Adorno, “Minima Moralia,” §71 (with commentary)

In §71 Adorno calls fascism the “least ideological” political system, even less ideological than the presumed alternatives, democracy or socialism. As it exposes the principle of domination, where right stems from might, directly, admitting the cynicism in the name of the ‘survival of the fittest’, fascism admits the lie to be the driving force of the world. Fascists only believe in power. Democracies and presumably socialist parties, hiding the principle of domination behind ‘humanitarian values’, limit, especially if they remain on the national level, the scope of such ideals, and not only permit, but also profit from the misery that reigns ‘outside’. Particularly in the present state of things, they must, in order to persist in the hegemonic order, act immorally and reduce the scope of humanity that they offer. Every migrant drowned in the Mediterranean is a proof of hypocrisy. Leftist parties might call for the protection of refugees, but not often will they call out the global hegemonial order that makes people refugees. The hypocrisy is complete where misery is not only permitted but also profited from. Liberal democracies are perfectly ok with suffering in the Global South as long as they stay where they are and provide the Global North with cheap goods. This relative comfort makes the humiliation on the national labour market bearable, radical change undesirable. To preserve this comfort, a relative falsification of truth is necessary, and also desired; we deserve it, and so do they. Western democracies pretend to be better than they are: their humanity doesn’t go beyond their borders (or their sphere of interest). This evident lie, which is necessary for the survival of these democracies as they are – dependent on the exploitation of the Global South – makes them easy prey of attacks by more cynical forces. When the radical right in Germany started picking up the old Nazi motto of “Lügenpresse” a few years ago, the liberal order shuddered. This slogan would not be so dangerous, if it did not speak the truth.

The aversion of the radical right for “facts” is in itself not irrational; filtered through the official channels, mass-media is more than happy to bombard us with facts that cloak the principle of power. But “Lügenpresse” does not call out the hypocrisy of mass-media in the name of a truth beyond power. What it wants is to replace the conservation of the antagonist state through the indirect images of ideology, with the direct rule of power, where the ‘stronger’ crushes the ‘weaker’. The legitimation of this domination, usually on racist grounds, surely, is not closer to the truth than the previous ideologies. But it speaks truth in the sense that it exposes the rule of power that already upholds the hegemonial order. Humanitarian values are good as long as they serve ‘soft power’, but they are quickly suspended where ‘our’ interests are threatened. The hypocrisy in the unequal reaction of Western democracies to Ukraine and Palestine serves their critics well, critics that are more than keen on insisting on the reality of the principle of power where it shines through, keen on cutting out the biggest piece of the pie, because everything’s permitted as long as you can get away with it. The cosy lie of ideology, pretending to trump the principle of power, because we know the truth, is preferred where the violence of domination can be hidden and ignored. But as soon as the frustrations, which are perpetuated in the antagonist state even within the so-called civilised world, become impossible to ignore, where precarity affects even those who were supposed to be protected by the ‘humanitarian values’, the open lie is preferred to the cosy truth. The irrational shift to the far-right, fascism as capitalism in decay, has its rational explanations.

In §71 Adorno evokes exactly this dynamic. The presumed democracies cannot lay claim to truth because they are forced to live a lie (in order to uphold their lifestyle through the exploitation of the Global South), as each time the order of things is threatened, they need to reassert the cynical principle of domination. We need to protect our interests, we need to be in charge, because we are the good guys. This hypocrisy is openly mocked by the fascistic forces, who are “less ideological” in as far as they openly proclaim the principle of power. The fascists can pretend to speak the truth, because they actually do: the “truth” of the democracies is an untruth, a cosy lie to preserve ‘dear peace’, in order not to worry about the horrors outside. Only liberals can claim that Trump merely speaks lies: rather, he constantly dissolves the distinction of truth and lie by proving that the one who has the power can speak the truth. In that sense he speaks the only truth that is left: right makes might. It is clear that he is already finding the limits of this proclamation in the limitation of his own power: he cannot dictate the economy to behave.

