The Technological Society

by Jacques Ellul

this technique must be implemented by the state, which alone has the means and the breadth to carry it through.

this technique is “pantocrator.”*4 It must be exercised over all men.

However, this freedom consists in a profound and detailed surveillance of the child’s activities, a complete shaping of his spiritual life, and a precise regulation of his time with a stop watch; in short, in habituating him to a joyful serfdom. The most important aspect of this technique is the forced orientation toward it. It is a social force directed toward a social end.

in the technical complex which our society has become, and which is destroying every kind of community, it is necessary to compensate for man’s natural incapacity to sustain human relations in a technical universe. This must be done not only for man’s sake but also because human relations are technically indispensable to the progress of great enterprises. It is necessary, therefore, to organize groups in these enterprises, groups which are responsible but also sufficiently directed to serve the common end, productivity. Then it is necessary to reproduce natural conditions artificially, so that human relations can be established.

The technique of so-called human relations, developed to adapt the individual to the technical milieu, to force him to accept his slavery, to make him find happiness by the “normalization” of his relations with his group and integrate him into that group to an ever greater degree—this technique is characteristic of the fakeries and shams with which men must be provided if the conflicts provoked by life in a technicized environment are to be avoided. As a remedy it does not amount to much, but as a symptom of technical reinforcement, it is important We can say that these personal relations are also techniques, that they are not a counterweight to other techniques, but that they bring about the application of technique in the most personal and immediate area of human activities: man’s relations with other men.

The worker is becoming more and more “organizable.” He is trapped in labor organizations which are becoming increasingly compulsory and increasingly efficient. He gets habituated to them and even feels a need for them. Moreover, the modern separation between personality and work favors surrender to organization.

Once again we are confronted with a mechanism of adaptation which deprives man of freedom and responsibility, makes him into a “thing,” and puts him where he is most desirable from the point of view of another technique, that is, where he is most efficient.

A kind of maladroit political propaganda first came into use during the First World War. It was often completely inept because it disregarded psychological laws and was, in effect, pure hokum. But it became scientific with the Russian Revolution and then with Hitlerism. Today all states without exception exploit the system of political propaganda created by the union of the two technical complexes.

The technique of measuring and producing such reflexes has been greatly developed. The reduction of political doctrines to programs, of programs to slogans, of slogans to pictures (the direct reflex-stimulating images) has been studied. Systematic efforts are available to create conditioned reflexes, either through education (as, for example, under Nazism or under Communism) or on the basis of already existing, spontaneous reflexes (for example, the American use of erotic reflexes in war propaganda).

Propaganda must become as natural as air or food. It must proceed by psychological inhibition and the least possible shock. The individual is then able to declare in all honesty that no such thing as propaganda exists. In fact, however, he has been so absorbed by it that he is literally no longer able to see the truth.

human emotions such as hate and resentment are exploited. The procedure is not so much obsessional as suggestive, and depends on the collective fixation of these emotions on a given adversary. Here we witness the crowning absurdity, a completely automatic development of emotions. To exploit resentments, it is sufficient merely to send the individual on his way, equipped with a very simple set of “directions for use.”

1) The critical faculty has been suppressed by the creation of collective passions.

The suppression of the critical faculty—man’s growing incapacity to distinguish truth from falsehood, the individual from the collectivity, action from talk, reality from statistics, and so on—is one of the most evident results of the technical power of propaganda.

Human intelligence cannot resist propaganda’s manipulation of its subconscious.

2) A good social conscience appears with the suppression of t...

3) Propaganda technique, moreover, creates a new sphere of the “sacred.”

To summarize: the suppression of the critical faculty, the formation of a good social conscience, and the creation of a sphere of the sacred are all aspects of a single manifestation, the first and clearest consequence of the application of psychoanalytic mass techniques.

Propaganda’s chief requirement is not so much to be rational, well grounded, and powerful as it is to produce individuals especially open to suggestion who can be easily set into motion.

