Books
Jacques Ellul. The Age of Technology.
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MPH, MSc
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Jacques Ellul (1912-1994) was a professor of law and sociology at the University of Bordeaux. He wrote The Technological Society in 1954 (La technique ou l'enjeu du siècle). In his work, Ellul analyzes how the true driving force behind politics and societies is the mechanistic dynamics of technology, which generates its own pattern that directs life by absorbing all spheres, eliminating any human decision, and the elements that constitute human beings themselves and the social and cultural form of coexistence. His work exposes the fetishism of "progress" in a society that has lost its capacity for critical judgment and the ability to engage in any moral reflection in the face of its technified consciousness and inertia. Nothing could be more relevant today.
All human and social processes are refined by a progressive process of technification. Human behavior, life in society, and human thought itself are being transformed into a system of processes. No area escapes technology. Thus, there is a technique of warfare, as well as a technique of shaving. More recently, coaches talk about techniques for picking up women, and there are videos that reach the point of absurdity (number of glasses of water per day, the correct order to eat a salad, the angle for efficient evacuation in the toilet, or breathing techniques to combat climate eco-anxiety).
Technology seeks what is effective, thereby spreading the same law of effectiveness everywhere. The more technology is applied, the more rational and effective it becomes. The more rational and effective it is, the more technology is needed. Every aspect of social life thus becomes a technical issue. Technology thus imposes itself by producing what is effective and efficient. However, the effectiveness of the technical does not produce wisdom, prudence, humanity, morality, or virtue. The path of effectiveness displaces other possibilities, imposing technology with violence under the "objectivity" of effectiveness, which is taken for "science," and with it even moral law, reduced to mechanistic effectiveness. This is the purest scientific brutality, mechanistic thought patterns conditioned at the level of the spinal reflex arc. The mental constriction of the scientist, which prevents him from seeing anything else, is taken for intelligence. It is clear that the system has created the concepts of "education" and "intelligence" that are useful to the system itself for its production and reproduction. For Ellul, "the cause lies in the bias of the scientific spirit." Technology is directed toward performance, toward the efficiency of processes, not toward developing the range of possibilities and knowledge of the various aspects necessary to improve human life. Technology follows a simple criterion of mechanistic efficiency. Any kind of reflection that goes beyond the framework of technification is completely irrelevant in this society. The wisest people in society have become completely irrelevant given the technicized expectations of thought in all spheres.
Hybris is present in Greek ethics and is rejected by authors such as Aristotle. By producing a power of domination, technology corrupts and distances human beings from wisdom (sophrosyne, moderation) and virtue. For this reason, technical power is suspect, because it points to a desire for domination that is not produced by virtue or moral reflection, but by naked efficiency, arrogance, and vanity (hubris, megalopsychía) or even the intrinsic violence of the instrumentalization of brute domination.
We see that in Greece there is no religious superstition, no primitive irrational fear of the unknown, nor ignorance stemming from an inability to think. The mythology of modernity has attempted to create a pseudo-dialectic belief/science in which the former represents the superstitious, unintelligent man, and the latter the rational, intelligent man. The scientistic propaganda of modern society has attempted to create this dialectic, creating its own Greek mythology in the process. Greek reflection was, in fact, broader and deeper than that of the modern scientist. It included logic, but also wisdom, moderation, ethics, virtue, the search for truth, etc., and not just technical development. The Greeks were aware of the brutalization that material science could lead to.
There is no epistemic cut-off point in humanity, as claimed by scientism, at which "true" knowledge begins with abstract reason, the logical-mathematical model, methodical observation, etc. However, technology will not reach its full development until science intervenes, rationalizing it, systematizing it, calculating its effectiveness and efficiency. An example is the steam engine, the result of successive trials of practical application. The scientific explanation would come later, and calculation would make it possible to obtain greater effectiveness and efficiency successively. Technology has its starting point in the power of the machine, but technology goes beyond the machine.
Rome is almost the opposite of Greece in the sense that there is no contemplation (theory), but rather an orientation toward technical order (practice). The Greek theoretical principles that rejected the machine were transformed into engineering in Rome. The abstract gives way to the concrete; science is not developed, but rather engineering, law, logistics, administration, etc. Even philosophy becomes pragmatic and oriented toward coping with living conditions, much less intellectually profound than in Greece. A civil and military order emerges. Politics is a technical social order, distinct from Greek politics, which was more oriented toward ethical deliberation about the polis. In Rome, there is an orientation toward concrete political situations; relations of necessity are transformed through administrative and judicial techniques, financial techniques, etc. A comprehensive set of regulations is constructed, leaving man bound to a system. Rome reifies society through the mechanization of normative and administrative processes, infiltrating all spheres of life.
A contemplative East has been perceived as fatalistic in the face of a cyclical destiny and resigned to the cosmic order, and a West that wants to conquer nature. However, this is more nuanced. The influence of the East through the eastern Mediterranean, or the rapid expansion of Islam towards the West, organized and based on an urban civilization with great technical and administrative production, are clear examples. With the collapse of Rome, technically organized society largely disappeared from all of Europe. In addition, Christianity did not have the state as its center of worship. We could add that Christianity, since its origins, has been "anti-capitalist" and "anti-technical," perhaps in a sense not so far removed from Greek prudence against hubris and the worship of different forms of power and material domination. However, it is also the Christian West, so often accused of obscurantism, that developed universities, hospitals, and the most diverse techniques (agricultural, architectural, naval, commercial...). That same archaic Christian West culminated in the knowledge and exploration of the entire world. In fact, "the period following the Renaissance and the Reformation is much less fruitful than the preceding one."
On the other hand, Christianity desacralizes nature. It eliminates fear of it. Nature is not divine, it is only material nature. It is not hidden gods, it is not animated or divine, but material and subject to material laws. Nature is a creation of God, who is transcendent. Christianity recognizes the material aspect of the world, paradoxically paving the way for the systematic technification of nature without fear of profaning the gods. On the other hand, while Greece and Rome saw slavery as something natural, Christianity opposed it by postulating that all human beings have dignity, regardless of their status, undermining its ontological and religious justification. Thus, it was in the Middle Ages that slavery gradually transformed into labor relations with rights. Technology was thus able to emerge from the need to create a new substitute driving force.
Christianity certainly represented a vision in Europe that was not that of a utilitarian ethic based on the will to power and wealth. Moral judgment was important in the Middle Ages, and for Christianity, what was just could not be valued for its usefulness (coincidentally, this utilitarian morality emerged on the eve of capitalism). On the contrary, Christianity condemns luxury, money, etc. Therefore, as in Greece, a technique must show more than its power, and cannot be developed by undermining other aspects of what is wise or just. A technique must be just, in this case before God. Techniques exist, but there is no systematic rationality based on them as a social direction. Thus, techniques of war are not developed, and existing wars do not have organizational logics based on rational calculation that would characterize "modern" wars.
For Ellul, it is with the development of humanist philosophy (man places himself at the center of the universe) and the modern authoritarian state that techniques develop exponentially, particularly in the 18th century. Thus, the development of economic techniques by physiocrats and liberals, military techniques with Napoleon, and state administration techniques through the accumulation of information about people in files, etc., took place. The naturalistic philosophy of the 18th century no longer sought so much to know as to exploit nature. Contrary to Greece, knowledge of nature had a utilitarian and practical purpose. Human problems were transformed into technical problems. Social issues were to be resolved through more mechanized, more efficient work, etc. This led to a purely mechanistic logic.
Technology is not a purely material process that evolves on its own, but has a basis in rationalization and the creation of normative processes. Specialization, division, norms, production standards, etc. There must also be a narrative, however, the narrative reduces the cognitive schemas of the population to the logical order of instruments. Everything must be measured, calculated, ordered, integrated into the activity of the circuit, etc. There must be a tear from nature towards artificiality. "In the 19th century, a technique was formed that was exclusively rational and obedient to efficiency." This contradicted life in society and deep collective and spiritual tendencies, etc. "Attempts have been made to introduce aesthetic and moral factors through the back door." Thus, for example, when it is noticed that the economic is not in line with the ethical, a pseudo-moral discourse is produced in order to sustain such economic technique and endow it with moral ends, which are of course non-existent, only techniques of language to prevent awareness of the technical end that is being pursued. That the bait of politics is narrative rationalization to prevent people from understanding what is happening is nothing more than life itself.
The breakdown of social groups will allow the enormous human migrations that, at the beginning of the 19th century, gave rise to the human concentration required by modern technology. This uproots people from their environment, from the countryside, from their relationships, from their families, and piles them into cities, says Ellul. In other words, it was necessary to uproot people from their natural relationships in order to put them at the service of the political project of the state, of industry, of the economy. "There is nothing but the state, which is fatally the supreme authority." Modern man is a misfit within a technical circuit. Technology eliminates any freedom of choice that individuals may have and destroys all elements of social life that conflict with the development of mechanization. This eliminates the meaning of life, reducing it to an organizational and productive technique. In doing so, it dehumanizes and engulfs the social and the individual. Man simply disappears, replaced by the procedural, organizational, productive, and narrative inertia generated by the technical structure.
The vision of materialistic, rational, and practical philosophers is not enough to explain the exponential development of technology. For Ellul, more factors are necessary: long technical experience, demographic pressure, the existence of an established economy, the emergence of society's technical intention, and social plasticity. There was a long incubation period for small inventions during the Middle Ages, which did not come to fruition and were even kept secret by religious orders, but which were the seeds for a later emergence when social conditions were conducive to the development of the technical end as a whole. Economic or political evolution does not condition technical progress. This progress is independent of social conditions. What happens is the reverse. Technology conditions and causes social, political, and economic changes. Technology is produced by its own internal needs.
Any non-technical activity is eliminated from the system. Technology destroys any other reason, way of life, and morality other than itself. The crushing of morality and religion gave free rein to the rational and technical exploitation of man, says Ellul. Technical progress is as much a function of bourgeois money as it is of the state, which came to the rescue of the bourgeoisie and mechanization during the popular uprisings, which were, in short, a threat to the technical project. The state and the bourgeoisie found themselves opposed to the masses who did not enjoy its benefits. "Marx rehabilitates technology in the eyes of the workers by asserting that technology is liberating." Thus, technology is saved, shifting the problem merely to the bourgeoisie. Later, the bourgeoisie would assert the same thing: the problem is not technology but the state.
