[FRIAM] Herbert Marcuse & Bryan Magee (1978)

[glen]

I tend to think Eco got this (nearly) right:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_fascism#Umberto_Eco

Fascism is a very large gravity well, i.e. a high-dimensional space of trajectories into the well. This is why I've had trouble with those who identify "corporatism" and "state communism" as a key element to fascism. It's not a matter of the (or any) aggregative entity like multinational corps or unipolar hegemonic states. It's a matter of something like entropy. Freedom and equivalence are fragile out of equilibrium states that have to be persnicketively maintained. Fascism is an equilibrium state always ready and waiting for us to lose diligence.

So, it's not a matter of too little state interference in the economy, or too little multinational corporation interference in the economy, or whatever such. You can get to fascism with all/any of those circumstances.

I suppose what we're after is an *automatic* high-dimensional controller/regulator, with higher *expressive* complexity than the thing being controlled. The trick is whether the plectic hypothesis holds: that high expressive complexity can be achieved with low foundational complexity. And if so, what foundation produces the expressive complexity that maintains the out of equilibrium states we want?

On 7/14/22 00:17, Jon Zingale wrote:
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U23Ho0m_Sv0&ab_channel=PhilosophyOverdose <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U23Ho0m_Sv0&ab_channel=PhilosophyOverdose>
> 
> "The economic convulsions that wracked western societies...were seen at the time, by most Marxists, as being the breakdown of the capitalist system, which Marxist theory had always predicted. However, whereas according to the theory, this was supposed to lead to communism, in not one single such western society did communist regimes emerge, what did emerge in several of them was fascism."
> 
> Bryan Magee opens in this discussion with Herbert Marcuse, and I am left wondering what Marcuse would think about the world today. One point of humour for me was to see that the Frankfurt school was so concerned with unconstrained penetration of the state into the economy, and today it appears that the reverse is what is so unbearable.


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