We live in a technological society

we live in a technological society

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no, we don't

jacques OMEGALUL he copied his thesis from ted kazinx

based ellul. this guy is like Francis Bacon's "Screaming Pope"

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Jacques- "psychological rape to psychological rape."- Ellul

that's the dialectics of technology for you, Cope.

>We are today at the stage of historical evolution in which everything that is not technique is being eliminated. The challenge to a country, an individual, or a system is solely a technical challenge. Only a technical force can be opposed to a technical force. All else is swept away. Serge Tchakotin reminds us of this constantly. In the face of the psychological outrages of propaganda, what reply can there be? It is useless to appeal to culture or religion. It is useless to educate the populace. Only propaganda can retort to propaganda, or psychological rape to psychological rape.

Jacques - "hey, this place looks kinda like auschwitz lmao" - Ellul

>Industrial labor likewise tends more and more to dispense with orders and personal contact. This was pushed to an extreme in the concentration camps, where men of different nations were mixed together so that they should have no contacts and yet be able to perform collective work. It was hasty and superficial work, to be sure, but a little more rigor could easily make this labor really productive (as seems to be the case in the Soviet Union). One cannot speak merely of isolation. These men work in teams, but there is no need for them to know or understand one another. They need only understand the technique involved and know in advance what their teammate will do. It is not necessary for the crew to understand one another in order to run an aircraft. The indicator panel controls the actions to be performed; and every crew member, submitting by necessity and conscience to the automatic indications, obeys for the safety of all. Each man's actions are dictated by the conditions of life and its preservation. This is clear in the case of flying an aircraft. But it is equally clear in every other situation involving technique—and this encompasses the most important areas of life. Men do not need to understand each other in order to carry out the most important endeavors of our times. Technique is of necessity, and as compensation, our universal language. It is the fruit of specialization. But this very specialization prevents mutual understanding. Everyone today has his own professional jargon, modes of thought, and peculiar perception of the world. There was a time when the distortion of overspecialization was the butt of jokes and a subject for vaudeville. Today the sharp knife of specialization has passed like a razor into the living flesh. It has cut the umbilical cord which linked men with each other and with nature. The man of today is no longer able to understand his neighbor because his profession is his whole life, and the technical specialization of this life has forced him to live in a closed universe. He no longer understands the vocabulary of the others. Nor does he comprehend the underlying motivations of the others. Yet technique, having ruptured the relations between man and man, proceeds to rebuild the bridge which links them. It bridges the specializations because it produces a new type of man always and everywhere like his duplicate, who develops along technical lines. He listens to himself and speaks to himself, but he obeys the slightest indications of the apparatus, confident that his neighbor will do the same. Technique has become the bond between men. By its agency they communicate, whatever their languages, beliefs, or race. It has become, for life or death, the universal language which compensates for all the deficiencies and separations it has itself produced. This is the major reason for the great impetus of technique toward the universal.

Jacques- "Einstein was kinda dumb"- Ellul

>When our savants characterize their golden age in any but scientific terms, they emit a quantity of down-at-the-heel platitudes that would gladden the heart of the pettiest politician. Let's take a few samples. “To render human nature nobler, more beautiful, and more harmonious.” What on earth can this mean? What criteria, what content, do they propose? Not many, I fear, would be able to reply. “To assure the triumph of peace, liberty, and reason.” Fine words with no substance behind them. “To eliminate cultural lag ” What culture? And would the culture they have in mind be able to subsist in this harsh social organization? “To conquer outer space.” For what purpose? The conquest of space seems to be an end in itself, which dispenses with any need for reflection. We are forced to conclude that our scientists are incapable of any but the emptiest platitudes when they stray from their specialties. It makes one think back on the collection of mediocrities accumulated by Einstein when he spoke of God, the state, peace, and the meaning of life. It is clear that Einstein, extraordinary mathematical genius that he was, was no Pascal; he knew nothing of political or human reality, or, in fact, anything at all outside his mathematical reach. The banality of Einstein's remarks in matters outside his specialty is as astonishing as his genius within it. It seems as though the specialized application of all one's faculties in a particular area inhibits the consideration of things in general. Even J. Robert Oppenheimer, who seems receptive to a general culture, is not outside this judgment. His political and social declarations, for example, scarcely go beyond the level of those of the man in the street.

Jacques -"how's that neurolink feels inside your skull? happy yet?" - Ellul

>And the opinions of the scientists quoted by tExpress are not even on the level of Einstein or Oppenheimer. Their pomposities, in fact, do not rise to the level of the average. They are vague generalities inherited from the nineteenth century, and the fact that they represent the furthest limits of thought of our scientific worthies must be symptomatic of arrested development or of a mental block. Particularly disquieting is the gap between the enormous power they wield and their critical ability, which must be estimated as null. To wield power well entails a certain faculty of criticism, discrimination, judgment, and option. It is impossible to have confidence in men who apparently lack these faculties. Yet it is apparently our fate to be facing a ‘‘golden age” in the power of sorcerers who are totally blind to the meaning of the human adventure. When they speak of preserving the seed of outstanding men, whom, pray, do they mean to be the judges. It is clear, alas, that they propose to sit in judgment themselves. It is hardly likely that they will deem a Rimbaud or a Nietszche worthy of posterity. When they announce that they will conserve the genetic mutations which appear to them most favorable, and that they propose to modify the very germ cells in order to produce such and such traits; and when we consider the mediocrity of the scientists themselves outside the confines of their specialties, we can only shudder at the thought of what they will esteem most '‘favorable.’* None of our wise men ever pose the question of the end of all their marvels. The “wherefore’* is resolutely passed by. The response which would occur to our contemporaries is: for the sake of happiness. Unfortunately, there is no longer any question of that. One of our best-known specialists in diseases of the nervous system writes: “We will be able to modify man’s emotions, desires and thoughts, as we have already done in a rudimentary way with tranquillizers.’* It will be possible, says our specialist to produce a conviction or an impression of happiness without any real basis for it. Our man of the golden age, therefore, will be capable of “happiness5* amid the worst privations. Why, then, promise us extraordinary comforts, hygiene, knowledge, and nourishment if, by simply manipulating our nervous systems, we can be happy without them? The last meager motive we could possibly ascribe to the technical adventure thus vanishes into thin air through the very existence of technique itself. But what good is it to pose questions of motives? of Why? All that must be the work of some miserable intellectual who balks at technical progress. The attitude of the scientists, at any rate, is clear. Technique exists because it is technique. The golden age will be because it will be. Any other answer is superfluous.

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holy fucking BASED. i need to read this nigga

“Technique has penetrated the deepest recesses of the human being. The machine tends not only to create a new human environment, but also to modify man's very essence. The milieu in which he lives is no longer his. He must adapt himself, as though the world were new, to a universe for which he was not created. He was made to go six kilometers an hour, and he goes a thousand. He was made to eat when he was hungry and to sleep when he was sleepy; instead, he obeys a clock. He was made to have contact with living things, and he lives in a world of stone. He was created with a certain essential unity, and he is fragmented by all the forces of the modern world.”