Adorno's Fallacious Evaluation of Mass Manipulation

IN light of recent events in the United States, I find it curious that Theodor W. Adorno (1903–1969) - whilst attempting to gather information pertaining to the psychological characteristics of those who are most predisposed towards the acceptance of fascist ideas - arrived at the conclusion that the manipulation of the masses leads to the 'regression' of humanity. Despite my own opposition to all forms of coercion and mass control, I strongly disagree with Adorno's analysis.

The word 'regression' more or less denotes a return to a former or less developed state, but history tells us that manipulation perpetrated on the kind of scale that one finds in Fascist Italy, Mao's China or, indeed, contemporary Western society, is actually progressive and not regressive at all. For a society to 'regress' it must surely undergo a return to origins, but the mass societies of today in which large numbers or people are controlled by a small elite are little more than a comparative blip on the radar of human millennia and are therefore inextricably bound up with the linear development of civilization itself. Mass manipulation, in other words, is something practised by empires and nation-states and used to control and influence large populations, it is not a feature of so-called primitive societies.

As an aside, one very revealing factor in the Frankfurt School's efforts to collect such data, is that whilst between 1929 and 1931 the group had tried to gauge the potential for Marxist revolution among German workers (see my post ‘Erich Fromm's Investigation into Anti-Authoritarianism’), by 1947 its exiled thinkers were doing virtually the same thing on behalf of the University of California. By this time, Adorno and his colleagues - having spent the war aiding the American government in its campaign against Hitler - had rejected things like revolution and class struggle altogether, which undoubtedly brings into question their true motives.