The 21st-century evolution of Herbert Marcuse's "one-dimensional man," expanded from a critique of consumer capitalism into a totalizing diagnosis of
contemporary society. This theory posits that under neoliberal hegemony, all spheres of life—thought, culture, language, science, politics, spirituality—have been collapsed into a single, suffocating dimension: the logic of capital, technocracy, and Euro-Atlantic liberalism. Dissent is not suppressed; it is simply rendered unintelligible.
Alternative epistemologies (Indigenous, religious, leftist) are not argued against; they are exiled from the realm of
respectable discourse. Big Tech platforms, popular media, and institutional science do not merely reflect this unidimensionality; they actively produce and police it, functioning as the priesthood of a secular, scientistic state religion. The theory argues we are not living in a pluralistic society but a monoculture of the permissible, where even rebellion is pre-packaged and sold back as lifestyle.
Example: A Systemic Unidimensionality theorist observes that both a
conservative pundit and a liberal activist on cable news ultimately agree on the
fundamental axioms: capitalism is eternal, electoral politics is the only arena of change, and
technological solutionism will fix all ills. Their heated debates about tax rates or social media censorship occur within a single, invisible dimension of assumptions. The Indigenous elder who speaks of land as a relative, not a resource, or the Marxist who calls for the abolition of wage labor, simply cannot appear on the screen at all. The dimension has no coordinates for them.
