Upon reading

1. Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion; Civilization and its discontents
2. Amos Vogel, Film as a Subversive Art
3. Hans Richter, Dada
4. Lunacharski, Narkompros

the following problem springs to the mind. It revolves around the concept of evil, but can be framed also in terms of the idea of ‘trust’.
The power structures that be do not trust the human being as able to liberate {him,her}self from habits, mental constructions and traditions that are clearly ‘arretrati’ (in the sense of Gramsci) but that are also comfortable, they dumb the minds down but secure a stable society.

Russell (HWP), Steiner (Bluebeard’s Castle, Archives of Eden) and J.D. Bernal (The World, the Flesh, the Devil) had same dilemma:
the periods of most intense fast forward in history (Athens V century bc, Italian Renaissance, Weimar Republic) were also the ones that ended up in very unstable social arrangements and ultimately broke down entirely, with massive human cost. Do we need a tyrant to produce “Sein und Zeit”?

A generous conceptualization of the unwillingness to promote a rational, progressive world view by the society’s power structures, of their reluctance to give rein to free though, to subversive contents, to true experimentation in the population at large, would be that they do not trust the human being.

A different – but linked – stream of ideas is the one linked to PR, essentially Stuart Ewen (PR; Captains of Consciousness) and Nystrom, Paul H. (Economics of fashion).
In particular, see this interview

Categories: Society