Still, the liberal criticism of trumpism, in merely defending the ideological lie in view of the open declaration of the principle of power, remains powerless in as far as it is hypocritical. The liberal mindset does not eschew violence; it merely prefers its indirect form as ‘soft’ power to uphold the ‘correct’ hegemonic order. The atrocities, as long as they are well-channelled through mass communication, are presented as both desirable (they deserve it because they don’t behave) and exaggerated (it isn’t actually happening, we wouldn’t do such a thing). News speakers with talk with the same intonation about a wedding party killed by an attack drone as about the results of the last football match. The state of things is affirmed as desirable, lying as an unfortunate necessity. Thus, the state of things can only be perpetuated in a state of corruption; the values cannot attain their universality, someone always has to be excluded. They’d do the same to us if they could. The fascists can easily point to this corruption, thereby proving that the cosy peace is nothing but a lie. In that sense, Trump openly proclaiming the principle of power is not the emergence of a new ideology of “post-truth” but the naked truth about the way the antagonist world has always been organised: they can do that because they can get away with it.

Where mere facticity breaks through in the direct, unchanneled images of suffering, of unbearable violence, as shocking images that make us demand change, a suspension of the principle of power occurs. Indignation reminds ‘humanitarian values’ of their claim for universality: it insists on the distinction of truth and lie. Such truth is not that of facts; the official channels are quickly to bombard us with facts, because they are in control of the circulation of information. Such truth merely expresses the untruth of the principle of power, which can only reign as long as it is violently imposed. In that sense, the cynical calling out of hypocrisy, which the fascist forces are keen on reminding us of – as it shows that it is the principle of power that reigns and that we are in charge – needs to be taken seriously by any criticism. The insistence on the distinction of truth and lie, to avoid being itself ideological, must remain negatively an opposition to the principle of power. That the violence imposed on those who are subjugated can shock us, shows that there is truth beyond power, because there is truth that power doesn’t want us to see. Truth is to be sought where something resists the integration into the circulation of commodities – images beyond information –, where we are confronted with something indigestible, something that resists consumption, something that shocks us and prohibits us from carrying on. Truth shines through where there is resistance to the current order of things, to the rule of the principle of power. This situation in which we find ourselves is in that sense perfectly formulated in §71 of the Minima Moralia, which, for this reason, is reproduced completely in the following.1placeholder

71.

“Pseudomenos [Greek: liar]. – The magnetic power which ideologies exert over human beings, while they have become entirely threadbare [fadenscheinig], is to be explained beyond psychology, in the objectively determined decay of logical evidence as such. It has come to the point that lies sound like truth, and truth like lies. Every statement, every news report, every thought is preformed by the centers of the culture-industry. What does not bear the trusted mark of such preformation lacks credibility in advance, all the more so that the institutions of public opinion garnish [mitgeben] what they send out with a thousand factual proofs and all the power of conviction which the total apparatus [Verfügung] can bring to bear. The truth which would like to do something against this, bears not merely the character of something improbable, but is moreover too poor to break through in direct competition with the highly concentrated apparatus of dissemination. The German extreme sheds light on the entire mechanism. When the Nazis began to torture, they did not merely terrorize people both inside and outside the country, but were at the same time the more secure against exposure [Enthüllung], the more savage the atrocities [Grauen] became. Its sheer unbelievability [Unglaubwürdigkeit] made it easy to disbelieve what, for the sake of [dear, lieben] peace, no-one wanted to believe, while simultaneously capitulating before it. Those who trembled in fear [Zitternden] told themselves that things were much exaggerated: well into the war, the details of the concentration camps were unwelcome in the English press. Every horror [Greuel] in the enlightened world turns necessarily into a horror story [Greuelmärchen]. For the untruth of the truth has a kernel [Kern], to which the unconscious eagerly turns [begierig anspricht]. It does not only wish [wünscht] for horror. Rather Fascism is in fact less “ideological,” to the extent it immediately proclaimed the principle of domination [Herrschaft], which was [is] elsewhere hidden. Whatever humane principles the democracies marshaled to oppose it [entgegenzustellen], were effortlessly rebutted by pointing out that these do not concern all of humanity, but merely its false image, which Fascism is man enough [mannhaft] to divest itself of. So desperate [desperat] however have human beings become in their culture, that they are ready to cast off the frail signs of a better state of affairs, if only the world does their worse side the favor of confessing how evil it is. The political forces of opposition [Gegenkräfte] however are compelled to make use of the lie, if they do not wish to be completely extinguished as completely destructive. The deeper their difference from the existent, which nevertheless grants them shelter from a still worse future, the easier it is for the Fascists to nail them down as untruths. Only the absolute lie still has the freedom to say anything of the truth. The confusion of truth with lies, which makes it nearly impossible to maintain the difference between the two, and which makes holding on to the simplest cognition a labor of Sisyphus, announces the victory of the principle in logical organization, even though its military basis has been crushed. Lies have long legs: they are ahead of their time. The reconfiguration of all questions of truth into those of power, which truth itself cannot evade, if it does not wish to be annihilated by power, does not merely suppress the truth, as in earlier despotisms, but has reached into the innermost core of the disjunction of true and false, whose abolition the hired mercenaries of logic are anyway feverishly working towards. Thus Hitler, who no-one can say if he died or escaped, lives on.”

