Technology the Devourer of Man

The unleashing of individualism and the perfecting of technology are two

parallel phenomena. First sweetly, timidly, man raised with disquieted
conscience the veil that covered secrets and did not fall down dead. He
discovered unexpected things. That which was mysterious became natural
and explicable. He didnt have respect for the unknown and he who lacked
this respect bore its fruits. The success he won encouraged him to
recommence. His scrutinizing view went to the depths of things. He did
experimentation and research. But each new piece of knowledge acquired is a
means to impose on nature a new servitude. The perfecting of technology
increased the general yield. The augmentation of consumption, the lure of
unlimited possibilities required a change in economic organization. At a
certain stage of development, technology always corresponds to a particular
form of economic structure. The individual crosses successive steps. The
sentiment of his superiority and the consciousness of his force increase. He
puts traditional social relations in question and concludes that by reason of
his advanced knowledge, they can no longer be justified. He revolts, having
finally won the cause and transforming in this fashion the social
conditions. The tendency to push limits marks the whole of this evolution.
Technology finally believes itself at the height of all tasks. Industrial
production pushes an unfathomable growth. The individual feels liberated. In
principle, he no longer recognizes any limit. Rules, order, and harmony of the
whole do not result from things. Still yet, in the measure where we respect
borders, we do it uniquely from an external point of view, that is to say from
the point of view of profitability. Technology turns toward new tasks when
investment is worth the pain. It needs capital to put at its disposal in the hope
of fetching, one day, interest. The production of goods is regulated by the
perspectives of profit. When there is a chance of profit, capital flows. The
more capital works, the more the rule of man over these things widens. In
general, the individual uses his liberty in the measure where it profits him. He
is all the more free as he represents capital, as he is rich.

Ultimately, the intensity of the processes of economic and technical

development seem like a simple function of the profitability of capital
available to an investment. Even the social importance of an individual is
only an indicator of the profit he earns, of his revenues. From there, money
becomes the measure of everything. The modern reign of money is the
constitutional form of the politics of force that correspond to the technical
era. Its system of provisioning consumer goods to societies is based on the
capitalist economy. Unleashed individualism is the expression of
its moral and mental attitude.

Technology, by removing everywhere the barriers imposed on human

expertise and by submitting all sources of natural energy to man, opens the
way to transformations of a great span. It shortens the distances, bringing
closer that which is far, and rendering the entire world understandable and
accessible. In this atmosphere metropolises, empires, production on a grand
scale, economic monopolies, and multinational trusts flourish. The individual
who feels at home, between his formations and constructions, between his
machines, his instruments, and invisible microwaves, begins to think in terms
of continents and finally in terms of the universe.
When there are no more enigmas to resolve, to explain, respect also
disappears. The veneration of the saints freezes, becoming a simple
convention. Although, by habit, we still do the sign of the cross, we know
that to believe in the sacred is to lie to oneself. The sentiment of rank and of
distance dies out. We become a democrat who is put on equal footing with
everyone else. We familiarize ourselves with forces that can blow away the
universe. We touch them daily. Children play with the stars. We are familiar
with everything and we know everything. Nothing can astonish or inspire
respect any more. All is exposed to the flood light of the most perfect
projectors.

No longer feeling respect, to be without discomfort signifies that we no

longer know limits. But those who do not know limits, ignore responsibility.
He runs the world and abandons his destiny, the sphere of his origins, the
places of his childhood, whatever may come: he leaves behind him. He goes
as far as permitted and, with each step, he profanes and destroys. By moving
the frontiers, he hurts what organically develops. Because all that is organic is
limited. Limits are the receptacle of life. By demolishing them, we waste
living substance. Technology violates nature. It does not account for it.
Technical progress snatches nature, which follows its own laws, one piece of
land after another. What for technology is a triumph is for nature ravage and
violation. Technology, by raising bit by bit the limits fixed by nature, destroys
life. The machine, which is only a function, supplants the organism, which
has an inherent sense. The function of a machines consists of providing a
calculable return. The sense of an organism is to exist and to realize this
existence. Technology always abuses the respect for life. It devours men and
all that is human. We fuel it with bodies, blood, and cooling liquid.
Consequently, in the technical era, war takes the form of a murderous
butchery. The individual, conquered by the spirit of technology, unleashed
and hungry for records, sees in the possession of weapons of annihilation the
most perfect things. Thus he easily throws toxic gas bombs and has no
scruples about asphyxiating millions of women and children in the hinterland.
The conception of modern war reveals in the most formidable and terrifying
fashion the mortifying genius of technology. At its apogee, its productive
capacity is such that is can, at the given moment, rapidly and radically
exterminate all living beings, wherever it finds them.

Of course, this terrible self revelation occurs only at the end. The spirit of
technology unveils its own nature with such violence only when it has
already penetrated and subjugated all of existence. Before the power to
extend the toxic coverings of its murderous fury over that which is living, it
must have already crossed many steps of its progress and its propagation.

