Societal Enlightenment | On Adorno’s Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life

In-Shadow: A Modern Odyssey (Animated Short Film) by Lubomir Arsov [Original Youtube Link]

For this week’s journal, I have decided to focus on Adorno’s Minima Moralia as it talks about the most prevalent problem that our society is facing today, and that is how human beings become subjected to the helms of a mechanical system (capitalism) that is ran by those who have the most monetary power in the world. Commodities then have became the very center of our economy, as companies are constantly producing more and more things even if it went beyond the people’s demand for the sake of getting profit, and for keeping those in power in the very same position. This process then took away what makes us “humans” in the first place.  It extracts the authentic intentions of an individual to another, and we tend to only take what benefits us and disagree when it does not, making our relationships ‘transactional’ to the point that the objects that we tie ourselves to are coercing us to abide to this synthetic system that creates the very division between the wealthy and normal people within the society, making this political. Our environment pushes us to engage in barbarity and encourages us to be more selfish, and it is sad to say that we act as if this is still okay.

The art piece that I chose is a video called “In-Shadow: A Modern Odessey” which underscored what Adorno was concerned with regarding the prescence of our isolation from the real things that matter. The video showed that our identities are now puppets of those who rule the society (the ones who have big businesses, the people who TRULY rule the world) and that the commodities (gadgets, content, clothes, enhancements, movies etc.) that they produce are means for them to nit-pick what they want to share to the rest of society to inflict a false sense of reality and to produce fake happiness from people, thus hiding the darkness that looms above us that were generated by them in the first place, while keeping the gears of their system going, and it even encourages us to take on the same path as them.

We are trying to fill the void of our hearts with discontent by being engulfed to principles of these economic objects by seeing wealth as a definite end, but we need to be reminded that this does not make us human. It takes us away from the very freedom that we are willed to enjoy in this lifetime. 

The video emphasized the need of an “enlightenment” for us to break free from the fetishization of the commodities that affect us in our daily lives; quoting C.G. Jung: “…One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.” It is indeed true that a single person would not be able to make sufficient changes to the world by being conscious, but the only way for us to wake up from this nightmare is to be critical of it.