Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments (Cultural Memory in the Present)

by Max Horkheimer

Just as women adore the unmoved paranoid man, nations fall to their knees before totalitarian fascism. The paranoid element in the devotees responds to the paranoiac as to the evil spirit, their fear of conscience to his utter lack of scruples, for which they feel gratitude. They follow the man who looks past them, who does not treat them as subjects but hands them over to the operations of his many purposes. Like everyone else, these women have made the occupation of greater or lesser positions of power their religion, and themselves the malign creatures society takes them for. And so the gaze which reminds them of freedom must strike them as that of the over-naive seducer. Their world is inverted. But at the same time they know, like the ancient gods who shunned the gaze of the faithful, that something lifeless resides behind their veil. In the trusting look of the nonparanoid they are reminded of the spirit which has died in them, because they see outside them only the cold means of their self-preservation. To be touched in this way awakens in them shame and rage.