It is hard to resist the conclusion that we are doomed--our individual freedom limited to just what the society will allow us to realize and as a society at the mercy of amoral politicians who seek power for powers sake while we are pinned like the madman in Dr Strangelove to the nuclear warhead. Forever fighting phony enemies much like the world of 1984 where there have to be perpetual enemies to secure Big Brothers’ rule. Like Orwell he had some direct experience of how government manipulates the truth. He worked for the Office of War Information (OWI) on anti-Nazi propaganda projects and for a good period afterwards, transferring in 1943 from OWI to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency and then until 1951 for the US Department of State retiring as the head of the Central European section. His understanding of the cold war, with its creation of the ‘perpetual Enemy’ is as sharply knowing as Orwells,
“Free institutions compete with authoritarian ones in making the Enemy a deadly force within the system. And this deadly force stimulates growth and initiative, not by virtue of the magnitude and economic impact of the defense "sector," but by virtue of the fact that the society as a whole becomes a defense society. For the Enemy is permanent. He is not in the emergency situation but in the normal state of affairs. He threatens in peace as much as in war (and perhaps more than in war); he is thus being built into the system as a cohesive power.”
This experience more extensive than most people realized about Marcuse in the corridors of US power made him alert to what kind of society the US was building when it committed itself to building and controlling nuclear weaponry. Language given such horrors is bent manipulated to hide the multiple Orwellian lies that must be told, as a consequence -- ‘peace through war’, the ‘luxury fall out shelter’; all phrases that unify opposites to make them digestable but not understood. The “linguistic behavior blocks conceptual development..serving as a vehicle for coordination and subordination” By an odd coincidence the film that represents the best analogue to ODM came out in the same year that ODM was published. Dr Strangelove brilliantly describes the failure of thinking, and the triumph of technocratic one dimensional values.
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