The Frankfurt School: Ignorance of Human Action and Intellectual Tyranny

Foreword: The Wardens of the Comfortable Cage—The Frankfurt School and Its Cultural Lament

In our time, few assaults on liberty and capitalism are as cleverly disguised and as widely spread as the ideas of the "Frankfurt School." This intellectual movement, originating in the Weimar Republic of the 20th century, is fundamentally an ideological expedition aimed at subverting Western civilization from a cultural and psychological level. Its thinkers, such as Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and those we will dissect in detail later—Herbert Marcuse and Erich Fromm—engaged in what can only be described as the most unnatural marriage in intellectual history: they forcibly fused Karl Marx's long-bankrupt theory of economic determinism with Sigmund Freud's mystically-tinged psychoanalysis.

The product of this theoretical crossbreeding was what they called "Critical Theory." This is by no means a scientific theory in pursuit of objective truth, but rather an eternal ideological weapon whose sole purpose is to expose and critique. What is their core thesis? They proclaim that the reason and freedom promised by the Enlightenment have betrayed themselves. In modern industrial capitalist society, reason has not brought liberation but has instead degenerated into "Instrumental Reason"—a cold calculation in the service of oppression and control. Humanity has not become freer but has fallen into a deeper, more imperceptible form of enslavement.

The jailer of this new form of slavery is no longer a tyrant with a whip, but the omnipresent "Culture Industry." Films, advertisements, popular music, and consumer goods together weave a vast, comfortable net of domination. It constantly manufactures "False Needs," causing people to indulge in material pleasures, thereby dissolving any will to resist or to think critically.

This pessimistic tune finds its most vivid literary and sociological echoes in two thinkers who were not formal members of the school. The first is Aldous Huxley, who, in his immortal cautionary tale "Brave New World," depicted the ultimate vision of the Frankfurt School's fears: a "happy" totalitarian society maintained through genetic engineering, psychological manipulation, and endless entertainment. There, people are not enslaved by violence but "willingly" come to love their servitude. The other is Neil Postman, who lamented in "Amusing Ourselves to Death" that Huxley's prophecy was becoming reality. He argued that electronic media, represented by television, had degraded all serious public discourse into superficial fragments of entertainment, ultimately causing people to lose the ability to think about complex issues, amusing themselves to death in a world of sensory stimulation.

Therefore, whether it is Marcuse's "One-Dimensional Man," Fromm's anxiety over the "Escape from Freedom," or the cultural laments of Huxley and Postman, they all point to a central assertion: modern capitalist society is a "comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom." By satisfying material desires and providing endless cheap entertainment, it strips us of our true, inner freedom. However, this entire system of thought, built on elitist pessimism, fundamentally misunderstands the nature of humanity, value, choice, and freedom. It is the liquidation of this series of fundamental errors that constitutes the necessary and imperative intellectual critique we are about to undertake.

I. The Consumer's "Iron Cage" or the Critic's "Illusion"?—A Rebuttal to Marcuse

The most prominent target of the Frankfurt School's critique is "consumerism." This critique reached its zenith in Herbert Marcuse's 1964 book, "One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society." In his view, modern industrial society is a covert totalitarian system that achieves total control over individuals not through violence, but through the infiltration of technological consumer goods. Happiness is commodified, freedom is replaced by the pursuit of new products, and people become thoroughly "alienated" in a cycle of overtime and consumption, losing their so-called "true selves."

We must ask: does this philosopher truly understand the most basic logic of human action? What he depicts is less a social reality and more an illusion constructed from his own biases. The root of this theory is an arrogant intellectual tyranny, which presupposes a "true" human nature and arrogantly proclaims that real, living people have deviated from this "truth" and are manipulated, "false" beings.

Let us shatter this illusion with a simple thought experiment. Consider a mobile phone worth two thousand dollars. Marcuse's theory would portray its purchase as an irrational impulse driven by capitalist temptation. However, human action in reality is a far more complex process of rational calculation:

First, the starting point of action—financial constraints and the nature of exchange. Any market exchange is based on the voluntary consent of both parties. An individual with insufficient funds cannot complete the purchase, no matter how strong their desire. This is an irrefutable fact. To depict consumption as a one-way indoctrination completely ignores the fundamental reality of "mutual consent" required for exchange.

