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#Theodore Adorno
Theodore Adorno is an important figure in the history of philosophy and critical theory. His writing, such as his book Minima Moralia, argued that everything was fascist. He was also a cultural elitist who actively disliked jazz music and Hollywood movies. Adorno was so pessimistic about creating positive social and political change that he thought it might not be worth trying anymore.
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First stopping off at Oxford, Adorno then lived in New York and finally settled in Los Angeles, the home of failed writers and academics. To this day, it was here that Adorno wrote Dialectic of Enlightenment with Max Horchheimer, Philosophy of Modern Music and Minima Moralia. He also co-wrote The Authoritarian Personality with a team of academics from UC Berkeley. It identified personality traits that made people inclined to support fascism with something they called the F-Scale, which, to be clear, indicated how fascist their personality was and not how much Adorno and his friends wanted to F them. The researchers would use their Wood-Smash Scale for the latter categorization.
Using this F-Scale, Adorno had an empirical case for his concerns that America was slowly creeping towards fascism. In this sociological work, he found that tons of Americans he spoke to were legit inclined to vibe with fascist movements. You can imagine that as a Jewish leftist in exile from Nazi Germany, this did not feel great for him.
His negative attitude was also on display in his critical analysis of the astrology columns in the LA Times. He argued that these columns were speaking to an audience that both wanted to see themselves as far more important than they actually were and who thought of themselves as either the beneficiaries or victims of a fate that’s written in the stars. According to philosopher Robin James, Adorno used the column to demonstrate how the capitalist culture industry in 1950s America sold quasi-scientific posturing to help an audience excluded from educational privileges nonetheless feel in the know.
In the same piece, James draws a comparison between Adorno’s critique of astrology and the modern reliance on data to offer predictions on political and economic reality. For Adorno, astrology columns leave folks feeling that they are naturally deserving of good things while those who are less fortunate are also naturally worthy of less; sort of like the Prosperity Gospel only with more crystals and less pastors with private jets. This also allowed people to comfort themselves with the thought that if things weren’t going particularly well, it’s not really their fault as fate is simply written in the stars.
This blind acceptance of their supposedly preordained reality and their attendant willingness to submit to the dubious authority of an astrology columnist let Adorno to believe these people would have few qualms with similarly submitting to a fascist leader. While this might sound extreme, Adorno thought that astrology facilitates an ideology of dependence in which people want to avoid taking matters into their own hands and instead rely on various prophets of deceit. As he writes, “people even with supposedly normal minds are prepared to accept systems of delusions for the simple reason that it is too difficult to distinguish such systems from the equally inexorable and equally opaque one under which they actually have to live out their lives.” This is pretty well reflected by astrology as well as by the two brands of totalitarian states which also claim to have a key for everything, nope all the answers, reduce the complex to simple and mechanical inferences, doing away with anything that is strange and unknown and at the same time fail to explain anything.
Much like how astrology might allow folks to give out control to the activity of the stars, totalitarian and fascist leaders are often strong men who promise to take care of us and those like us, asking only for our complete trust in their own determining of our faiths. Adorno had similar thoughts about jazz music and Hollywood films which he called “dream factories”. For him, these products valorized the American Cult of the individual. He thought that their message was usually that individuality is great just so long as it serves the interest of the social whole. Lurking behind American individualism was a huge pressure to conform; i.e. this culture makes us feel like individuals when in reality we’re actually being asked to conform.