This led to Marxist, socialist, and fascist projects. Marxism cannot prevent history from contradicting its theoretical assertions. "Fascism and Nazism are approaches derived from Marxism aimed at adapting man to his techniques." All of them are more closely related to each other than they would like. For Ellul, Hitler's methods come directly from Lenin's lessons, just as "Stalinism has also taken lessons in technique from Nazism." The left is as consumerist, dehumanizing, controlling, and objectifying as the "capitalist" ideology it accuses, if not more so. Obviously, neoliberalism and what we call "democracies" are not so far removed. The narrative difference is greater than the actual operational difference, even though there may be some systems that are indeed more efficient or allow for greater relative freedom that can be revoked at any time.
Technology is not merely a succession of inventions. Inventions and gadgets have always existed, but not technology as a social form, not technology as rational planning, one might say as a social engine, even destiny or teleology. The great Greek thinkers did not want a technical society, and many societies that developed techniques did not want such a society. Scientism has widely valued this as an "inferiority" of thought, a completely ordinary view. Societies have valued their social forms and cultural developments; sharing ways of relating to each other and a common meaning was their social form and their way of signifying and living life as a conscious experience. From scientific perspectives, it is assumed as self-evident that life must have a technical purpose, something that has already been shown without a doubt, even to those most brutalized by their idea of "progress" and "objectivity," as something obvious. Many societies simply did not want to embark on a mechanistic path to nowhere, thereby destroying their social form. Almost no one thought that technology was more important than people and the way of life in which each society coexisted. Laws and customs were not replaced with every mechanical gadget that was produced, nor was this seen as "progress." It is worth questioning whether, as scientific propaganda has developed, this is due to unsophisticated thinking, or whether it is rather modern thinking that has reached extraordinary levels of vulgarity and inability to self-reflect.
Man is no longer an agent who chooses, he is a subject subjected to the inertia of the technical apparatus that imposes its own rational logic of efficiency on him. Social issues are progressively becoming technical problems. Once human issues have been turned into technical problems, they can only be solved by producing more technology. Human beings simply disappear from life progressively. What are the laws and ends of this mechanistic order, apart from its own mechanistic inertia, like a donkey chasing a carrot? People, powerless in the face of mechanization, simply accept it, and their consciousness, submerged in technical society, is incapable of seeing anything else that would allow them to become aware. The Soviet Union exemplified the violence of the subjugation of the population to technical machinery even more than capitalism, which will be crushed by its own automatism, says Ellul. If human beings accept technology, then "they will be irretrievably subjected to technical slavery." Human beings could fight against technology by following a moral path, or by defending a way of life based on personal freedom, or simply by joining forces against the technological project. In that case, they will be eliminated by the very system they are fighting against. Old traditional civilizations collapse as soon as they come into contact with technology. "All the peoples of the world today live in a state of cultural disintegration." UNESCO has admitted that we contribute nothing to everything we are destroying. "Traditions become aware of their inferiority."
The idea most often used to rationalize the imposition of technology is that it is not technology itself that is bad, but rather the use that is made of it. However, technology produces its own rules that eliminate any use other than the strictly technical. Technology produces a technical use and a technical perception of things, which eliminate other perceptions and implications that are not technical in nature. The use made of technology is that of technical possibility, which is dictated by technology. Man does not decide on technology, and technology has no ends. There is no "good or bad use of public funds." The process of taxation tends toward economism and control that tends toward totality. There is no "good or bad use of the police." The police are in themselves a technique of control that will always involve both good and evil. Technique does not discover medicines, but it refuses to discover chemical weapons; it does not produce commercial aircraft, but it does not produce warplanes, etc. Technology "is necessarily used when it is available." Such is the main law of our time, says Ellul. On the other hand, there is a moral disinterest; something is only of concern if it is a technical issue. Nothing is important if it does not serve a material purpose.
The argument of "misuse" shifts the problem from technology to man. It would simply suffice for man to "be better." This implies that technology would be developed for moral rather than technical reasons, which is somewhat contradictory and uncertain. Technology does not support any kind of moral judgment; technology is technology, independent of moral judgment, and develops itself according to its own laws. Therefore, a technical morality is generated that is completely independent of any morality other than technical efficiency itself. But even perception, logic, morality, and human behavior are subject to the same dynamics of technology. Therefore, the argument of "misuse" is not exactly solid. "Wanting to subordinate the machine to the ideal is a childish endeavor." Technology is autonomous in relation to morality, and wanting to embellish it with a narrative that alludes to a sense of the good of humanity or to a subjectivism about the possibilities of use will not change anything. To make moral use of technology is to cease to make technical use of it, as the Greeks and Christians already saw.
Only man is subject to moral judgment. Technology is safe. Finally, a teleology of progress develops, practically as a moral good in itself, with which we look down on the rest of humanity. To say that the use of technology is bad is to say nothing, and it is to fail to describe technology properly in the first place. We find ourselves subject to blind phenomena that determine the fate of humanity, in a realm governed solely by material mechanism and technical imposition. This is perhaps the great myth of modernity, "the worst of modern mystifications."
The positivized legal structure comes into direct conflict with the law. The spontaneous social regulation that has evolved in different communities is supplanted by a technical legal framework that destroys the original law. The frameworks of coexistence created by different cultures are annihilated in contact with planned and organized legal technology. It is equipped with a technical apparatus and linked to the political and police administrative network for the total surveillance and control of all aspects of society. The idea of "order" replaces morality based on customary law, local customs and culture, or law derived from what is philosophically just or good as the foundation of positivized law. Since the state seeks order, the law is instrumentalized to this end, diverting it from its human purpose. Order is only efficiency, therefore mere technique. "Then law and police become confused, for law is no longer anything but an instrument of the state." A technical idea of the state as a whole is imposed. Man has sacrificed law and justice to efficiency. With law reduced to mere positivism at the service of the technical system itself, the technical project has no opposition. Law is nothing more than technical rules and a set of self-affirming judicial mechanisms. With this, law dissolves. The more technical the law becomes, the more it disappears, becoming the mere technical expression of the state, which becomes a mere self-imposed order. Law is what the state expresses, and conversely, there is no law to control the state. Law thus becomes a technique of the state for its own reproduction. Hand in hand with surveillance, coercion, punitiveness, collection through organized and highly rationalized confiscation, etc. It seeks its own effectiveness, which begins to be effectiveness in collection, effectiveness in surveillance, effectiveness in rationalization, effectiveness in punitiveness, etc. The machinery expands and infiltrates all areas of human life.
The "submission of law to politics," under the iron rule of the state that Hobbes already anticipated. The state is dedicated to protecting science "not out of a greatness of spirit for the sake of civilization, but out of an instinct for power." It is clear that science produces techniques that allow the state to improve its effectiveness by monitoring, controlling, and punishing. After the state, "it was the bourgeoisie that discovered the benefits that could be derived from a conscientiously developed technology." We see that what has always been at stake in power struggles is control over technology, because it is what allows domination over society. No one wants to seize the state and technology to liberate human beings, but to control them. A systematic struggle against all natural groups is unleashed. The individual must be isolated, alienated from the masses, in direct relation only to the state, with no other points of social connection. "There is no doubt that revolutionary legislation led to the destruction of the family," says Ellul. Like any other social fact, marriage also becomes technified, today reduced to little more than a legal formality. The destruction wrought cannot be repaired, says Ellul. Even divorce laws sought to break up societies, despite being sold under the rationalization of "freedom," a rationalization used systematically and therefore unsurprising. "In reality, we have an atomized society that will become increasingly so. The individual is the only sociological magnitude, but we realize that this, instead of guaranteeing freedom, leads to the worst kind of slavery." Reasoning, both moral and logical, becomes a dangerous mechanized empiricism. The ideal of comfort emerges as the moral ideal of society, and with it the subjugation of people to the society of technology as a legitimization of the ideology of "progress." In modern society, a climate of optimism arose, with "discoveries" seen as the solution to the hardships and dissatisfactions of life. "They believed that their research would result not only in happiness, but also in justice. This is where the myth of progress begins."
In short, technology satisfied everyone. The state's desire for power and social control, the bourgeoisie's desire to develop industry and make money, and individuals' desire to consume. Morality has ceased to matter to man "abandoned to himself." He is satisfied with consumption, and the rest are the same. He only wants technology to provide him with comfort and reduce all uncertainty in his life. Ironically, he seeks the same predictability that technology offers. Therefore, he will orient his morality toward simple comfort, affirming a technified life as good. I do not believe, as people like to claim about themselves, that "the common people" are innocent in all this.
TOTALITARIANISM: THE INEVITABLE END OF TECHNOLOGY Technology creates an aristocracy of technicians that makes human beings impenetrable. It is simply incompatible with democracy; it destroys it by necessity, says Ellul. When technology develops, it ceases to be an object of man, and it is man who becomes an object for technology. Technology is at the center of civilization and marks the destiny of humanity. "Technology cannot be anything other than totalitarian." The state is a technology and, as such, moves toward technical control of the entire social structure. Rationalization becomes doctrine in the 19th century; everything is calculation, control, order. "Police techniques, which are developing at an extremely rapid pace, have as their necessary goal the transformation of the entire nation into a concentration camp." A visionary, Ellul, says "...that everyone be watched, that we know exactly what every citizen is doing, their relationships, their habits, their distractions, and it is increasingly possible to know this." Both the state and the police are techniques that evolve towards technical development, which means that technical development ends with total control of everything. Police and administrative techniques function as much as communications and military techniques. Administration, education, labor... everything is part of the same technical activity coordinated for the control of everything. It is "pure technique" that becomes the social model, dominating everything, including human relations. The technical state of things becomes normalized. Citizens become accustomed to being watched and punished. Brutality is not necessary; on the contrary, brutality implies an underdeveloped state of technique.