It follows from the elaborations in Adorno’s aphorism that the distinction of true and false implies the separation of truth and power. The total subsumption of truth to power, the point at which §71 ends, is the capitulation of “logical evidence as such” and the beginning of a ghostly existence. Once power fully determines truth, the distinction of truth and lie disappears, for those in power can make lie appear like truth. In contemporary capitalism’s mechanisms of distribution (of sense, dissemination of information, “coding”), the total domination over facts emanating from the institutions of truthfulness (and thus of “likelihood”), makes truth and lie indistinguishable precisely because it is power that communicates truth. Living within ideology means to think that you’re in on the joke, that you know the truth – because it has been communicated to you – while all the others are not. But the only thing holding this conviction is the trust in the institutions as the origins of such communication. Power as control in many ways means power to convince. The nihilism resulting from that subsummation of truth to power, making lies appear like truths and truths like lies, reveals itself most clearly and directly in the cynicism of fascism, which openly declares the principle of domination, instead of hiding it behind ideological lies. The principle of power permits those who can to mistreat those who can’t defend themselves, who have to obey, in one way or another. Those who are allowed and even meant to be mistreated – the undesirables – are chosen on cynical grounds – they are those who can’t resist, at least not successfully – but the direct violence that crushes them is legitimised on ideological grounds, racist convictions or ideas of superiority. It is in this sense that fascism remains ideological: the direct effectuation of violence can’t persist, if it does not keep disseminating the lies that legitimise this violence. We are in charge because we deserve it; but if it is only power that makes it so, then changes within the hegemonial order are as legitimate as the efforts of its conservation. If the other guys were in charge, they’d be equally convinced, that they deserve it on other grounds than the mere execution of power. ‘Soft’ power is not just a humane attenuation of violence, it is its necessary double, because it is it that justifies the violence. We can’t help but believe that we are the good guys, even though the principle of power denies precisely the existence of such moral superiority. Ideology is dependent on trust; it is in that sense that Adorno defends an ascetic position of irreconcilability (Unversöhnlichkeit) and solitude, which stares into the face of joylessness and suffering:

“For intellectuals, unswerving isolation [Einsamkeit] is the only form in which they can vouchsafe a measure of solidarity. All of the playing along [Mitmachen], all of the humanity of interaction and participation is the mere mask of the tacit acceptance of inhumanity. One should be united with the suffering of human beings: the smallest step to their joys is one towards the hardening of suffering” (§52placeholder).

