Monad Cont.

I posted a comment on McCall's original monad post. However, this goes in a bit of a different, perhaps mildly less relevant, direction.

Over break I was camping, and sitting around the fire one night found myself in a very strange game involving word association and spelling. Don’t ask. Anyhow, to get to my point, I decided to try to stump everyone by using the word monad. This resulted in a rather intense debate over the meaning of the word, which somehow led to a discussion of scientology.

Though most of us there were less than well educated on the subject, a few among us (including myself) had known someone that had been involved with that “religion.” The important aspects can be summarized as follows: scientology works by establishing places or times in your life when you have hit a road block – perhaps when you were four and bullied, or forty and fired. What the religion can do about this is to “clear” you, and allow you to move on and succeed at whatever you are doing. Furthermore, it performs this action for only a few thousand dollars a session.

I think that this would epitomize what Horkeimer and Adorno feel like the effect of the culture industry has been on religion. Would you agree? It seems that scientology has bent the purpose of religion from guiding people to live their life in accordance with an afterlife or moral god, to a purpose of economic success. A stranger thought, perhaps they would say that this is the religion not for the laymen or factory workers, but for the bourgeois in the modern period. Look at the primary advocates (i.e. Tom Cruise). Does this mean that even the people in charge have become merely subjects to the culture industry? Simply to the machine of industry itself?

It’s taking over the world…