Otto Von Bismarck was the first to see the advantage of making people beneficiaries of the state. The origin of social security and the "welfare" state has an authoritarian, right-wing origin, with the explicit aim of creating a dependence of people on the state in order to control society. The state will not be satisfied with half-hearted progress in its project, says Ellul. It will never leave any space that it does not control, monitor, organize, and execute, and its evolution is toward the control and prediction of everything that happens. It is not that the state has or does not have the will to intervene more or less, as so many liberals say; it is that it is impossible for it to be otherwise, since the state is nothing more than a technique of intervention. Once we enter the age of technology, the state emerges as a machine to the end. On the other hand, so-called "neoliberalism" does not pursue any freedom or liberation. This view is strikingly clumsy. If oligarchic functioning exists, it is for technical reasons; it is simply more efficient than a rigidly state-controlled system. The birth of the technical state means that capital ceases to be important. "An economy based entirely on technology cannot be a liberal economy." It is surprising that so few authors have realized something so obvious, which implies that most economists, political philosophers, etc., do not understand the dynamics of systems very well.
Technology is not economistic; it does not seek mere profitability, as much of the left continues to believe. Technology imposes its efficiency. The technical state "no longer considers profitability as the ultimate value." In the conflict between economics and technology, it is technology that has subjected economics to its dictates. This implies the de facto elimination of liberalism. The system needs control. Rational, logical evolution is not a dialectical evolution. There is a positivization of what is effective and efficient, which exterminates the possibility of any other position. Technology functions simply by self-affirmation. Ultimately, the whole of society ends up in a technical plan, with population control, demographic control, migration control, etc. This plan is purely technical, independent of the form of government or ideology with which it may be dressed up. There is no government, no ruler, only technology. There is no ideology, except as a mere narrative fantasy to mislead the population about the technical engineering that subjugates them. As the economy becomes more technical, it ceases to be a human action and becomes a process that is automated in parallel with technology. No one decides anything; investment is mechanically directed toward technical development. What is progressively organized is no longer the production of the company, but the entire system: production, consumption, the price of money, demographics themselves, etc. The only ideology is the effectiveness of the state through its military, police, administrative, and propaganda techniques, etc. Calculation becomes morality and destiny. "The ideal of all governments is to promote industrialization and technical servitude as much as possible." Feudalism gave way to the authoritarian state, and from there to the current technical state of surveillance and forensic control. A scientific fascism, a social engineering whose danger lies precisely in its high degree of technical development.
The planned economy has made it very difficult to separate the political from the economic, says Ellul. It is not the economy but technology that is at the basis of Marxism. In fact, the economy necessarily arises from technology. There is no economy without technology. It is the technical process that drives the entire contemporary economy. Technical innovation is indispensable to the investment process. Ideas and theories do not dominate, but rather the power of production. Technification implies a concentration of power and finance. In 1920, there were 30,000 banks in the United States, linked to communities and cooperatives. Today, most of them have disappeared, and only a few large banks concentrate most of the finances. We are not evolving towards a free market capitalism, but towards planned control of all technology and all investment. The system of political and economic technology is necessarily evolving towards a planned dictatorship, precisely in order to eliminate delocalized capitalist unpredictability and human uncertainty. It clearly lacks the necessary direction of positivization and control. The plan is only "the constant search for the most efficient use of mechanical means, natural resources, and available forces. It is a matter of organizing, coordinating, and subjecting them to rules so that each instrument provides maximum performance."
The economy also becomes technified (until it is digitized and becomes an administrative process of operational control of social credit, which is exactly where we are today). The law of supply and demand is also subject to the technical process of production. Can we really believe that if public opinion wants cakes, planning will be geared towards that? Sauvy already realized that the economy does not satisfy the consumer. Rather, the process is positivized and the decision becomes the goal that the producer wants to impose. However, for Ellul, there is no mere will of the producer coming out of nowhere. What is produced is what technology dictates, which is exactly what the technified society demands to consume. The next thing that can be produced will be determined in the mechanistic sense of effectiveness and/or efficiency, reduced to the utilitarianism of technology. The entire process of supply and demand is reified at the dictates of technology. There is no free supply and demand, but rather the same process of organizational technification that reifies the entire process. In 1931, the International Labor Organization itself said, "Not only manufacturing must be rationalized, but also the relations between employers and employees." Unionism was created, a wild card for the system to ensure that criticism was merely requests for economic improvements or greater comfort, but not criticism of the system itself, nor a pursuit of what is good, true, or just. That was the end of it. And so it developed into the company psychologist, not out of human interest, but out of technical strategy. The technical state is not content with producing, but accumulates data and records, organizes capital, organizes consumption, organizes the legal system, organizes administration, organizes even demographics, etc. All data since the state stored the first file on a stone wedge is directed toward totalitarianism. The average person today is subject to constant individual forensic analysis that would make the CSI of the early 2000s pale in comparison. It is not that software companies are spying on us, but that a technical and legal architecture has been created for this purpose. The state benefits from the data that these companies, acting as proxies, collect for it.
The technical economy is fatally anti-democratic. In a technical system, talking about collective ownership is as elusive as talking about democracy. Even if it were possible, it would follow technical logic, or it would be left out of the social mechanism. However, this implies a state of disorganization that makes technology inefficient, which means that it cannot prosper. "Everything that technology gains, democracy loses." The greater or lesser degree of democracy and the greater or lesser degree of socialization of the distribution of production are nothing more than necessities for the reproduction of the system. The essence of democracy is choice, which implies the opposite of standardization and technical mechanization. As this increases, the ability to choose, even to think, inevitably decreases.
The individual freedom we talk about in our "democracies" is the same as that envisioned by Goebbels: "You can seek your path to salvation as you wish, provided that it does not change the social order." In other words, systems grant freedom in everything that does not threaten the system. Technology is socialization and rationalization. It produces behavior and thought. A mass in a state of hypnosis does not produce democracy, and if democracy is justified by the mere adherence of the people, many totalitarian regimes could use the same fallacy of claiming to have the support of the majority and of democracy. No politician makes policy. Policy is made by itself, through the set of techniques. Changes in life are technical changes, which follow technical laws and technical logic, regardless of what politicians want to say or stage. Democratic planning implies the "astonishing theory that enlightened public opinion has the power to guide the decisions of planners." It will then be said that people do not know what they need, and technical planning will be reinstated. The power of the state is the inevitable force for planning all industrial activity, demographics, resources, the economy, politics... everything in the same direction dictated by technology.
The individual, collectivized and positivized, can only contemplate the steamroller of technical mechanism that devours everything around them. Man's own needs simply tend toward the plan." Promethean society must exclude chance and all uncertainty, until life is completely positivized. Administration and organizational technique are historically coercive and based on violence, and their progress is only the expansion of the same framework of evolution of coercive techniques, coupled with more effective predictive techniques. An absolute monarch did not reach the degree of absolutism that any modern state has achieved, no matter how much legend the modern state tries to tell. For Ellul, political technique developed above all with Lenin. Language ceases to be a symbolic act of communication; it becomes reified and turns into a language with a high operational load. The state penetrates transportation, education, the press, etc. Techniques gradually transform private space into state-controlled space, even if it is a large private society. The more techniques the state accumulates, whether in the direct sense of ownership and organizational control or through more subtle forms of legal, bureaucratic, etc. control, the more its power increases. The state never gives back anything it takes. It has only one direction of expansion, the end of which is everything. No one can escape this logic.
It becomes impossible to speak and communicate; everything is judged according to a logic of technical utility. Books, even music, are censored by money and/or the state. Human appreciation of any aspect of the social world is reified into statistics. Dissenting opinion is eliminated from the language system through propaganda and discourse control techniques. The technical system proceeds by a positivism that excludes its negations. Education and universities are also subject to the same technical system, reduced to an institutionalization of knowledge divided into compartments, which produces a scheme that directs thought by constricting the capacity for broad reasoning. The mass movement itself is univocal and anti-dialectical. Any empirical or symbolic "diversity" works within the technical process, contributing to the development of the system. The content of the media is equally technical, social engineering, propaganda tactics. It has the technical purpose of breaking the ability to become aware of anything other than the propaganda that must be delivered through technical means. Where Google ends and the US military intelligence services begin is a line that probably does not even exist. Anyone who has not understood this aspect simply does not understand the world in which they live.
The state did not create hospitals, medicine, drugs, social security, or education. The state expropriated them and appropriated their knowledge. The state can take over an organization, but "this fact does not change the technique" or its origin. Public and private companies are subject to the same technical laws. So-called "socialism" is nothing more than a Taylorist technique that has stripped it of all theoretical content. The fact that the state appropriates things does not produce anything new. If the state displaces the capitalists, no commune of goods is produced, but simply a state capitalism with a single capitalist, without changing anything with regard to the technical project. The difference between what the worker produces and the wage paid has been more evident in Russia than anywhere else, except that this profit, which they claimed to want to resolve, went to the state. That the modern state is nothing more than a technique for extracting value through calculated and planned inflationary engineering is obvious to anyone with a minimum knowledge of economics.
"The machine has conquered the brain and heart of the average man, of the masses." Technology has always existed as a tradition, evolving under the pressure of circumstances. For Fourastié, "technical progress is the increase in the volume of production obtained from a fixed amount of raw materials or human labor." The boundary between the technical and the scientific is unclear. Technology is the application of science, the point of contact between material reality and speculation, the hidden, the underlying. It can be questioned, however, whether the application of technical criteria is the same as science. It is general theories that produce a scientific spirit. Scientific knowledge itself is adulterated by technology. "The state mobilizes all technicians and scholars by imposing a goal on them." Thus, the scientist is no longer a wise man, but rather someone surrounded by techniques and materials. If technique precedes science, science has ultimately become a means at the service of technique. A scientific utilitarianism under which no disinterested research can take place, "under an implicit will to optimism." Science no longer wants to know, it wants to administer, control, predict, subjugate. Science that promotes knowledge, and not technology, does not allow domination and its violent self-imposition. Therefore, what science pursues is far from the ideals of objective knowledge, or the search for virtuous knowledge, which scientismists seek to sell. "We are currently in the phase of historical evolution that eliminates everything that is not technical."