In the most intimate sphere, in the smallest cell, in each individual, the spirit
of technology begins its work, secret and underground, of the destruction of
living substance. The loss of this substance leads to proletarianization, whose
final product is the specialized worker. In a few hours, he learns the
rudimentary maintenance of machines and can, consequently, be employed
and take his reports, without any preparation, in all branches of production.
The proletarian does not have a well defined sphere of work, no particular
expertise, that distinguishes him and gives him a sense of life. He is nothing
in himself and by himself. He is anything, mobile or interchangeable. He is a
function of the machine, a little quantity of energy besides the vast processes
of production. Between him and the produced goods, there is only a bond
between cause and effect. Psychological relations, whose depth and
abundance makes the wealth of the human soul, are not created between him
and things. He sells his potential to work. This lack of psychological bonds
equates to a lack of responsibility. He also feels so little sense of
responsibility for his work that the boss feels responsible for the fate of his
workers.

Artisanal production was the first to fall under the empire of technology. The
decline of the artisan was its inevitable consequence. The artisan became the
worker. The artisanal crafts struggled desperately but in vain against this
decline.

Today, we take the gear of the processes of the mechanization of agriculture.

The drama lived by the artisan is repeated on the peasant. It the true that the
invention of the combine harvester, which prepared to equally mow down the
independence of the European peasant, already happened in 1833. But until
the present, it has not been employed against the cultivator. The draft animals
no longer have a place. In the meantime, tractor unit was necessary, the
tractor was constructed. Ever since, the total transformation of agriculture
commenced. In North America, in South America, in Australia, we already
utilize the combine harvester. The cost of production of wheat has fallen by
more than half. The farmer supplanted the peasant as the worker did the
artisan. The farmer is a proletarian peasant. The structures of agriculture
change. The peasant loses footing. The bases of his free existence are shaken.
The soil is stolen from under him. Technology chases him from the earth. The
natural land becomes a romantic dream as the little workshop of the artisan
once did. The International Property Credit, founded on March 3rd in Basel,
will sooner or later make its ravages, like an avenging angel, among the
peasants. It will only be the leader of the spirit of technology in the domain of
German agriculture. The independent peasant is going to disappear.
With the dis-aggregation of labors, all the traditional forms of life change. In
the measure where man ceases to be something for himself, he becomes a
public being, he will be at home everywhere and nowhere. At the end, theses
transformations will equally touch the foundations of the state. It loses its
organic character that follows its proper laws. It becomes an integral part of a
greater economic space, whose branches of production are rationalized
according to the norms of the last conquests of technology.

Man is part of the conquest of nature. He does not make an account where he
tramples on the feet of nature itself and thus he destroys that part of nature. In
the cold climate of technology, the last biological reserves freeze. The natural
energies of reproduction and growth become exhausted. Thus, it is nature that
avenges itself: it punishes this violation, that technology committed against
it, by suicide. Technology celebrates its victories among heaps of corpses
until one day with it will choke under their weight.

Doctrines and theories, programs and dogmas, which serve innovative

historical movements in order to make them known in the world are neither
important or decisive in themselves. Even if we know their content, that does
not mean we comprehend the essence, the sense, and veritable historical
mission of the movement. Only those who, after the letter of theories, see the
hidden motive forces pushing essential transformations, feel this behind a
radical change in the world.

Marxism is more than a this red flag, in the proper and figurative sense,
which then permits it to carry the masses, uneducated and undemanding, and
put them in states of blind excitation. Marxism is the premonition of things
that will happen. Certainly, it is not in this sense that it can show what will be
under the sober lights of its future reality. It is, in someway, the idealization
of the future. Marx was a prophet, but he transformed a cruel destiny and an
overwhelming necessity into a religion of salvation. Very certainly, the spirit
of technology lives in it. He was its pioneer and announced the
mechanization of life. He accelerated these processes by giving hope to those
who would become its victims. He gave them the faith in that which would
become a curse on the world. Thus, they waited with impatience for this
paradise that would become their hell. However, this self destructive folly
was provoked with the aid of the thought of the German philosopher, Hegel.
The dialectical dynamic was the magic formula of the great spirit. Under its
supernatural light, it accomplishes the transubstantiation of the thankless way
of technical progress along the road of grace towards salvation. It must push
to the extreme mechanization, rationalization, monopolism, and
proletarianization. That is the sole means of arriving at the expropriation of
the expropriators. Within the capitalist society, approaching its apogee, the
fruit of a beautiful socialism ripens. The persuasive force of the dialectical
dynamic was due to the fact that the idea seems to be more than an amusing
thought game and they must recognize it as the faithful image of a future
reality. The walls and the gables of the slaughterhouse shine in the distance,
in the mists colored with blood, such an aurora. Their silhouette resembles a
fairy tale castle. Irresistibly, they wait for their victims who hasten to arrive
at the castle.

