Master Slave Dialectic Analysis

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Another central idea of The Frankfurt School is the master-slave dialectic (famously articulated in the Phenomenology of Spirit by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel). For time immemorial there has always been hierarchy: sometimes good and sometimes bad. A morally acceptable example of hierarchy is an apprenticeship, where the apprentice learns from his employer (for example, a master carpenter); in this case the one who is better is good because he is helping the one who is not as good to become as good as he is. A morally unacceptable example of hierarchy is slavery, where the master's prosperity is solely due to the ill-gotten wealth that is the fruits of the slave's labor (who is dependent on who?); in this case the relationship is noxious as …show more content…
This dialectic is often (usually falsely) applied to many different forms of hierarchy and is the essence of conspiracy theory, examples: "Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful" -Seneca the Younger (disputed), "monarchs and aristocrats are tyrants", "Capitalists are evil oppressors", "Western Civilization is only 'better' because it stole from and exploited every other culture; they barely invented anything" (colonialism is not seen as morally net-good), "blacks only underachieve in White countries because of White racism", "traditional values/mores are bad for your psychology and you should rebel against your parents", "women underachieve due to sexist males and are put into an inferior position by gender roles", and a more contemporary attack on reason by Postmodernism: "[The] horrors, according to postmodernism, are most prominent in the West, Western civilization being where reason and power [reason = power] have been the most developed.
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