Kierkegaard made a criticism of this at the beginning of the 19th century, but it went unheard. He spoke of objective knowledge, dehumanized calculation that knows nothing, reliance on the masses to reject responsibility and the construction of meaning, forming a reified and reifying social spirit that detaches itself from the good. Although he wants to dialectically oppose Marx to the bourgeois liberal, in reality Kierkegaard is the most obvious opposite, although little has been said about this. Marx places the social basis in the material, the collective, the economic, the historical, the objective. He represents the reifying process of technology mentioned by Ellul. For Kierkegaard, life is on the opposite plane, the singular plane of the person, the interior, lived experience. Socializing mechanization mutilates the human aspect of existence by imposing a mechanics of processes. This is why he is considered the father of existentialism, which would later be taken up by Sartre and others in an attempt to save the left from the ashes of its own mechanistic project. It was not until World War I that alarm bells rang about the ideology of technology and the logic of instrumental rationality in modern states, in the name of "progress" and "science." Both capitalist systems and socialist systems of the left and right developed the same technical deployment of the state. At that time, philosophers of the left and right began to wonder whether the materialist project of modernity had not become the most dangerous political experiment of all. "It is not the frontier of science that is at stake today, but the frontier of man."
Although techniques have existed in every society for thousands of years, there was no systematic application of them. Technique functioned at the service of each culture, not the other way around. Ellul defines technique above all by its rationalization and systematization, not by the empirical existence of an invention. The distinction between the concepts of technique and technology is often presented in common discourse as an opposition between traditional practical tools and modern scientific applications. However, for Ellul, there is no break between the two, but rather a single continuous process, an evolution towards greater automation, rationalization, systematization, industrialization, scientific calculation, etc. Societies and cultures are swallowed up by the development of the technical program. All social and cultural forms are progressively becoming a technical and administrative system, like an assembly line. Today's techno-science society is built on a massive surveillance system that allows data to be extracted for the purpose of absolute prediction and planning of society. Technology today makes possible what Stalin and Hitler could only dream of.
It seems that the history of modern life is that of man who locks himself into his own technology and becomes trapped by it. Perhaps the most useful way to understand the state and power is through game theory, evolutionary biology, or theoretical frameworks such as Luhmann's systems. That is, adaptive phenotypes of organization that follow strategies of survival and competitive advantage over other systems. The point is that it is not social systems that seek what is fair, true, or good that prevail, but merely the most effective systems of technical production and social organization. The mistake most people make is to add an ideological narrative filter to what is pure strategic technique in the most mechanical sense. A verbal world is manufactured for man so that he cannot see the real world in which he lives. If the problem we face is not left-right, then criticism cannot be left-right either. There can be no criticism that does not start from a dialectic that rejects the mechanistic project itself.
The technical system makes social problems appear as simple technical problems. A civilization is considered as such according to the degree of technology it has achieved. Countries are compared in a technical and economic scheme with measures such as GDP, etc. Things such as the wisdom of people, the preservation of social and cultural forms, freedom, justice, etc. are not compared. When attempts are made to do so, they are done in adulterated forms, taking justice as a mere distribution of GDP, etc. Morality becomes a matter of legal technique, economic distribution, social maladjustment is perceived as a mere lack of money, etc. This form of mechanical "objectivity" becomes ontological substance, destroying not only forms of social coexistence, ethics, or personal freedom, but also the very capacity to reason. The concept of poverty is assigned to any society that does not meet the level of technification set by Western countries. The solution to poverty is, of course, technocratic and economic. The fact that the devastation of traditional social forms has in fact been produced by their own process of Westernization is completely out of mind. It is precisely those who are "sensitive to causes" who have the most ethnocentric views. That is why they are most useful to the system, and the system invests a lot of money in promoting certain versions of poverty or "social justice." It is a form of intellectual colonialism.
In the current phase, technical power imposes the dissolution of organic social forms (at this moment, the nation-state in a phase of decomposition). The global technical apparatus cannot be fully deployed if there are local structures that hinder systemic functional interoperability. The administration of populations is far from spontaneous, being driven by this operational logic. Bauman exposed how globalization dissociates power and politics, Foucault showed that there are no longer populations or people, but rather an operation that manages biological flows (migration, reproduction, etc.) under criteria of technical utility. Biopolitics, in this sense, is the final phase of instrumental rationality: there are no longer people, but operable flows. It is well known that a minimum degree of homogeneity is necessary for existence as a real political unit (Carl Schmitt) and for coexistence (Durkheim), so that opposing dynamics represent a project to dissolve political unity.
The problem with morality is that it requires wisdom and not just superficial empathy with immediate appearances. Technology is universalizing through an empirical steamroller. It is not surprising that it is the institutions of the state themselves that disseminate universalizing morality: egalitarian, multicultural, etc. Justice is "egalitarian" submission to the project of dismemberment. The modern mind is a caricature that has run its course. One of the best ways to understand what intelligence is is as the ability to understand what underlies the apparent. This is perfectly understood when studying the ontogenetic development of the child's intellect, which must learn to renounce the sensory and immediate in order to reason (conservation, etc.). The system seems to be a game theory dynamic in which the society that adopts the technical phenotype devours everything it comes into contact with. It is useless to educate the people, says Ellul.
People tend to find one politician or another more unlikable, but they do not reject the technical state as such. First, because they do not understand it, given that the human mind merely reproduces the technical scheme in which the person lives. Second, because this same State has created technical means that make their state of annulment tolerable, sedating the nervous system through audiovisual entertainment techniques, the availability of sugary products, the prescription of anxiolytics and antidepressants, etc. While people's lives pass by watching the clock and performing tasks in a mechanized way, they sedate their nervous system with audiovisual gadgets, palatable food, drugs, etc. In my view, people are not innocent in all this. They have betrayed their being, simply for the sake of receiving, whether under a consciousness of free capitalism or with the crude excuse of egalitarianism.
The modern rebel with colorful hair spouts the pre-cooked speeches that the system's propaganda techniques have prepared for them to control their disenchantment. Like the normalized egosyntonic person, the egodystonic "rebel" is another product of the system's techniques. Propaganda "must produce individuals who are particularly suggestible and easily set in motion." The broken toy of society feels the need to scream, but does not know that it is incapable of articulating anything coherent in its mind. It is easy to create resentment in people who are frustrated with their lives. "This strengthens their belief in their own right," Hitler commented.
Life is an enormous process of mechanical conditioning and operational coercion, coupled with an enormous mechanism of symbolic dissemination and language that organizes thought patterns. The illusion of free will and the illusion of free thought contrast with the flooding of that same consciousness with the technical production of symbols, logical patterns, narratives, and behavioral coercions produced by the system. This debate between the "infrastructural" and the "superstructural" has been ongoing since Marxism. Gramsci sought to dissociate them, but the fact is that there is no dissociation. Both factors are decisive in conditioning people's thinking, one from the procedural side, the other from the symbolic side (which can nevertheless be seen as a system of narrative production). Both systems push in the same direction, the empirical organizing coercion from operational processes that generate behavior, the other organizing patterns of perception and thought.
The origins of technology are more complex than the simple narrative that has been constructed, for better or for worse. We must remember that between the 16th and 18th centuries, many of the most prosperous regions were part of the Spanish Empire: Seville, Mexico City, Lima, Potosí, Manila, etc. That backward Christian Spain laid the foundations of the modern economy before Adam Smith, as well as universal human rights (School of Salamanca). What should perhaps be put on the table is that these economic, cultural, and political centers did not want to place themselves at the service of a relentless instrumental rationality at the expense of their cultural, social, and moral heritage. It is worth reflecting on whether, deep down, what is being criticized about Spain is the fact that it did not dominate economies, markets, technologies, etc., with a greater instrumental will than other countries would later have. Although there has been an interest in constructing a technical and economic narrative of simple "backwardness," the Christian morality of the Hispanic world did not see wealth as a sign of divine election, but rather, like the Greeks, as a moral problem.
Our society is ultimately the violent imposition of a logic of technical efficiency over everything else. It is the same technical efficiency whose end is the elimination of the human being itself. Ironically, this is the consequence whether the technical project goes wrong (systemic catastrophes produced by technical power) or goes right, in which case the technical state has total control over everything and the human being ceases to be human to become a mere nanotechnological means of support for a centralized consciousness. In both cases, human beings disappear under the same force of technology. Transhumanism is nothing more than the efficient human being, but this would be a brief transition because the human body is actually a hindrance to the material processing of information. The machine can live throughout the universe without biological limitations; it will be the machine that ultimately grows and multiplies. If one of these biological technologies does not extinguish us first, scientists will have achieved their dream of predictive control over everything. Human life involves uncertainty, but intolerance to uncertainty produces the controlling psychosis that underlies Ellul's work.
"Freedom is nothing more than obedience to technical necessity." Jacques Ellul.
TECHNOLOGY
No social, human, or spiritual fact has as much importance in the modern world as technology, says Ellul. And yet, there is no other less understood. Even among sociologists, political science professors, economists, philosophers, not to mention psychologists, despite the fact that all of them ultimately seek to understand and predict the causes of human behavior in society. In recent centuries, technology has been the central axis of behavior in societies, progressively displacing other causes of behavior, such as morality, symbolism, culture, individuality, etc. Not only is there a displacement, but all of these causes are being transformed into technology. Human communication, symbolism, is becoming technologized (institutionalization, marketing, propaganda, persuasion, rationalization, etc.). Thus, communication between people is progressively becoming communication about work techniques, about technified consumer "tastes," etc. Morality is transformed into law, coercion produced by legal techniques at the service of the technical project of modern societies that drives social direction toward its ends. Politics is progressively administrative and police-like, with very few real differences between what one politician does and another. Leisure is transformed into a series of audiovisual and consumer techniques, etc. What we might call cultural is nothing more than the sum of all this in reality, and is therefore ultimately another technified process.All human and social processes are refined by a progressive process of technification. Human behavior, life in society, and human thought itself are being transformed into a system of processes. No area escapes technology. Thus, there is a technique of warfare, as well as a technique of shaving. More recently, coaches talk about techniques for picking up women, and there are videos that reach the point of absurdity (number of glasses of water per day, the correct order to eat a salad, the angle for efficient evacuation in the toilet, or breathing techniques to combat climate eco-anxiety).
