Preface(1944 and 1947) xvii language and thought to which art, literature, and philosophy must con form today. By tabooing any thought which sets out negatively from the facts and from the prevailing modes of thought as obscure, convoluted, and preferably foreign, that concept holds mind captive in ever deeper blindness. It is in the nature of the calamitous situation existing today that even the most honorable reformer who recommends renewal in threadbare language reinforces the existing order he seeks to break by taking over its worn-out categorial apparatus and the pernicious power-philosophy lying behind it. False clarity is only another name for myth. Myth was always obscure and luminous at once. It has always been distinguished by its familiarity and its exemption from the work of concepts The enslavement to nature of people today cannot be separated from social progress. The increase in economic productivity which creates the conditions for a more just world also affords the technical apparatus and the social groups controlling it a disproportionate advantage over the rest of the population. The individual is entirely nullified in face of the eco- nomic powers. These powers are taking society's domination over nature to unimagined heights. While individuals as such are vanishing before the apparatus they serve, they are provided for by that apparatus and better than ever before. In the unjust state of society the powerlessness and pla bility of the masses increase* with the quantity of goods allocated to them The materially considerable and socially paltry rise in the standard of liv ing of the lower classes is reflected in the hypocritical propagation of intel lect. Intellect's true concern is a negation of reification. It must perish when it is solidified into a cultural asset and handed out for consumption purposes. The flood of precise information and brand-new amusements make people smarter and more stupid at once What is at issue here is not culture as a value, as understood by ics of civilization such as Huxley, Jaspers, and Ortega y Gasset, but the necessity for enlightenment to reflect on itself if humanity is not to be totally betrayed. What is at stake is not conservation of the past but the fulfillment of past hopes. Today, however,*the past is being continued as destruction of the past. If, up to the nineteenth century, respectable edu cation was a privilege paid for by the increased sufferings of the unedu- cated,in the twentieth the hygienic factory is bought with the melting down of all cultural entities in the gigantic crucible. That might not even be so high a price as those defenders of culture believe if the bargain sale