According to Horkheimer and Adorno, the source of today's calamity is a pattern of blind domination, domination in a triple sense: the domination of nature by human beings, domination of nature within human beings, and, in both of these forms of domination, the domination of some human beings by others.
What motivates such triple domination is an irrational fear of the unknown: "Humans believe themselves free of fear when there is no longer anything unknown. This has determined the path of demythologization . . . . Enlightenment is mythical fear radicalized" (DE 11).
In an unfree society whose culture pursues so-called progress no matter what the cost, that which is "other," whether human or nonhuman, gets shoved aside, exploited, or destroyed.
- from Stanford's Plato site
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