Technology seeks what is effective, thereby spreading the same law of effectiveness everywhere. The more technology is applied, the more rational and effective it becomes. The more rational and effective it is, the more technology is needed. Every aspect of social life thus becomes a technical issue. Technology thus imposes itself by producing what is effective and efficient. However, the effectiveness of the technical does not produce wisdom, prudence, humanity, morality, or virtue. The path of effectiveness displaces other possibilities, imposing technology with violence under the "objectivity" of effectiveness, which is taken for "science," and with it even moral law, reduced to mechanistic effectiveness. This is the purest scientific brutality, mechanistic thought patterns conditioned at the level of the spinal reflex arc. The mental constriction of the scientist, which prevents him from seeing anything else, is taken for intelligence. It is clear that the system has created the concepts of "education" and "intelligence" that are useful to the system itself for its production and reproduction. For Ellul, "the cause lies in the bias of the scientific spirit." Technology is directed toward performance, toward the efficiency of processes, not toward developing the range of possibilities and knowledge of the various aspects necessary to improve human life. Technology follows a simple criterion of mechanistic efficiency. Any kind of reflection that goes beyond the framework of technification is completely irrelevant in this society. The wisest people in society have become completely irrelevant given the technicized expectations of thought in all spheres.
DEVELOPMENT OF TECHNOLOGY
Primitive man was knowledgeable about various techniques, which is why he preceded science. Hellenic civilization received techniques from the East (for example, in economics and accounting, metallurgy, construction, navigation, medicine, etc.). Techniques were therefore not derived from Greek science, as the Western narrative has maintained. Techniques were developed empirically, practically, and cumulatively, solely because of their effectiveness, not because of the development of abstract scientific models developed rationally in Greece. Therefore, the relationship between science and technology must be reversed in its genesis. The Greeks actually separated science and technology. Classical Greece considered technology (techné) to be an inferior activity, linked to manual labor, to the world of crafts, and therefore alien to the ideal of pure knowledge or philosophical contemplation. Greek science, especially since Plato and Aristotle, sought the theoretical, the universal, the necessary, while technology dealt with the contingent, the material, and the concrete. One could cite the example of Archimedes, but his legacy is not technical manuals for building contraptions, nor was his goal technical or utilitarian, but rather to demonstrate theoretical principles, validate mathematical calculations, show a law, etc. Once built to demonstrate the accuracy of the calculation, the machine is destroyed.Hybris is present in Greek ethics and is rejected by authors such as Aristotle. By producing a power of domination, technology corrupts and distances human beings from wisdom (sophrosyne, moderation) and virtue. For this reason, technical power is suspect, because it points to a desire for domination that is not produced by virtue or moral reflection, but by naked efficiency, arrogance, and vanity (hubris, megalopsychía) or even the intrinsic violence of the instrumentalization of brute domination.
We see that in Greece there is no religious superstition, no primitive irrational fear of the unknown, nor ignorance stemming from an inability to think. The mythology of modernity has attempted to create a pseudo-dialectic belief/science in which the former represents the superstitious, unintelligent man, and the latter the rational, intelligent man. The scientistic propaganda of modern society has attempted to create this dialectic, creating its own Greek mythology in the process. Greek reflection was, in fact, broader and deeper than that of the modern scientist. It included logic, but also wisdom, moderation, ethics, virtue, the search for truth, etc., and not just technical development. The Greeks were aware of the brutalization that material science could lead to.
There is no epistemic cut-off point in humanity, as claimed by scientism, at which "true" knowledge begins with abstract reason, the logical-mathematical model, methodical observation, etc. However, technology will not reach its full development until science intervenes, rationalizing it, systematizing it, calculating its effectiveness and efficiency. An example is the steam engine, the result of successive trials of practical application. The scientific explanation would come later, and calculation would make it possible to obtain greater effectiveness and efficiency successively. Technology has its starting point in the power of the machine, but technology goes beyond the machine.
Rome is almost the opposite of Greece in the sense that there is no contemplation (theory), but rather an orientation toward technical order (practice). The Greek theoretical principles that rejected the machine were transformed into engineering in Rome. The abstract gives way to the concrete; science is not developed, but rather engineering, law, logistics, administration, etc. Even philosophy becomes pragmatic and oriented toward coping with living conditions, much less intellectually profound than in Greece. A civil and military order emerges. Politics is a technical social order, distinct from Greek politics, which was more oriented toward ethical deliberation about the polis. In Rome, there is an orientation toward concrete political situations; relations of necessity are transformed through administrative and judicial techniques, financial techniques, etc. A comprehensive set of regulations is constructed, leaving man bound to a system. Rome reifies society through the mechanization of normative and administrative processes, infiltrating all spheres of life.
A contemplative East has been perceived as fatalistic in the face of a cyclical destiny and resigned to the cosmic order, and a West that wants to conquer nature. However, this is more nuanced. The influence of the East through the eastern Mediterranean, or the rapid expansion of Islam towards the West, organized and based on an urban civilization with great technical and administrative production, are clear examples. With the collapse of Rome, technically organized society largely disappeared from all of Europe. In addition, Christianity did not have the state as its center of worship. We could add that Christianity, since its origins, has been "anti-capitalist" and "anti-technical," perhaps in a sense not so far removed from Greek prudence against hubris and the worship of different forms of power and material domination. However, it is also the Christian West, so often accused of obscurantism, that developed universities, hospitals, and the most diverse techniques (agricultural, architectural, naval, commercial...). That same archaic Christian West culminated in the knowledge and exploration of the entire world. In fact, "the period following the Renaissance and the Reformation is much less fruitful than the preceding one."
On the other hand, Christianity desacralizes nature. It eliminates fear of it. Nature is not divine, it is only material nature. It is not hidden gods, it is not animated or divine, but material and subject to material laws. Nature is a creation of God, who is transcendent. Christianity recognizes the material aspect of the world, paradoxically paving the way for the systematic technification of nature without fear of profaning the gods. On the other hand, while Greece and Rome saw slavery as something natural, Christianity opposed it by postulating that all human beings have dignity, regardless of their status, undermining its ontological and religious justification. Thus, it was in the Middle Ages that slavery gradually transformed into labor relations with rights. Technology was thus able to emerge from the need to create a new substitute driving force.
Christianity certainly represented a vision in Europe that was not that of a utilitarian ethic based on the will to power and wealth. Moral judgment was important in the Middle Ages, and for Christianity, what was just could not be valued for its usefulness (coincidentally, this utilitarian morality emerged on the eve of capitalism). On the contrary, Christianity condemns luxury, money, etc. Therefore, as in Greece, a technique must show more than its power, and cannot be developed by undermining other aspects of what is wise or just. A technique must be just, in this case before God. Techniques exist, but there is no systematic rationality based on them as a social direction. Thus, techniques of war are not developed, and existing wars do not have organizational logics based on rational calculation that would characterize "modern" wars.
For Ellul, it is with the development of humanist philosophy (man places himself at the center of the universe) and the modern authoritarian state that techniques develop exponentially, particularly in the 18th century. Thus, the development of economic techniques by physiocrats and liberals, military techniques with Napoleon, and state administration techniques through the accumulation of information about people in files, etc., took place. The naturalistic philosophy of the 18th century no longer sought so much to know as to exploit nature. Contrary to Greece, knowledge of nature had a utilitarian and practical purpose. Human problems were transformed into technical problems. Social issues were to be resolved through more mechanized, more efficient work, etc. This led to a purely mechanistic logic.
Technology is not a purely material process that evolves on its own, but has a basis in rationalization and the creation of normative processes. Specialization, division, norms, production standards, etc. There must also be a narrative, however, the narrative reduces the cognitive schemas of the population to the logical order of instruments. Everything must be measured, calculated, ordered, integrated into the activity of the circuit, etc. There must be a tear from nature towards artificiality. "In the 19th century, a technique was formed that was exclusively rational and obedient to efficiency." This contradicted life in society and deep collective and spiritual tendencies, etc. "Attempts have been made to introduce aesthetic and moral factors through the back door." Thus, for example, when it is noticed that the economic is not in line with the ethical, a pseudo-moral discourse is produced in order to sustain such economic technique and endow it with moral ends, which are of course non-existent, only techniques of language to prevent awareness of the technical end that is being pursued. That the bait of politics is narrative rationalization to prevent people from understanding what is happening is nothing more than life itself.
The breakdown of social groups will allow the enormous human migrations that, at the beginning of the 19th century, gave rise to the human concentration required by modern technology. This uproots people from their environment, from the countryside, from their relationships, from their families, and piles them into cities, says Ellul. In other words, it was necessary to uproot people from their natural relationships in order to put them at the service of the political project of the state, of industry, of the economy. "There is nothing but the state, which is fatally the supreme authority." Modern man is a misfit within a technical circuit. Technology eliminates any freedom of choice that individuals may have and destroys all elements of social life that conflict with the development of mechanization. This eliminates the meaning of life, reducing it to an organizational and productive technique. In doing so, it dehumanizes and engulfs the social and the individual. Man simply disappears, replaced by the procedural, organizational, productive, and narrative inertia generated by the technical structure.
The vision of materialistic, rational, and practical philosophers is not enough to explain the exponential development of technology. For Ellul, more factors are necessary: long technical experience, demographic pressure, the existence of an established economy, the emergence of society's technical intention, and social plasticity. There was a long incubation period for small inventions during the Middle Ages, which did not come to fruition and were even kept secret by religious orders, but which were the seeds for a later emergence when social conditions were conducive to the development of the technical end as a whole. Economic or political evolution does not condition technical progress. This progress is independent of social conditions. What happens is the reverse. Technology conditions and causes social, political, and economic changes. Technology is produced by its own internal needs.
Any non-technical activity is eliminated from the system. Technology destroys any other reason, way of life, and morality other than itself. The crushing of morality and religion gave free rein to the rational and technical exploitation of man, says Ellul. Technical progress is as much a function of bourgeois money as it is of the state, which came to the rescue of the bourgeoisie and mechanization during the popular uprisings, which were, in short, a threat to the technical project. The state and the bourgeoisie found themselves opposed to the masses who did not enjoy its benefits. "Marx rehabilitates technology in the eyes of the workers by asserting that technology is liberating." Thus, technology is saved, shifting the problem merely to the bourgeoisie. Later, the bourgeoisie would assert the same thing: the problem is not technology but the state.