“Only alienness [Fremdheit: foreignness] is the antidote to alienation [Entfremdung]” (§583placeholder).

Democracies are in as far ideological as they are hypocritical, participating in the general cynicism by accepting the principle of domination (“Realpolitik”), all the while exerting domination through ‘soft power’ with the pretence of improving the situation of others through ‘righteous’ domination. Yet, the latter is ultimately legitimised only through the effectuation of actual power. Thus Hitler lives on; the myth of his possible escape gives him a life after death. Hitler is the nakedness of the principle of domination, its most openly cynical form, which knows no legitimation beyond power, but which reigns only through lies.

It is in that regard that Adorno claims in §60 that Nietzsche’s “amoralism” has aged. Nietzsche fought against the “limiting prohibitions [beschränkenden Verbote]” that have lost their meaning today, where we have attained a much higher level of material production.4placeholder The liberation of desire, which Nietzsche expressed in the image of the “blond beasts,” announces the principle of domination, “social robbery,” which, in premodern times, was legitimised on the basis of there not being enough for everyone. Nietzsche’s violent opposition against bourgeois limitation and its “normalisation,” says Adorno in §60, was objectively reasonable in a world in which “material production” was “underdeveloped”. But Nietzsche ages, and he does so due to the improvement of material conditions that resulted from technological development:

“The objective prerequisites for this have changed. In view of the immediate possibility of abundance, this limitation must seem superfluous not just to social non-conformists, but even to the limited minds of bourgeois citizens. […] [D]ue to the fact that in the face of open plenitude, the blond beast itself, social robbery, has taken on the aspect of something backwoodsy, of the deluded philistine, and even of the ‘short-end-of-the-stick’ attitude, against which the ruling ethics [Herrenmoral] was invented. […] The preaching of amorality has become the task of the same Darwinists who[m] Nietzsche loathed, and who convulsively proclaimed the barbaric struggle for existence as a maxim, precisely because it is no longer needed” (§605placeholder).

The Darwinists, in proclaiming the principle of domination as the ‘survival of the fittest’, naturalised cynicism; this truth is revealed to be a lie in the face of material abundance. Adorno thus proposes to go beyond mere amorality, which has not brought forth the perspectivism that Nietzsche aimed at, and rather the perpetuation of the antagonist state through the reduction of truth to power. Yet, with Nietzsche, Adorno refuses the emptiness of nihilism, and defends higher ‚aristocratic‘ virtues, a morality ‘beyond good and evil’:

“The virtue of gentility has long since ceased to mean the taking what is better from others, but means instead becoming satiated with [überdrüssig] taking and really practicing the virtue of giving [die schenkende Tugend], something which occurs in Nietzsche solely intellectually [als vergeistigte]. The ascetic ideals comprise a greater degree of resistance against the madness of the profit economy today than lavish living did sixty years ago against liberal repression. Amoralists may finally permit themselves to be as benevolent, kind [zart], unegoistic and open-minded as Nietzsche already was at that time. As a guarantee of their unyielding resistance, they will still remain as lonely [einsam] as in the days when he turned the mask of evil against the normal world, in order to teach the norm to fear its own wrongness [Verkehrtheit]” (§606placeholder).

In light of abundance, there is no need to proclaim the Dionysian liberation from repression, which was subversive in Nietzsche’s time. The evidence of possible abundance, resulting from a high level of material production (industrialisation), renders the principle of domination obsolete. Where there’s enough for everyone, there’s no need to try to grab the biggest piece of cake. In refraining from taking more than one’s fair share, a higher virtue becomes possible, which is no longer guided by the will to dominate, but by a tenderness towards other beings. Getting tired of taking, reacquiring one’s kindness, is the small gesture that can bring the whole machinery to a halt:

“In the profit-based economy, the practical social orders [Ordnungen] of life, while claiming to benefit human beings, cause what is human to wither, and the wider they spread, the more they cut off everything which is tender [zart]. For tenderness between human beings is nothing other than the consciousness of the possibility of non-purposive relations, which strikes those who are caught up in purposes as consolation; the legacy of ancient privileges, which promises a condition without privilege” (§207placeholder).

