ps181006 Illusion of freedom and calculation  

Jacques Ellul’s words are translated as: “. . . technique enslaves people, while proffering them the mere illusion of freedom, all the while tyrannically conforming them to the demands of the technological society with its complex of artificial operational objectives.”

This declaration comes after his considerable explanation of the difference between technique and technology. I read it with interest, as in my mind is my hope to be a great teacher in the domain of my expertise, printmaking.

I’ve written that printmaking is the ancestor of all technology. I’m bound to understand Ellul’s perspective. After all, it was he who advised, “Think globally, act locally.” I’m conscious that everything he said, and others’ lives he touched (I’m thinking of a friend in Hungary who is a multimedia artist, soon to visit me again) has come to me by technique/technology.

Ellul is correct in observing, “Like cancer in a living organism, the systematization of technique pervades every cell of our modern technical and technological society.”

I wonder, thinking to the opening scenes in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” if that cancer was set in motion by the accidental notice of the ape smashing a bone pile with another bone. What happened in the brain of that simian creature was the rubbing together, as it were, of the two halves of a coffee-bean-sized part of the fleshy brain known as the nucleus accumbens.

This little piece of the brain (or mind) may be responsible for the creative process of which humans are so fond of thinking separates our species from other animals. Ellul says it may be our undoing, and concomitantly, the undoing of much of Earth’s sustainability of life forms like ours.

In my nucleus accumbens, I cling to hope that if I read Ellul and other people who came before me and demonstrated their way of “smashing a pile of bones” I might help in Earth’s human and other life forms’ sustainability. Maybe if I read Ellul, his words will help me with skills to turn my creativity to help other people who have the same hope and desires.

It is, I believe, the illusion of calculation at work in the minds of men and women – and children, too. This illusion has its counterpart in the invention of the illusion of 3D space on a flat plane, with equally important long-range effects on Earth’s human life and all life-forms’ sustainability. By the illusion of calculation – gaming probability, in other words – humans may use technology to restore what technique has deconstructed or use it to destroy man’s propensity toward destroying life as we knew it.