The Technological Society Quotes

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

“Our civilization is first and foremost a civilization of means; in the reality of modern life, the means, it would seem, are more important than the ends. Any other assessment of the situation is mere idealism.”
― Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society

“If man--if each one of us--abdicates his responsibilities with regard to values; if each one of us limits himself to leading a trivial existence in a technological civilization, with greater adaptation and increasing success as his sole objectives; if we do not even consider the possibility of making a stand against these determinants, then everything will happen as I have described it, and the determinates will be transformed into inevitabilities.”
― Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society

“The individual is in a dilemma: either he decides to safeguard his freedom of choice, chooses to use traditional , personal, moral, or empirical means, thereby entering into competition with a power against which there is no efficacious defense and before which he must suffer defeat; or he decides to accept technical necessity, in which case he will himself by the victor, but only by submitting irreparably to technical slavery. In effect he has no freedom of choice.”
― Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society

“Efficiency is a fact and justice a slogan.”
― Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society

“The man of today is no longer able to understand his neighbor because his profession is his whole life, and the technical specialization of this life has forced him to live in a closed universe.”
― Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society

“As a matter of fact, reality is itself a combination of determinisms, and freedom consists in overcoming and transcending these determinisms. Freedom is completely without meaning unless it is related to necessity, unless it represents victory over necessity....We must not think of the problem in terms of a choice between being determined, but that it is open to him to overcome necessity, and that this act is freedom. Freedom is not static but dynamic; not a vested interested, but a prize continually to be won. The moment man stops and resigns himself, he becomes subject to determinism. He is most enslaved when he thinks he is comfortably settled in freedom.”
― Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society

“A major section of modern art and poetry unconsciously guides us in the direction of madness; and, indeed, for the modern man there is no other way. Only madness is inaccessible to the machine.”
― Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society

“For the Greeks, physical exercise was an ethic for developing freely and harmoniously the form and strength of the human body. For the Romans, it was a technique for increasing the legionnaire's efficiency. The Roman conception prevails today.”
― Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society

“The human being is changing slowly under the pressure of the economic milieu; he is in process of becoming the uncomplicated being the liberal economist constructed.”
― Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society

“Those who count on the good will of mankind display a delirious, idealistic optimism. Centuries of history, despite the facts, have not been able to convince them of the contrary; reason certainly will not change them. But they are so far removed from reality that their opinion is negligible.”
― Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society

“Economic life, not in its content but in its direction, will henceforth entirely elude popular control. No democracy is possible in the face of a perfected economic technique. the decisions of the voters, and even of the elected, are oversimplified, incoherent, and technically inadmissible. It is a grave illusion to believe that democratic control or decision-making can be reconciled with economic technique.”
― Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society

“The tool enables man to conquer. But, man, dost thou not know there is no more victory which is thy victory? The victory of our days belongs to the tool.”
― Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society

“If a whole people is oriented toward the search for justice or purity, if it obeys in depth the primacy of the spiritual, it does not suffer from the lack of material things, just as we today do not feel the inverse need of the spiritual.”
― Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society

“The world that is being created by the accumulation of technical means is an artificial world and hence radically different from the natural world.
It destroys, eliminates, or subordinates the natural world, and does not allow this world to restore itself or even to enter into a symbiotic relation with it. The two worlds obey different imperatives, different directives, and different laws which have nothing in common. Just as hydroelectric installations take waterfalls and lead them into conduits, so the technical milieu absorbs the natural. We are rapidly approaching the time when there will be no longer any natural environment at all. When we succeed in producing artificial aurorae boreales, night will disappear and perpetual day will reign over the planet.”
― Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society

“It is easy to boast of victory over ancient oppression, but what if victory has been gained at the price of an even greater subjection to the forces of the artificial necessity of the technical society which has come to dominate our lives?”
― Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society

“The melancholy fact is that the human personality has been almost wholly disassociated and and dissolved through mechanization.”
― Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society

“We see first of all that leisure, instead of being a vacuum representing a break with society, is literally stuffed with technical mechanisms of compensation and integration. It is not a vacuous interval. It is not a human kind of emptiness in which decisions might be matured. Leisure time is a mechanized time and is exploited by techniques which, although different from those of man's ordinary work, are as invasive, exacting, and leave man no more free than labor itself.”
― Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society

“Only two possibilities are left to the individual: either he remains what he was, in which case he becomes more and more unadapted, neurotic, and inefficient, loses his possibilities of subsistence, and is at last tossed on the social rubbish heap, whatever his talents may be; or he adapts himself to the new sociological organism, which becomes his world, and he becomes unable to live except in a mass society.”
― Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society

“The individual can no longer live except in a climate of tension and overexcitement. He can no longer be a smiling skeptical spectator. He is indeed "engaged," but involuntarily so, since he has ceased to dominate his own thoughts and actions.”
― Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society

