry does this by feeding our curiosity idle talk, leaving us in a state of perpetual ambiguity about our existence. In this the 46 Starr, C., and R. Rudman. "Parameters of Technological Growth."Science 182.4110 (1973): 358-64. Web. Pg. 361. 47 Ibid. 25 culture industry promotes a false consciousness of authenticity. It does this intently, in order to keep the status quo of rationalistic, reductionist materialism in place. The extraction of the earth's resources is the foundation by which the culture industry perpetuates mass consumption of information, entertainment, and the necessary nutrients and water to sustain the mass population of consumers. Technological optimism becomes the means through which we put our faith in technology for the continuation of the status quo. This whole system of the culture industry systematically severs us from our connection with spirit. Rationalistic, reductionist materialism leaves no room in reality for the transcendental spiritualism that connects us to the greater sphere of life that is so intricately complex that our intellect cannot wrap its essence up into a nice parcel of clear reasonings. The avenue of thought that we are attuned to is so deeply entrenched in rationalism that we are unable to cultivate a sense of wonder, respect, or connection to or with the world that we live in. Rationalistic reductionism finds that it is completely random that life exists on this planet and that it is an accident that humanity has a consciousness at all. In order to answer Heidegger's call to be Being we must allow ourselves to reconnect with the essence of ourselves as Dasein. I believe that my thesis of a singular attunement of reason towards reality is the source of the growing alienation from ourselves and the world we live in. With the increasingly destructive forces of the modern culture industry it is clear that humankind has a moral obligation to broaden its orientation towards reality in order to ensure not only the existence of our species, but of the earth's ecosystems as a whole. This means that in order to answer Heidegger's call to Being, I believe we must use continental philosophy in order to envision the human existence as otherwise. This otherwise, I believe, means living in a symbiotic, sustainable relationship with the world around us. The inauthentic sphere of the 26 culture industry is imbedded in a system that is unsustainable. The ideology of mass production and consumption of the earth’s material resources that is entrenched in technological optimism is not sustainable. Therefore to live authentically we must live in a symbiotic, sustainable relationship with the earth. 27 Bibliography Descartes, Rene. “Meditations on First Philosophy” Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. 1993. Heidegger, Martin. "Being and Time" Harper & Row Publishers, Incorporated. 1962. Horkheimer, Max. “Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments” Standford University Press. 2002. Juenger, Friedrich. "The Failure of Technology: Perfection Without a Purpose" Henry Regnery Company, 1949 Shiva, Vandana. “Water Wars: Privatization, Pollution, and Profit” India Research Press, 2002. Starr, C., and R. Rudman. "Parameters of Technological Growth."Science 182.4110 (1973): 358-64. Web.