(tangentopolis) feat. Jacques Ellul - Democracy (A Users Manual)
[David Crabtree Lecture, Guttenberg College, 11.01.21]
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Jacques Ellul (the finest of France), The Technological Society (1980),
"The term technique, as I use it, does not mean machines, technology, or this or that procedure for attaining an end. In our technological society, technique is the totality of methods ralionally arrived at and having absolute efficiency (for a given stage of development) in every field of human activity. Its characteristics are new; the technique of the present has no common measure with that of the past." (p. xxv)
Jacques Ellul was a French theologian/sociologist and anarchist. He first became well-known to American readers when his book The Technological Society was published in English in 1964. In 1950, Ellul finished his manuscript La Technique ou l'enjeu du siecle (The Technological Society), his seminal analysis of the way technology shapes every aspect of society. As contemporary thinker, he was strongly influenced by Kierkegaard, Marx and Barth. After a life, in which he wrote close to fifty books, Ellul died in the summer of 1994, at the age of 82 .
For Ellul, technique represented an entire way of life characterized by life fragmented so that efficiency ultimately rules over all ethical decisions. Ellul warned that technique was having drastic effects on all aspects of modern life. His books, Anarchy and Christianity, The Politics of God and the Politics of Man are two examples of how his political and religious outlooks mutually reinforced one another.
"There is a limited elite that understands the secrets of their own techniques, but not necessarily of all techniques. These men are close to the seat of modern governmental power. The state is no longer founded on the 'average citizen', but on the ability and knowledge of this elite. The average man is altogether unable to penetrate technical secrets or governmental organization and consequently can exert no influence at all on the state."
"If the ruler wants to play the game by himself and follow secret policies, he must present a decoy to the masses. He cannot escape the mass; but he can draw between himself and that mass an invisible curtain, a screen, on which the mass will see projected the mirage of some politics, while the real politics are being made behind it."
"This is where each individual must decide for himself. The essential thing is the decision to challenge the modern state, which without this small group of protesters will be checked by neither brake, value, nor reason."
"The orchestration of press, radio and television to create a continuous, lasting and total environment renders the influence of propaganda virtually unnoticed precisely because it creates a constant environment....[the goal of modern propaganda is no longer to transform opinion but to arouse an active and mythical belief"
"Enclosed within his artificial creation, man finds that there is “no exit”; that he cannot pierce the shell of technology again to find the ancient milieu to which he was adapted for hundreds of thousands of years . In our cities there is no more day or night or heat or cold. But there is overpopulation, thralldom to press and television, total absence of purpose. All men are constrained by means external to them to ends equally external. The further the technical mechanism develops that allows us to escape natural necessity, the more we are subjected to artificial technical necessities..."
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Jacques Ellul - The Technological System (Audiobook)
https://www.bitchute.com/video/6XbDP9M5IUSY/
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