“The old dream that has tempted man from the beginning, the medieval legend of the man who sells his soul for an inexhaustible purse, which recurs with an enticing insistence through all the changes of civilization, is perhaps in process of being realized, and not a for a single man but all.”
― Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society

“It is not true that the perfection of police power is the result of the state’s Machiavellianism or of some transitory influence. The whole structure of society of society implies it, of necessity. The more we mobilize the forces of nature, the more must we mobilize men and the more do we require order.”
― Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society

“There is no such thing as technique by and in itself. In its irresistible forward progress, it forced the human individual, without whom it is nothing, to accompany it. For this reason economic man, a working hypothesis when economics was only a doctrine, was forced to become reality when reality became technical. This mutation... was not completely a creation of technique, but technique found in it what it required. Stalin, as well as the liberal economists, considered man as 'capital'. And... from the technical point of view, man must be appraised as capital. To recoil before this conception is merely a sentimental reaction. No efficiency is possible for economic technique in the absence of exact calculation of average human production costs and human profit-making ability. Man is capital, and he must become perfectly adapted to this role....

Scientific, willed utilization systematically and definitely creates the economic man, who ultimately comes to be nothing more than the 'needs-yield complex'. But the human being no longer feels only particular distress at this, because the almost magical results of economic technique come from perfect adjustment. The man who suffered under capitalism because of its spasmodic fits and starts and its spiritual unsatisfactoriness, the individuals who suffered under a Communist regime because of fear and restraint, find themselves released from suffering by this adaptation, when in either regime technique assumes primacy. In both situations, man's spiritual needs are partially gratified by propaganda and, in both, technique demands active participation of him. It even requires of him that he become intelligent, the better to serve the organization and the machine. The stage in which the human being was a mere slave of the mechanical tyrant has been passed. When man himself becomes a machine, he attains to the marvelous freedom of unconsciousness the freedom of the machine itself. A spiritual and moral life is required of him because the machine has need of such a life: no technique is possible with amoral and asocial men. Man feels himself to be responsible, but he is not. He does not feel himself an object, but he is. He has been so well assimilated to the economic world, so well adjusted to it by being reduced to the homo economicus, in short, so well conditioned, that the appearance of personal life becomes for him the reality of personal life. Thus, the development of economic techniques does not formally destroy the spiritual, but rather subordinates it to the realization of the Great Design. Henceforth, there is no more need for the hypothesis of the economic man. The whole of man's life has become a function of economic technique. In its realization, technique itself has far transcended the timid hypotheses of the classical economists. Man knows himself to be more and more free, for technique has eliminated all natural forces and in this way has given him the sense of being master of his fate. The new man being created before our very eyes, correctly tailored to enter into the artificial paradise, the detailed and necessary product of the means which he ordains for himself - that man is I.”
― Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society

“The individual, in order to make use of technical instruments, no longer needs to know about his civilization. And no single technician dominated the whole complex any longer. The bond that unites the fragmentary actions and disjointedness of individuals, co-ordinating and systematizing their work, is no longer a human one, but the internal laws of technique. The human hand no longer spans the complex of means, nor does the human brain synthesize man's acts. Only the intrinsic monism of technique assures cohesion between human means and acts. Technique reigns alone, a blind force and more clear-sighted than the best human intelligence. This phenomenon of self-augmentation gives technique a strangely harsh aspect. It resembles nothing other than itself. Whatever the domain to which it is applied, man or God, technique simply is; it undergoes no modifications in the movement which is its being and essence. It is the only locus where form and being are identical. It is only a form, but everything conforms to it.... Whatever the adaptations nature or circumstances demand of it, technique remains itself - identical in its characteristics and its course. Hindrances seem to compel it to become, not something else, but even more itself. Everything it assimilates strengthens it in its traits.”
― Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society

“The machine, so characteristic of the nineteenth century, made an abrupt entrance into a society which, from the political, institutional, and human points of view, was not made to receive it; and man has had to put up with it as best he can. Men now live in conditions that are less than human. Consider the concentration of our great cities, the slums, the lack of space, air, of time, the gloomy streets and the sallow lights that confuse night and day. Think of our dehumanized factories, our unsatisfied senses, our working women, our estrangement from nature. Life in such an environment has no meaning. Consider our public transportation, in which man is less important than a parcel; our hospitals, in which he is only a number. Yet we call this progress.”
― Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society

“Man is caught like a fly in a bottle. His attempts at culture, freedom, and creative endeavor have become mere entries in technique's filing cabinet.”
― Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society

“Man has always had one unfailing subject of conversation, life's vexations.”
― Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society

“The stage in which the human being was a mere slave of the mechanical tyrant has been passed. When man himself becomes a machine, he attains to the marvelous freedom of unconsciousness, the freedom of the machine itself.”
― Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society

“The proletarian was alienated not only because he was the servant of the bourgeois but because he became a stranger to the human condition, a sort of automaton filled with economic machinery and worked by and economic switch.”
― Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society

“Technique can leave nothing untouched in a civilization. Everything is its concern.”
― Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society