This led to Marxist, socialist, and fascist projects. Marxism cannot prevent history from contradicting its theoretical assertions. "Fascism and Nazism are approaches derived from Marxism aimed at adapting man to his techniques." All of them are more closely related to each other than they would like. For Ellul, Hitler's methods come directly from Lenin's lessons, just as "Stalinism has also taken lessons in technique from Nazism." The left is as consumerist, dehumanizing, controlling, and objectifying as the "capitalist" ideology it accuses, if not more so. Obviously, neoliberalism and what we call "democracies" are not so far removed. The narrative difference is greater than the actual operational difference, even though there may be some systems that are indeed more efficient or allow for greater relative freedom that can be revoked at any time.
Technology is not merely a succession of inventions. Inventions and gadgets have always existed, but not technology as a social form, not technology as rational planning, one might say as a social engine, even destiny or teleology. The great Greek thinkers did not want a technical society, and many societies that developed techniques did not want such a society. Scientism has widely valued this as an "inferiority" of thought, a completely ordinary view. Societies have valued their social forms and cultural developments; sharing ways of relating to each other and a common meaning was their social form and their way of signifying and living life as a conscious experience. From scientific perspectives, it is assumed as self-evident that life must have a technical purpose, something that has already been shown without a doubt, even to those most brutalized by their idea of "progress" and "objectivity," as something obvious. Many societies simply did not want to embark on a mechanistic path to nowhere, thereby destroying their social form. Almost no one thought that technology was more important than people and the way of life in which each society coexisted. Laws and customs were not replaced with every mechanical gadget that was produced, nor was this seen as "progress." It is worth questioning whether, as scientific propaganda has developed, this is due to unsophisticated thinking, or whether it is rather modern thinking that has reached extraordinary levels of vulgarity and inability to self-reflect.
Man is no longer an agent who chooses, he is a subject subjected to the inertia of the technical apparatus that imposes its own rational logic of efficiency on him. Social issues are progressively becoming technical problems. Once human issues have been turned into technical problems, they can only be solved by producing more technology. Human beings simply disappear from life progressively. What are the laws and ends of this mechanistic order, apart from its own mechanistic inertia, like a donkey chasing a carrot? People, powerless in the face of mechanization, simply accept it, and their consciousness, submerged in technical society, is incapable of seeing anything else that would allow them to become aware. The Soviet Union exemplified the violence of the subjugation of the population to technical machinery even more than capitalism, which will be crushed by its own automatism, says Ellul. If human beings accept technology, then "they will be irretrievably subjected to technical slavery." Human beings could fight against technology by following a moral path, or by defending a way of life based on personal freedom, or simply by joining forces against the technological project. In that case, they will be eliminated by the very system they are fighting against. Old traditional civilizations collapse as soon as they come into contact with technology. "All the peoples of the world today live in a state of cultural disintegration." UNESCO has admitted that we contribute nothing to everything we are destroying. "Traditions become aware of their inferiority."
TECHNOLOGY, LAW, AND MORALITY
"The technological phenomenon cannot be dissociated in such a way that we keep what is good and discard what is bad."The idea most often used to rationalize the imposition of technology is that it is not technology itself that is bad, but rather the use that is made of it. However, technology produces its own rules that eliminate any use other than the strictly technical. Technology produces a technical use and a technical perception of things, which eliminate other perceptions and implications that are not technical in nature. The use made of technology is that of technical possibility, which is dictated by technology. Man does not decide on technology, and technology has no ends. There is no "good or bad use of public funds." The process of taxation tends toward economism and control that tends toward totality. There is no "good or bad use of the police." The police are in themselves a technique of control that will always involve both good and evil. Technique does not discover medicines, but it refuses to discover chemical weapons; it does not produce commercial aircraft, but it does not produce warplanes, etc. Technology "is necessarily used when it is available." Such is the main law of our time, says Ellul. On the other hand, there is a moral disinterest; something is only of concern if it is a technical issue. Nothing is important if it does not serve a material purpose.
The argument of "misuse" shifts the problem from technology to man. It would simply suffice for man to "be better." This implies that technology would be developed for moral rather than technical reasons, which is somewhat contradictory and uncertain. Technology does not support any kind of moral judgment; technology is technology, independent of moral judgment, and develops itself according to its own laws. Therefore, a technical morality is generated that is completely independent of any morality other than technical efficiency itself. But even perception, logic, morality, and human behavior are subject to the same dynamics of technology. Therefore, the argument of "misuse" is not exactly solid. "Wanting to subordinate the machine to the ideal is a childish endeavor." Technology is autonomous in relation to morality, and wanting to embellish it with a narrative that alludes to a sense of the good of humanity or to a subjectivism about the possibilities of use will not change anything. To make moral use of technology is to cease to make technical use of it, as the Greeks and Christians already saw.
Only man is subject to moral judgment. Technology is safe. Finally, a teleology of progress develops, practically as a moral good in itself, with which we look down on the rest of humanity. To say that the use of technology is bad is to say nothing, and it is to fail to describe technology properly in the first place. We find ourselves subject to blind phenomena that determine the fate of humanity, in a realm governed solely by material mechanism and technical imposition. This is perhaps the great myth of modernity, "the worst of modern mystifications."
The positivized legal structure comes into direct conflict with the law. The spontaneous social regulation that has evolved in different communities is supplanted by a technical legal framework that destroys the original law. The frameworks of coexistence created by different cultures are annihilated in contact with planned and organized legal technology. It is equipped with a technical apparatus and linked to the political and police administrative network for the total surveillance and control of all aspects of society. The idea of "order" replaces morality based on customary law, local customs and culture, or law derived from what is philosophically just or good as the foundation of positivized law. Since the state seeks order, the law is instrumentalized to this end, diverting it from its human purpose. Order is only efficiency, therefore mere technique. "Then law and police become confused, for law is no longer anything but an instrument of the state." A technical idea of the state as a whole is imposed. Man has sacrificed law and justice to efficiency. With law reduced to mere positivism at the service of the technical system itself, the technical project has no opposition. Law is nothing more than technical rules and a set of self-affirming judicial mechanisms. With this, law dissolves. The more technical the law becomes, the more it disappears, becoming the mere technical expression of the state, which becomes a mere self-imposed order. Law is what the state expresses, and conversely, there is no law to control the state. Law thus becomes a technique of the state for its own reproduction. Hand in hand with surveillance, coercion, punitiveness, collection through organized and highly rationalized confiscation, etc. It seeks its own effectiveness, which begins to be effectiveness in collection, effectiveness in surveillance, effectiveness in rationalization, effectiveness in punitiveness, etc. The machinery expands and infiltrates all areas of human life.
The "submission of law to politics," under the iron rule of the state that Hobbes already anticipated. The state is dedicated to protecting science "not out of a greatness of spirit for the sake of civilization, but out of an instinct for power." It is clear that science produces techniques that allow the state to improve its effectiveness by monitoring, controlling, and punishing. After the state, "it was the bourgeoisie that discovered the benefits that could be derived from a conscientiously developed technology." We see that what has always been at stake in power struggles is control over technology, because it is what allows domination over society. No one wants to seize the state and technology to liberate human beings, but to control them. A systematic struggle against all natural groups is unleashed. The individual must be isolated, alienated from the masses, in direct relation only to the state, with no other points of social connection. "There is no doubt that revolutionary legislation led to the destruction of the family," says Ellul. Like any other social fact, marriage also becomes technified, today reduced to little more than a legal formality. The destruction wrought cannot be repaired, says Ellul. Even divorce laws sought to break up societies, despite being sold under the rationalization of "freedom," a rationalization used systematically and therefore unsurprising. "In reality, we have an atomized society that will become increasingly so. The individual is the only sociological magnitude, but we realize that this, instead of guaranteeing freedom, leads to the worst kind of slavery." Reasoning, both moral and logical, becomes a dangerous mechanized empiricism. The ideal of comfort emerges as the moral ideal of society, and with it the subjugation of people to the society of technology as a legitimization of the ideology of "progress." In modern society, a climate of optimism arose, with "discoveries" seen as the solution to the hardships and dissatisfactions of life. "They believed that their research would result not only in happiness, but also in justice. This is where the myth of progress begins."
In short, technology satisfied everyone. The state's desire for power and social control, the bourgeoisie's desire to develop industry and make money, and individuals' desire to consume. Morality has ceased to matter to man "abandoned to himself." He is satisfied with consumption, and the rest are the same. He only wants technology to provide him with comfort and reduce all uncertainty in his life. Ironically, he seeks the same predictability that technology offers. Therefore, he will orient his morality toward simple comfort, affirming a technified life as good. I do not believe, as people like to claim about themselves, that "the common people" are innocent in all this.
TOTALITARIANISM: THE INEVITABLE END OF TECHNOLOGY Technology creates an aristocracy of technicians that makes human beings impenetrable. It is simply incompatible with democracy; it destroys it by necessity, says Ellul. When technology develops, it ceases to be an object of man, and it is man who becomes an object for technology. Technology is at the center of civilization and marks the destiny of humanity. "Technology cannot be anything other than totalitarian." The state is a technology and, as such, moves toward technical control of the entire social structure. Rationalization becomes doctrine in the 19th century; everything is calculation, control, order. "Police techniques, which are developing at an extremely rapid pace, have as their necessary goal the transformation of the entire nation into a concentration camp." A visionary, Ellul, says "...that everyone be watched, that we know exactly what every citizen is doing, their relationships, their habits, their distractions, and it is increasingly possible to know this." Both the state and the police are techniques that evolve towards technical development, which means that technical development ends with total control of everything. Police and administrative techniques function as much as communications and military techniques. Administration, education, labor... everything is part of the same technical activity coordinated for the control of everything. It is "pure technique" that becomes the social model, dominating everything, including human relations. The technical state of things becomes normalized. Citizens become accustomed to being watched and punished. Brutality is not necessary; on the contrary, brutality implies an underdeveloped state of technique.
