“Within the affluent democracy, […] All points of view can be heard […]. Moreover, in endlessly dragging debates over the media, the stupid opinion is treated with the same respect as the intelligent one, the misinformed may talk as long as the informed, and propaganda rides along with education, truth with falsehood. This pure tolerance of sense and nonsense is justified by the democratic argument that nobody, neither group nor individual, is in possession of the truth and capable of defining what is right and wrong, good and bad. […] I have already suggested that the democratic argument implies a necessary condition, namely, that the people must be capable of deliberating and choosing on the basis of knowledge, that they must have access to authentic information, and that, on this basis, their evaluation must be the result of autonomous thought.” [Pp. 94-95.]
“Under the role of monopolistic media – themselves the mere instruments of economic and political power – a mentality is created for which right and wrong, true and false are predefined wherever they affect the vital interests of the society. This is, prior to all expression and communication, a matter of semantics: the blocking of effective dissent, of the recognition of that which is not of the Establishment which begins in the language that is publicized and administered. The meaning of words is rigidly stabilized. … at the massive scale of the conservative majority, they are immediately “evaluated” (i.e. automatically understood) in terms of the public language – a language which determines “a priori” the direction in which the thought process moves. Thus the process of reflection ends where it started: in the given conditions and relations. […] These conditions invalidate the logic of tolerance which involves the rational development of meaning and precludes the closing of meaning. Consequently, persuasion through discussion and the equal presentation of opposites (even where it is really equal) easily lose their liberating force as factors of understanding and learning; they are far more likely to strengthen the established thesis and to repel the alternatives.” [Pp. 95-97.]
“When a magazine prints side by side a negative and a positive report on the FBI, it fulfills honestly the requirements of objectivity: however, the chances are that the positive wins because the image of the institution is deeply engraved in the mind of the people. […] The tolerance expressed in such impartiality serves to minimize or even absolve prevailing intolerance and suppression. If objectivity has anything to do with truth, […] then this kind of objectivity is false, and this kind of tolerance inhuman. And if it is necessary to break the established universe of meaning in order to enable man to find out what is true and false, this deceptive impartiality would have to be abandoned. The people exposed to this impartiality are no tabulae rasae [a clean slate], they are indoctrinated by the conditions under which they live and think and which they do not transcend. To enable them to become autonomous, to find by themselves what is true and what is false for man in the existing society, they would have to be freed from the prevailing indoctrination (which is no longer recognized as indoctrination). But this means that the trend would have to be reversed: they would have to get information slanted in the opposite direction. For the facts are never given immediately and never accessible immediately; they are established, “mediated” by those who made them; the truth, “the whole truth” surpasses these facts and requires the rupture with their appearance. This rupture – prerequisite and token of all freedom of thought and of speech – cannot be accomplished within the established framework of abstract tolerance and spurious objectivity because these are precisely the factors which precondition the mind against the rupture.” [Pp. 98-99.]
Marcuse, Herbert. 1965. “Repressive Tolerance.” Pp. 81-117 in A Critique of Pure Tolerance, edited by R. P. Wolff, B. R. Jr., and H. Marcuse. Boston: Beacon Press. [Italics in original, bold not. Marcuse pictured.]
Sociological Fragments 
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