The functional language is a radically anti-historical language: operational rationality has little room and little use for historical reason.

Most people are afraid of freedom. They are conditioned to be afraid of it.

The existing liberties and the existing gratifications are tied to the requirements of repression: they themselves become instruments of repression.

Technological rationality reveals its political character as it becomes the great vehicle of better domination, creating a truely totalitarian universe in which society and nature, mind and body are kept in a state of permanent mobilization for the defense of this universe.

The web of domination has become the web of Reason itself, and this society is fatally entangled in it.

The organism is thus being preconditioned for the spontaneous acceptance of what is offered. Inasmuch as the greater liberty involves a contraction rather than extension and development of instinctual needs, it works for rather than against the status quo of general repression - one might speak of "institutionalized desublimation". The latter appears to be a vital factor in the making of the authoritarian personality of our time.

Obscenity is a moral concept in the verbal arsenal of the establishment, which abuses the term by applying it, not to expressions of its own morality but to those of another.