Otto Von Bismarck was the first to see the advantage of making people beneficiaries of the state. The origin of social security and the "welfare" state has an authoritarian, right-wing origin, with the explicit aim of creating a dependence of people on the state in order to control society. The state will not be satisfied with half-hearted progress in its project, says Ellul. It will never leave any space that it does not control, monitor, organize, and execute, and its evolution is toward the control and prediction of everything that happens. It is not that the state has or does not have the will to intervene more or less, as so many liberals say; it is that it is impossible for it to be otherwise, since the state is nothing more than a technique of intervention. Once we enter the age of technology, the state emerges as a machine to the end. On the other hand, so-called "neoliberalism" does not pursue any freedom or liberation. This view is strikingly clumsy. If oligarchic functioning exists, it is for technical reasons; it is simply more efficient than a rigidly state-controlled system. The birth of the technical state means that capital ceases to be important. "An economy based entirely on technology cannot be a liberal economy." It is surprising that so few authors have realized something so obvious, which implies that most economists, political philosophers, etc., do not understand the dynamics of systems very well.
Technology is not economistic; it does not seek mere profitability, as much of the left continues to believe. Technology imposes its efficiency. The technical state "no longer considers profitability as the ultimate value." In the conflict between economics and technology, it is technology that has subjected economics to its dictates. This implies the de facto elimination of liberalism. The system needs control. Rational, logical evolution is not a dialectical evolution. There is a positivization of what is effective and efficient, which exterminates the possibility of any other position. Technology functions simply by self-affirmation. Ultimately, the whole of society ends up in a technical plan, with population control, demographic control, migration control, etc. This plan is purely technical, independent of the form of government or ideology with which it may be dressed up. There is no government, no ruler, only technology. There is no ideology, except as a mere narrative fantasy to mislead the population about the technical engineering that subjugates them. As the economy becomes more technical, it ceases to be a human action and becomes a process that is automated in parallel with technology. No one decides anything; investment is mechanically directed toward technical development. What is progressively organized is no longer the production of the company, but the entire system: production, consumption, the price of money, demographics themselves, etc. The only ideology is the effectiveness of the state through its military, police, administrative, and propaganda techniques, etc. Calculation becomes morality and destiny. "The ideal of all governments is to promote industrialization and technical servitude as much as possible." Feudalism gave way to the authoritarian state, and from there to the current technical state of surveillance and forensic control. A scientific fascism, a social engineering whose danger lies precisely in its high degree of technical development.
The planned economy has made it very difficult to separate the political from the economic, says Ellul. It is not the economy but technology that is at the basis of Marxism. In fact, the economy necessarily arises from technology. There is no economy without technology. It is the technical process that drives the entire contemporary economy. Technical innovation is indispensable to the investment process. Ideas and theories do not dominate, but rather the power of production. Technification implies a concentration of power and finance. In 1920, there were 30,000 banks in the United States, linked to communities and cooperatives. Today, most of them have disappeared, and only a few large banks concentrate most of the finances. We are not evolving towards a free market capitalism, but towards planned control of all technology and all investment. The system of political and economic technology is necessarily evolving towards a planned dictatorship, precisely in order to eliminate delocalized capitalist unpredictability and human uncertainty. It clearly lacks the necessary direction of positivization and control. The plan is only "the constant search for the most efficient use of mechanical means, natural resources, and available forces. It is a matter of organizing, coordinating, and subjecting them to rules so that each instrument provides maximum performance."
The economy also becomes technified (until it is digitized and becomes an administrative process of operational control of social credit, which is exactly where we are today). The law of supply and demand is also subject to the technical process of production. Can we really believe that if public opinion wants cakes, planning will be geared towards that? Sauvy already realized that the economy does not satisfy the consumer. Rather, the process is positivized and the decision becomes the goal that the producer wants to impose. However, for Ellul, there is no mere will of the producer coming out of nowhere. What is produced is what technology dictates, which is exactly what the technified society demands to consume. The next thing that can be produced will be determined in the mechanistic sense of effectiveness and/or efficiency, reduced to the utilitarianism of technology. The entire process of supply and demand is reified at the dictates of technology. There is no free supply and demand, but rather the same process of organizational technification that reifies the entire process. In 1931, the International Labor Organization itself said, "Not only manufacturing must be rationalized, but also the relations between employers and employees." Unionism was created, a wild card for the system to ensure that criticism was merely requests for economic improvements or greater comfort, but not criticism of the system itself, nor a pursuit of what is good, true, or just. That was the end of it. And so it developed into the company psychologist, not out of human interest, but out of technical strategy. The technical state is not content with producing, but accumulates data and records, organizes capital, organizes consumption, organizes the legal system, organizes administration, organizes even demographics, etc. All data since the state stored the first file on a stone wedge is directed toward totalitarianism. The average person today is subject to constant individual forensic analysis that would make the CSI of the early 2000s pale in comparison. It is not that software companies are spying on us, but that a technical and legal architecture has been created for this purpose. The state benefits from the data that these companies, acting as proxies, collect for it.
The technical economy is fatally anti-democratic. In a technical system, talking about collective ownership is as elusive as talking about democracy. Even if it were possible, it would follow technical logic, or it would be left out of the social mechanism. However, this implies a state of disorganization that makes technology inefficient, which means that it cannot prosper. "Everything that technology gains, democracy loses." The greater or lesser degree of democracy and the greater or lesser degree of socialization of the distribution of production are nothing more than necessities for the reproduction of the system. The essence of democracy is choice, which implies the opposite of standardization and technical mechanization. As this increases, the ability to choose, even to think, inevitably decreases.
The individual freedom we talk about in our "democracies" is the same as that envisioned by Goebbels: "You can seek your path to salvation as you wish, provided that it does not change the social order." In other words, systems grant freedom in everything that does not threaten the system. Technology is socialization and rationalization. It produces behavior and thought. A mass in a state of hypnosis does not produce democracy, and if democracy is justified by the mere adherence of the people, many totalitarian regimes could use the same fallacy of claiming to have the support of the majority and of democracy. No politician makes policy. Policy is made by itself, through the set of techniques. Changes in life are technical changes, which follow technical laws and technical logic, regardless of what politicians want to say or stage. Democratic planning implies the "astonishing theory that enlightened public opinion has the power to guide the decisions of planners." It will then be said that people do not know what they need, and technical planning will be reinstated. The power of the state is the inevitable force for planning all industrial activity, demographics, resources, the economy, politics... everything in the same direction dictated by technology.
The individual, collectivized and positivized, can only contemplate the steamroller of technical mechanism that devours everything around them. Man's own needs simply tend toward the plan." Promethean society must exclude chance and all uncertainty, until life is completely positivized. Administration and organizational technique are historically coercive and based on violence, and their progress is only the expansion of the same framework of evolution of coercive techniques, coupled with more effective predictive techniques. An absolute monarch did not reach the degree of absolutism that any modern state has achieved, no matter how much legend the modern state tries to tell. For Ellul, political technique developed above all with Lenin. Language ceases to be a symbolic act of communication; it becomes reified and turns into a language with a high operational load. The state penetrates transportation, education, the press, etc. Techniques gradually transform private space into state-controlled space, even if it is a large private society. The more techniques the state accumulates, whether in the direct sense of ownership and organizational control or through more subtle forms of legal, bureaucratic, etc. control, the more its power increases. The state never gives back anything it takes. It has only one direction of expansion, the end of which is everything. No one can escape this logic.
It becomes impossible to speak and communicate; everything is judged according to a logic of technical utility. Books, even music, are censored by money and/or the state. Human appreciation of any aspect of the social world is reified into statistics. Dissenting opinion is eliminated from the language system through propaganda and discourse control techniques. The technical system proceeds by a positivism that excludes its negations. Education and universities are also subject to the same technical system, reduced to an institutionalization of knowledge divided into compartments, which produces a scheme that directs thought by constricting the capacity for broad reasoning. The mass movement itself is univocal and anti-dialectical. Any empirical or symbolic "diversity" works within the technical process, contributing to the development of the system. The content of the media is equally technical, social engineering, propaganda tactics. It has the technical purpose of breaking the ability to become aware of anything other than the propaganda that must be delivered through technical means. Where Google ends and the US military intelligence services begin is a line that probably does not even exist. Anyone who has not understood this aspect simply does not understand the world in which they live.
The state did not create hospitals, medicine, drugs, social security, or education. The state expropriated them and appropriated their knowledge. The state can take over an organization, but "this fact does not change the technique" or its origin. Public and private companies are subject to the same technical laws. So-called "socialism" is nothing more than a Taylorist technique that has stripped it of all theoretical content. The fact that the state appropriates things does not produce anything new. If the state displaces the capitalists, no commune of goods is produced, but simply a state capitalism with a single capitalist, without changing anything with regard to the technical project. The difference between what the worker produces and the wage paid has been more evident in Russia than anywhere else, except that this profit, which they claimed to want to resolve, went to the state. That the modern state is nothing more than a technique for extracting value through calculated and planned inflationary engineering is obvious to anyone with a minimum knowledge of economics.
SCIENTIFICISM AND THE WILL TO POWER
Transcendent religion has become social religion, says Ellul. The worship of technology in the religion of scientism produces a fanatical faith in the name of "science." As the Greeks already understood, the cult of technology is a worship of the desire for power. "The will to power has found in technology an extraordinary means of expression." Man worships the power he does not have in his life, which he cannot achieve by himself. He celebrates the technology that produces his own castration. God and human beings can be criticized, but "progress," which has been sacralized and turned into a religion, cannot be criticized, which makes any criticism blasphemy. The materialistic atheist has convinced himself that he does not live by his own teleological beliefs, and that he is a rational being above superstitions and acts of faith. Few people have made self-deception into an art form as the modern scientist and atheist have done."The machine has conquered the brain and heart of the average man, of the masses." Technology has always existed as a tradition, evolving under the pressure of circumstances. For Fourastié, "technical progress is the increase in the volume of production obtained from a fixed amount of raw materials or human labor." The boundary between the technical and the scientific is unclear. Technology is the application of science, the point of contact between material reality and speculation, the hidden, the underlying. It can be questioned, however, whether the application of technical criteria is the same as science. It is general theories that produce a scientific spirit. Scientific knowledge itself is adulterated by technology. "The state mobilizes all technicians and scholars by imposing a goal on them." Thus, the scientist is no longer a wise man, but rather someone surrounded by techniques and materials. If technique precedes science, science has ultimately become a means at the service of technique. A scientific utilitarianism under which no disinterested research can take place, "under an implicit will to optimism." Science no longer wants to know, it wants to administer, control, predict, subjugate. Science that promotes knowledge, and not technology, does not allow domination and its violent self-imposition. Therefore, what science pursues is far from the ideals of objective knowledge, or the search for virtuous knowledge, which scientismists seek to sell. "We are currently in the phase of historical evolution that eliminates everything that is not technical."