The Dissociation of Man. A second element, which is of great importance (and is, in a way, the inverse of the last), is the human dissociation produced by techniques. The purpose of our human techniques is ostensibly to reintegrate and restore the lost unity of the human being. But the unity produced is the abstract unity of the ideal Man; in reality, the concrete application of techniques dissociates man into fragments.

The purpose of human techniques is to defend man, and the first line of defense is that he be able to live. If these techniques strengthen him in his nineteenth-century individualism (itself no ideal state of affairs), they only aggravate the split between the material structures of society, the social institutions, and the forces of production, on the one hand, and man’s personal tendencies, on the other. This presupposes that technique can in fact defend man’s individuality. But such a disruption is technically impossible because it would entail insupportable disorders for man. Human techniques must therefore act to adapt man to the mass. Moreover, these techniques remain at variance with the other material techniques on which they depend. They must contribute to making man a mass man and help put an end to what has hitherto been considered the normal type of humanity. The type that will emerge and the type that will disappear will be the subjects of a forthcoming work. For the moment, it suffices to establish concretely the tendencies of our human techniques to create the mass man.

The task of the technician is to develop machine techniques and human techniques to such a pitch of perfection that even the man face to face with the perfectly functioning machine no longer has human initiative or the desire to escape.

The ability to forget the machine is the ideal of technical perfection. In the “man-machine” complex, friction results from the collision between the human being and the organization. This friction can take a number of forms. Individual initiative may become irritated by some obvious mechanical failure; the individual may insist on operating the machine in a manner not provided for in the rules of automatism. The problem then is twofold: to perfect mechanical techniques, on the one hand, and to invent and impose certain human techniques, on the other, so as to obviate the human sources of friction.

The technical society must perfect the “man-machine” complex or risk total collapse.

These technical means ipso facto “censor” initiative. First, they screen out whatever does not lend itself to technical expression; initiative remains a purely private matter, with no importance to the technical society. Second, they compel a rigid conformism; initiative is reduced to the lowest common denominator and is, in effect, emasculated.

With the final integration of the instinctive and the spiritual by means of these human techniques, the edifice of the technical society will be completed. It will not be a universal concentration camp, for it will be guilty of no atrocity. It will not seem insane, for everything will be ordered, and the stains of human passion will be lost amid the chromium gleam. We shall have nothing more to lose, and nothing to win. Our deepest instincts and our most secret passions will be analyzed, published, and exploited. We shall be rewarded with everything our hearts ever desired. And the supreme luxury of the society of technical necessity will be to grant the bonus of useless revolt and of an acquiescent smile.

In the domain of genetics, natural reproduction will be forbidden. A stable population will be necessary, and it will consist of the highest human types. Artificial insemination will be employed. This, according to Muller, will “permit the introduction into a carrier uterus of an ovum fertilized in vitro, ovum and sperm…having been taken from persons representing the masculine ideal and the feminine ideal, respectively. The reproductive cells in question will preferably be those of persons dead long enough that a true perspective of their lives and works, free of all personal prejudice, can be seen. Such cells will be taken from cell banks and will represent the most precious genetic heritage of humanity…The method will have to be applied universally. If the people of a single country were to apply it intelligently and intensively…they would quickly attain a practically invincible level of superiority…” Here is a future Huxley never dreamed of.

When our savants characterize their golden age in any but scientific terms, they emit a quantity of down-at-the-heel platitudes that would gladden the heart of the pettiest politician. Let’s take a few samples. “To render human nature nobler, more beautiful, and more harmonious.” What on earth can this mean? What criteria, what content, do they propose? Not many, I fear, would be able to reply. “To assure the triumph of peace, liberty, and reason.” Fine words with no substance behind them. “To eliminate cultural lag.” What culture? And would the culture they have in mind be able to subsist in this harsh social organization? “To conquer outer space.” For what purpose? The conquest of space seems to be an end in itself, which dispenses with any need for reflection.