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Fritz Freud's avatar

The power we fear is the power we give to others to be used against us.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vRsEC65NTA

The Greatest Capital of Humanity is Humanity itself

https://fritzfreud.substack.com/p/the-greatest-capital-of-humanity

Hello? (Hello, hello, hello)

Is there anybody in there?

Just nod if you can hear me

Is there anyone home?

Come on (Come on, come on), now

I hear you're feeling down

Well, I can ease your pain

And get you on your feet again

Relax (Relax, relax, relax)

I'll need some information first

Just the basic facts

Can you show me where it hurts?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrWZNAQrkf4

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Stegiel's avatar

Wait. What is this economy? Is not just fraud all the way down? Paper acquiring resources and paper is debt and resources are real? Central Banks of putative nation states are doing everything in their power to loot for oligarchs-irrespective of ideology of a given governmentality? Ellul argues this is due to the triumph of technique.

Excerpt From

Perspectives on Our Age

Jacques Ellul

https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewBook?id=0

This material may be protected by copyright.

His book The Technological Bluff published in US in 1990. such a society. Ellul argues that technology presents fundamental threats to society. His concerns are not what we typically take to be the problems raised by technology such as pollution, deskilling of work, or exhaustion of resources. He acknowledges that these issues do, indeed, create real problems—real dislocations of ways of living and destructions of eco-systems, for example—yet because each of these challenges appears amenable to (or, perhaps require) a technological solution, none constitute a primary threat to humanity. The true threats technology poses to humans are, according to Ellul, its ability to drive out or erase the mystery that animates our “humanness” and to create a general cultural condition—a background for all we do—that technology will provide the solution or the way(s) forward (a concept he refers to as the technological bluff). TechniqueCentral to understanding Ellul’s view is an explication of the concept of “technique.” Ellul (1962) believed that “Technique has become the new and specific milieu in which man is required to exist, one that has supplanted the old milieu, viz., that of nature.” In The Technological Society (1964), he defined technique as “the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency (for a given stage of development) in every field of human activity” (p. xxv). Technology, then, is not only, or even primarily, artifacts or objects—although it included those, to be sure—it is systemic and incorporates processes, rules (or codes), and institutions as well. Technique is a totalizing system of methods that has become the new environment, or milieu, for all of human existence. Ellul wrote: “Modern technology has become a total phenomenon for civilization, the defining force of a new social order in which efficiency is no longer an option but a necessity imposed on all human activity” (1964, p. 17). In a technological society, technique shapes everything—not only transportation and communication, but also politics and religion, economics, science, and education, even love and sex—all of these are comprehended as component processes aimed at clearly identifiable and quantitative goals that can be rendered more efficient. In this way, mystery is pushed out of human experience, and replaced with benchmarks, comparison groups, and measurable outcomes. The concept of technique closely parallels Weber’s (1930/1992) notion of “rationalization” (Kalberg, 1980; Ritzer, 2013). What Ellul deemed the fundamental characteristic of the technological society—the application of technique to all aspects of life—Weber identified as the complete triumph of the process of rationalization. In lamenting the lack of resources for critical reflection and engagement in modern society, Marcuse’s (1964) text, One-Dimensional Man, also stakes a claim similar. degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/huma…

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