Second, the trade-off between reason and morality. When faced with desire, the vast majority of people know how to act within the framework of law and morality. To portray those who cannot afford a phone as potential criminals, or to believe that the allure of capital is sufficient to destroy a person's basic moral sense, is a profound degradation of human nature.

Third, time preference and the microcosm of capital accumulation. For a consumer who desires a product but currently cannot afford it, saving is the rational path. This act itself is a manifestation of the great mental faculty of "deferred gratification." The individual forgoes immediate pleasure for a future, more desirable goal (owning the phone). This is precisely the fundamental reason for the progress of human civilization and the accumulation of capital. Marcuse's theory not only fails to understand this but inverts it, seemingly believing that people will destroy their future for immediate consumption—a characteristic of barbarism, not civilization.

Fourth, the supremacy of subjective value. Even with sufficient funds, an individual may well choose not to buy. Why? Because value is purely subjective. The value of the phone to the buyer must be higher than the two thousand dollars he pays for it (and the sum of all other goods and services that two thousand dollars could buy). If his internal valuation for a phone is only five hundred dollars, then spending two thousand on it would be a "losing" transaction, which a rational actor would not make. Conversely, if he needs more expensive equipment, a two-thousand-dollar phone will not satisfy him either. The final purchase decision is always the optimal choice made by an individual after ranking all things in his own mind according to value.

To denigrate this complex decision-making process, based on individual circumstances and subjective value, as a "one-dimensional" act controlled by advertising is utterly absurd! Advertising may provide information and spark interest, but it can never substitute for an individual's value judgment. In an age of information overload, people's ability to filter, reject, and even block ads is greater than ever. To portray the consumer as a puppet of capital is the most profound insult to human reason and free will.

As for the so-called "alienation" and the decline of critical thinking, it is even more baseless. The technological progress brought by the market economy, especially the internet and social media, has provided countless individuals with unprecedented tools and platforms to express dissent and engage in social criticism. It is the dynamic development of capitalism that has given rise to the most diverse cultural forms and cultural movements that resist consumerism. To use its own logic against it, the Frankfurt School's theory, which forcibly crams complex reality into its single framework of "capitalist oppression," is the only truly and hopelessly "one-dimensional thought."

II. The "Burden" of Freedom or a "Hymn" to Individuality?—A Rebuttal to Fromm

Having clarified the school's fundamental errors in economic cognition, we can now analyze the psychological edifice Fromm built on the same foundation, only to find it teetering on the brink of collapse.

Fromm's core argument is that modern man, liberated from traditional authority, has gained freedom but has also fallen into isolation and helplessness, thus developing an impulse to "escape from freedom." He attempts a "forced marriage" between psychoanalysis and Marxist philosophy, and this theoretical contortion fills his analysis with ambiguity and far-fetched claims.

His greatest fallacy lies in his disastrous confusion of two distinct concepts: "isolation" and "individuality." The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer put it succinctly: "Personality is the determination of destiny." A person's choices are rooted in their unique personality, not in a sense of "isolation" that needs to be cured. What modern society provides is precisely the freedom for individuality to flourish. The traditional community that Fromm yearns for, which saves one from "isolation," comes at the cost of suppressing and stifling individuality.

Loneliness should not be seen as a disease. A person with an independent personality is by no means psychologically impaired, even if they temporarily lack close companions. Humans are indeed social animals, but this in no way means that individuality must be sacrificed in the name of forced integration into a collective. Choosing to join a group or to keep one's distance is itself an expression of freedom, not a sign of psychopathology. Under Hitler's rule, where the masses fanatically sought collective identity and national hatred, could those people truly experience what Fromm calls "the feeling of isolation"? Quite the contrary, they lost the ability to feel true solitude (i.e., to exist as independent individuals). Fromm's argument here is self-contradictory.