Kierkegaard made a criticism of this at the beginning of the 19th century, but it went unheard. He spoke of objective knowledge, dehumanized calculation that knows nothing, reliance on the masses to reject responsibility and the construction of meaning, forming a reified and reifying social spirit that detaches itself from the good. Although he wants to dialectically oppose Marx to the bourgeois liberal, in reality Kierkegaard is the most obvious opposite, although little has been said about this. Marx places the social basis in the material, the collective, the economic, the historical, the objective. He represents the reifying process of technology mentioned by Ellul. For Kierkegaard, life is on the opposite plane, the singular plane of the person, the interior, lived experience. Socializing mechanization mutilates the human aspect of existence by imposing a mechanics of processes. This is why he is considered the father of existentialism, which would later be taken up by Sartre and others in an attempt to save the left from the ashes of its own mechanistic project. It was not until World War I that alarm bells rang about the ideology of technology and the logic of instrumental rationality in modern states, in the name of "progress" and "science." Both capitalist systems and socialist systems of the left and right developed the same technical deployment of the state. At that time, philosophers of the left and right began to wonder whether the materialist project of modernity had not become the most dangerous political experiment of all. "It is not the frontier of science that is at stake today, but the frontier of man."
FINAL COMMENTS
The Technological Society is one of the most important philosophy books of the 20th century, by an author who has been unfairly overlooked, even though I am sure he inspired the work of Foucault, Marcuse, Habermas, etc. However, Ellul wanted to remain outside academia. He wrote and taught in Bordeaux, far from the French intellectual center, and refused to dilute himself in the game of academic or media visibility. He was a radically free thinker who systematically rejected academic honors, prestigious chairs in Paris, and the construction of a school of thought around his work. Perhaps this has made him less cited than his thinking deserves. He anticipated by decades the debates on surveillance, transhumanism, propaganda, technocracy, and the disappearance of meaning.Although techniques have existed in every society for thousands of years, there was no systematic application of them. Technique functioned at the service of each culture, not the other way around. Ellul defines technique above all by its rationalization and systematization, not by the empirical existence of an invention. The distinction between the concepts of technique and technology is often presented in common discourse as an opposition between traditional practical tools and modern scientific applications. However, for Ellul, there is no break between the two, but rather a single continuous process, an evolution towards greater automation, rationalization, systematization, industrialization, scientific calculation, etc. Societies and cultures are swallowed up by the development of the technical program. All social and cultural forms are progressively becoming a technical and administrative system, like an assembly line. Today's techno-science society is built on a massive surveillance system that allows data to be extracted for the purpose of absolute prediction and planning of society. Technology today makes possible what Stalin and Hitler could only dream of.
It seems that the history of modern life is that of man who locks himself into his own technology and becomes trapped by it. Perhaps the most useful way to understand the state and power is through game theory, evolutionary biology, or theoretical frameworks such as Luhmann's systems. That is, adaptive phenotypes of organization that follow strategies of survival and competitive advantage over other systems. The point is that it is not social systems that seek what is fair, true, or good that prevail, but merely the most effective systems of technical production and social organization. The mistake most people make is to add an ideological narrative filter to what is pure strategic technique in the most mechanical sense. A verbal world is manufactured for man so that he cannot see the real world in which he lives. If the problem we face is not left-right, then criticism cannot be left-right either. There can be no criticism that does not start from a dialectic that rejects the mechanistic project itself.
The technical system makes social problems appear as simple technical problems. A civilization is considered as such according to the degree of technology it has achieved. Countries are compared in a technical and economic scheme with measures such as GDP, etc. Things such as the wisdom of people, the preservation of social and cultural forms, freedom, justice, etc. are not compared. When attempts are made to do so, they are done in adulterated forms, taking justice as a mere distribution of GDP, etc. Morality becomes a matter of legal technique, economic distribution, social maladjustment is perceived as a mere lack of money, etc. This form of mechanical "objectivity" becomes ontological substance, destroying not only forms of social coexistence, ethics, or personal freedom, but also the very capacity to reason. The concept of poverty is assigned to any society that does not meet the level of technification set by Western countries. The solution to poverty is, of course, technocratic and economic. The fact that the devastation of traditional social forms has in fact been produced by their own process of Westernization is completely out of mind. It is precisely those who are "sensitive to causes" who have the most ethnocentric views. That is why they are most useful to the system, and the system invests a lot of money in promoting certain versions of poverty or "social justice." It is a form of intellectual colonialism.
In the current phase, technical power imposes the dissolution of organic social forms (at this moment, the nation-state in a phase of decomposition). The global technical apparatus cannot be fully deployed if there are local structures that hinder systemic functional interoperability. The administration of populations is far from spontaneous, being driven by this operational logic. Bauman exposed how globalization dissociates power and politics, Foucault showed that there are no longer populations or people, but rather an operation that manages biological flows (migration, reproduction, etc.) under criteria of technical utility. Biopolitics, in this sense, is the final phase of instrumental rationality: there are no longer people, but operable flows. It is well known that a minimum degree of homogeneity is necessary for existence as a real political unit (Carl Schmitt) and for coexistence (Durkheim), so that opposing dynamics represent a project to dissolve political unity.
The problem with morality is that it requires wisdom and not just superficial empathy with immediate appearances. Technology is universalizing through an empirical steamroller. It is not surprising that it is the institutions of the state themselves that disseminate universalizing morality: egalitarian, multicultural, etc. Justice is "egalitarian" submission to the project of dismemberment. The modern mind is a caricature that has run its course. One of the best ways to understand what intelligence is is as the ability to understand what underlies the apparent. This is perfectly understood when studying the ontogenetic development of the child's intellect, which must learn to renounce the sensory and immediate in order to reason (conservation, etc.). The system seems to be a game theory dynamic in which the society that adopts the technical phenotype devours everything it comes into contact with. It is useless to educate the people, says Ellul.
People tend to find one politician or another more unlikable, but they do not reject the technical state as such. First, because they do not understand it, given that the human mind merely reproduces the technical scheme in which the person lives. Second, because this same State has created technical means that make their state of annulment tolerable, sedating the nervous system through audiovisual entertainment techniques, the availability of sugary products, the prescription of anxiolytics and antidepressants, etc. While people's lives pass by watching the clock and performing tasks in a mechanized way, they sedate their nervous system with audiovisual gadgets, palatable food, drugs, etc. In my view, people are not innocent in all this. They have betrayed their being, simply for the sake of receiving, whether under a consciousness of free capitalism or with the crude excuse of egalitarianism.
The modern rebel with colorful hair spouts the pre-cooked speeches that the system's propaganda techniques have prepared for them to control their disenchantment. Like the normalized egosyntonic person, the egodystonic "rebel" is another product of the system's techniques. Propaganda "must produce individuals who are particularly suggestible and easily set in motion." The broken toy of society feels the need to scream, but does not know that it is incapable of articulating anything coherent in its mind. It is easy to create resentment in people who are frustrated with their lives. "This strengthens their belief in their own right," Hitler commented.
Life is an enormous process of mechanical conditioning and operational coercion, coupled with an enormous mechanism of symbolic dissemination and language that organizes thought patterns. The illusion of free will and the illusion of free thought contrast with the flooding of that same consciousness with the technical production of symbols, logical patterns, narratives, and behavioral coercions produced by the system. This debate between the "infrastructural" and the "superstructural" has been ongoing since Marxism. Gramsci sought to dissociate them, but the fact is that there is no dissociation. Both factors are decisive in conditioning people's thinking, one from the procedural side, the other from the symbolic side (which can nevertheless be seen as a system of narrative production). Both systems push in the same direction, the empirical organizing coercion from operational processes that generate behavior, the other organizing patterns of perception and thought.
The origins of technology are more complex than the simple narrative that has been constructed, for better or for worse. We must remember that between the 16th and 18th centuries, many of the most prosperous regions were part of the Spanish Empire: Seville, Mexico City, Lima, Potosí, Manila, etc. That backward Christian Spain laid the foundations of the modern economy before Adam Smith, as well as universal human rights (School of Salamanca). What should perhaps be put on the table is that these economic, cultural, and political centers did not want to place themselves at the service of a relentless instrumental rationality at the expense of their cultural, social, and moral heritage. It is worth reflecting on whether, deep down, what is being criticized about Spain is the fact that it did not dominate economies, markets, technologies, etc., with a greater instrumental will than other countries would later have. Although there has been an interest in constructing a technical and economic narrative of simple "backwardness," the Christian morality of the Hispanic world did not see wealth as a sign of divine election, but rather, like the Greeks, as a moral problem.
Our society is ultimately the violent imposition of a logic of technical efficiency over everything else. It is the same technical efficiency whose end is the elimination of the human being itself. Ironically, this is the consequence whether the technical project goes wrong (systemic catastrophes produced by technical power) or goes right, in which case the technical state has total control over everything and the human being ceases to be human to become a mere nanotechnological means of support for a centralized consciousness. In both cases, human beings disappear under the same force of technology. Transhumanism is nothing more than the efficient human being, but this would be a brief transition because the human body is actually a hindrance to the material processing of information. The machine can live throughout the universe without biological limitations; it will be the machine that ultimately grows and multiplies. If one of these biological technologies does not extinguish us first, scientists will have achieved their dream of predictive control over everything. Human life involves uncertainty, but intolerance to uncertainty produces the controlling psychosis that underlies Ellul's work.
"Freedom is nothing more than obedience to technical necessity." Jacques Ellul.
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