In light of abundance, is no fear of being left out, as the material conditions have made it possible to live comfortably and without domination. With Nietzsche, Adorno calls for a new ethos, while defending the “ascetic ideals,” which the former decried, as a “resistance against the madness of the profit economy.” It is in such “solitude” alone, which remains in the negativity of criticism, that resistance is possible. This implies the distinction of truth and lie, where the “truth,” proclaimed by fascism’s open cynicism, of the hypocrisy of any attempt at making the world a little bit better, of drawing an image that opposes itself to truth, is itself revealed to be a lie, disseminated in order to keep the principle of domination in place as the ruling principle. Any attempt to question the principle of domination is violently suppressed. Truth itself must resist from entering the “market of ideas”, where it is subsumed to power, as the capacity to sell. It is a mark of truth to be indigestible:

“Today progress and barbarism are so intertwined as mass culture that only barbaric asceticism against this latter and against the progression of the means may again produce that which is unbarbaric. No work of art, no thought which does not innervate the rejection of false wealth and first-class productions, of color films and television, of millionaire magazines and Toscanini, has a chance to survive” (§308placeholder).

Still, truth cannot be untangled from power. How are the “ascetic ideals” compatible with power, resisting against the ‘poverty’ of truth? Not by conquering the means of communication, by trying to make oneself heard, but by the simple refusal to act according to the principle of domination: “The almost insoluble task consists of refusing to allow oneself to be rendered dumb, either by the power of others or by one’s own powerlessness” (§349placeholder). People protesting genocide where they profit from it is such a gesture of refusal, refusing to sacrifice the humane to uphold a violent order. The profits that are extracted from this violence, in which a certain geopolitical order is upheld, are willingly sacrificed in the name of a better future, in which general well-being can be assured without violence. The evidence of abundance shows us that it is not necessary to exclude others from the enjoyment of material comfort.

The official discourse, the official means of communication, are quick to subsume such protests under the discourse of power; the protesters are “paid” or “manipulated by mischievous forces.” Such ‘reasonable doubt’ that is diffused through mass-media once again blurs the line between truth and lie. Yet, what the affective nature of unchanneled images of genocide, which we are not supposed to see, which we ought to be protected from, is tied to the second aspect, in which Adorno proclaims a new ethos. They confront us, beyond all presumed moral relativity, with the fact that evil exist. As a reaction, the affect of indignation gives birth to the conviction that evil ought not exist, that it should be resisted, that it is unbearable. The protests turn against the cynical principle of domination, not in the name of higher values, but in a willingness to share the pain. Resistance against the principle of domination is the desire to bring the endless series of violent shocks to a halt:

“Life has transformed itself into a timeless succession of shocks, between which gape holes, paralyzed intermediary spaces. Nothing however is perhaps more catastrophic for the future than the fact that soon literally no-one will be able to think of this, that every trauma, every unprocessed shock of that which recurs, is a ferment of coming destruction” (§3310placeholder).

The humane gesture that is willing to sacrifice material comfort in the name of a better future, the protest against global injustice that one profits from, suspends the principle of domination, which is revealed to be secondary. It insists on the distinction of truth and lie, because there is something that lies beyond the principle of power. Resistance against the “madness” of capitalist production, which produces too much while perpetuating poverty and misery, is possible only through ascetic solitude, which is the only means of attaining solidarity in an age of “post-truth.” The simple gesture of the helping hand, which refuses to lay claim to the last bite of the other, which is content with a modest level of material comfort, which insists that “everyone gets firsts before anyone gets seconds,” goes beyond Nietzsche’s amoralism; it is not a limitation in the name of higher ideals, a self-restriction, but a self-contentment in light of abundance.