His analysis of product "alienation" is even more erroneous. He seems to believe that goods produced by capital will erase human personality. Yet reality is the exact opposite! It is precisely because there are countless consumers with unique personalities that the market must offer a vast variety of products to satisfy them. When existing products fail to meet certain unique, individualistic demands, entrepreneurs identify this "market gap" and, through roundabout production, create higher-order, more personalized goods to compete for profit. Was not the birth of Apple Inc. driven by a soul as distinctive and, to some, as "isolated" as Steve Jobs? It is the market mechanism of capitalism that provides these outstanding, distinctive "loners" with the tools and opportunities to change the world, not the other way around! If one claims that isolation lacks creativity, how does one explain that the products created by these "isolated" individuals are used by billions of "non-isolated" people? This "alienation" theory crumbles in the face of facts.

III. The "Art" of Emotion and the "Ignorance" of Value—The Final Collapse of Fromm's Thought

Fromm's fallacies are most thoroughly exposed in his "The Art of Loving." He actually conceives of love, the most complex and subjective of human emotions, as a technique that can be learned through "discipline" and "concentration," like carpentry. We must raise the most severe objection: this attempt to "engineer" human emotion is a classic constructivist fallacy! The emergence of love is based on unspoken subjective preferences and chemistry between two people; it is a spontaneous order, by no means something that can be facilitated by technical training or government planning. Can a suitor truly win the heart of another independent individual by attending a "love training course"? This is a complete disregard for human dignity.

Furthermore, when analyzing loneliness, Fromm links it to orgiastic indulgence, suggesting the latter is a means of escaping the former. This prompts a counter-question: is not the "artistic practice" he himself advocates, experienced through learning and practice, also a more refined form of "indulgence"? The absurdity of this argument lies in the fact that when a totalitarian government forces its people to learn certain symbols or spiritual discourse, this imposed behavior does not even qualify as indulgence; it is more like the dictator's own indulgence in power itself.

Here, Fromm falls into a paradox from which his own theory cannot escape. He asserts that a person dominated by passive affects is a slave to external forces. Let us then imagine a fanatical dictator who holds a "positive love" for the theory he created and the study programs named after him, and forces his people to generate this "love" as well. In this situation, controlled by "positive emotions," the people mistakenly believe they understand the motives behind it. We must ask the fatal question: who, then, is the external driver? The dictator himself? But he is in a state of "positive love"! According to Fromm's own logic, this dictator has become a slave to motives he himself does not understand. In that case, the "love for the external driver" would probably be the most extreme form of "concentration" that Fromm described as a condition for learning to love. The entire theory self-destructs logically at this point.

Finally, we must liquidate the economic foundation of his theory—that set of erroneous cognitions about value, which can only be described as a pre-scientific relic. He laments: "...a shoe, for instance, which is useful and necessary, may have no economic value (exchange value) if there is no demand for it on the market."

Anyone with a basic knowledge of modern economics would be speechless reading this. He complains about a great truth of the market—that value is determined by the subjective preferences of consumers—as if it were a tragedy! This perfectly exposes his complete ignorance of the dual nature of value (use-value and exchange-value). The use-value of a commodity (its physical utility) and its exchange-value (its market price) are two different concepts. And what determines the allocation of resources is precisely the exchange value, which is aggregated from the subjective evaluations of countless consumers. The value of an object is never determined by its intrinsic properties or the labor invested in it.

The labor theory of value of Marx and his followers is the most fatal "masterpiece" in his entire theoretical system. Let us end this debate with that classic example: if a person casually tosses an apple seed, and ten years later it grows into a large tree without any labor input, do the fruits of this tree have any "labor value"? In this process, no worker is "exploited," and no capitalist is present. The reason Fromm and the entire Frankfurt School have managed to perpetuate their theories to this day is not because of their academic validity, but simply because there are always some intellectuals who, after reading a few books lacking logical support, develop a blind adherence akin to religious faith.

With this, our intellectual dissection of the Frankfurt School's theory can come to a close. This is not just a clarification of a school of thought, but the eradication of a deeply harmful intellectual virus. The rigor and science of theory are directly related to human freedom and prosperity. We must ensure that the theoretical foundations of economics and all social sciences are unbreakable, and we must deliver the fiercest attacks against any erroneous theory that attempts to enslave in the name of liberation.