Anti-Marxism, to them, is not a force that slows, that bears a solution. It only
means the habitual protest of those who profit from the mechanization of the
world, but who fear for their privileges when someone begins to say aloud
what happened. To say properly, anti-Marxism is not the fear of
consequences, but the fear that they will be clearly explained. Marxism
creates illusions and provokes enthusiasm in place of warnings. Anti-
Marxism, in contrast, is hypocritical. It throws accusations and then openly
profits from the situation and secretly favors it. By the force of things,
humanity lets itself be carried by this current. Already the wind carries the
spray of distant whirlpools. The shade of dangerous reefs draws itself on the
horizon. Marxism greets them as isles of happiness, while anti-Marxism
watches the anchorages to find shelter; it would like to reserve it elusively.
Consequently, he does everything for those men, carried by the current,
seeing upstream. Marxism attracts the view in the direction of the onward
march, puts him in a fury. Marxist doctrine is naive. It glorifies the progress
that will destroy its followers. Anti-Marxism is a Tartuffery: it praises the
good old times so that no one remarks it uses modern times exclusively for
itself.

The basically individualist attitude, which is at the base of the processes of

technical development, is naturally expressed by the fact that direction of all
the organisms, rationally structured, tangled, and fused, finds itself in the
hands of a small group of people. This minority, which only knows its own
interest, ignores all metaphysical responsibility and only thinks in terms of
profitability. The men who compose it are the technical functionaries of the
economic system, even the men of the masses are technical functions of their
machines. In Des Tieres Fall (Georg Mller), this genial fantastic vision of
the future by Reck-Malleczewen, Grant is a formidable symbol of these
lords of the world that technology brings into power. Submitting to the
tempo and the force of the machine that he invented, obsessed with
technology and rejected by life he is a great constructor and miserable
shipwreck of a human. Hecatombs of human bodies perish. Quantities of
human life found themselves wasted. Organic communities fall into dust. The
fraternization of men is realized under the form of an immense herd of
proletarians who have, at their head, the chief proletarians with withered
hearts.

That will be the way of the American-European world, of the Western world.
The Western man, who is the arm of technology, to revolt against the natural
order, will expiate his crime by submitting to the law of technology, which
crushes all that is living in him.

We cannot stop the victorious course of technology across the world. The
late comer peoples are put in a position of dependency in the fashion of
falling under the yoke of industrially more advanced nations. These last
years, some of these peoples, until the present under developed, suddenly
realized the situation. Firstly the Russians, but equally the Chinese and Turks,
who became conscious of the danger.

Given the particular character of these peoples, the situation changed

completely, leading to unexpected forms of development. These peoples
Russia at the head didnt simply imitate the West. They did not assimilate
the mentality and the manner of being by making abstractions of themselves.

In Russia, as well as in China and Turkey, relatively young nations entered

into contact with technology. This gave a strange result. The Russian people
could then oppose the constraint of mechanization with their own weight and
a great force, flexible and organic. It did not use its living substance by
sacrificing it to the perfection of the technological apparatus. They seized
technology and not the inverse. The power of organic material reigned over
the processes of mechanization, showing the way and the goal, spawning
channels, but equally indicating the rules. This power was habituated by the
instinctive wisdom of the biological substance of the Russian people. It is in
the Russian state and in the authority that they exercise, that this organic
power shows its value. With much energy, with a firm hand and without
hesitation, they made the inevitable concessions to the spirit of technology.
Since then, they abandoned, courageously and imperturbably that which we
have refused to, in many years. The application of collectivism to agriculture
was, before all, the sacrifice that they had to make, given the revolutionary
effects that we have waited for since the combine harvester. This arbitrary
act, freeing them of illusions, henceforth permitted them to be the masters of
all the decisions to follow.

By placing a living organizing power above the mechanizing tendencies of

technology, the mechanization of Russia could be realized according to the
rules of collectivism. They braced for and broke the individualist pressure of
the technological spirit. Here, it did not open the way to the domination of the
anonymous three cents. Henceforth, the state was on the rise. Certainly, the
individualist principle of technology is in fundamental opposition with the
collectivist form of life in Russia. Even the dangerous work of engineers
testifies to this opposition. Collectivism is the social form that the organic
will must adopt when it wants to affirm itself against the mortifying
influences of technology and limit them to a minimum. Russia conserved this
collectivist form of life such that it will have sufficient vital force to restrain
the dangerous tendencies of technology. The hate that America and Europe
demonstrate towards Russia is the protest of the techno-individualist spirit
that collides with the organic barriers of self defense and believes itself
violated when it fails to achieve its work of biological destruction. The
Western world, in its individualist irresponsibility, feels annoyed and
provoked by the sole existence of a people that imposed the severe discipline
of responsibility. The demon of technology feels frustrated with its wages: it
would want the whole of humanity to burn on its altar. Right now, it foams in
rage because the peoples of the East have restrained it and put it at their
service, to become their domesticated genie. The Catholic curates, the
Protestant pastors, and the apostles of Western civilization echo the horrible
growls of this demon.