Ellul described himself in an interview as 'an active pessimist'. Ellul's passion was to understand. His 'answers' to society's problem was (for him being a Christian) a Christian one. He put these in his theological books. He wrote explicitly on anarchy as the option for Christians. If people think it too negative, as Ellul asked of them, please show errors in fact or argument.
Marcus Garvey was wrong. RazorBladeKandy was white. Chinweizu synthesized both their ideas but it was Rollo Tomassi who perfected them. His text The Rational Male currently has far more appeal than the myriad of black nationalist literature already in circulation. It so happens that he published it the same year Tommy Curry challenged the fantasy of male privilege, referring to being a black male as a death sentence . His The Man Not however was not the first text to address the shortcomings of fem-centric pan-africanism. Nor was his recent 'Decolonising the Intersection' despite highlighting his attempts to emphasise the role of misandry in black female thinking. Chinweizu (Anamtomy of female power) and Shahrazad Ali (The Black Mans Guide) also made similar efforts but it was George Subira (1992) who hit the mark . Unlike Chinweizu, Subira did not draw upon Esther Vilar's 1976 classic, The Manipulated Man. Unlike most disciplined minds, Subira was an original thinker and one of the first to advocate a programme of economic leadership. Most modern black rhetoricians can offer no such programme or agenda because they are largely victims of black female programming. Their minds were long domesticated meaning they are reduced to reproducing aimless echo chambers almost every time they talk. Neely Fuller (1957) was not hostage to such conditioning but his programme seems to have a key fault. Despite realising the incredible driving motivating force of sexual expression , he still managed to downplay it's role, especially how it compares to the larger logic of antiblackness and global white terror domination. Although Charles Mills (1997) did indirectly develop his ideas, he neglected to integrate the foundation his own work borrowed from, "The Sexual Contract." (1996) Neil Postman, like Jeff Schmidtt, was one of the few people capable of making sense of these divergent ideas (much like John Gatto and Jan Matthews were two of those rare individuals with the pieces of the puzzle.) Conventional panafrikanism doesn't even realise there is a jigsaw to be solved. It has a distorted conception of itself because it views the world through a damaged lens incapable of accountability and self-reflection. PanAfrikanism will not produce any quick results either because unlike Chinweizu, Subira and Curry, it still refuses the interrogate and recognise the role of women in sabotaging the afrikan agenda. Texts like Addicted to White work towards this, only, in this age of intersectional confusion and fragmented voices in the wind, it isn't necessary to silence this perspective; it is enough just to drown it out. Jacques Ellul and Guy Debord surely foresaw this tragic arrangement, when few others could. Men have been fooled, black and white. It is no longer a question of race-first but male first, if not black-male first at the very least. Men are going to have to muster the clarity and courage to challenge the corporate-feminine regime dominating their "emptied" lives. If anything is to be redeemed black thinkers will need to prioritise the black pill and realise that the fundamental question of what it means to be a woman is as urgent as the need to ask what it means to be white. Gwiz +447939642873 Omalone11@gmail.com Addendum: 1. Attention to a woman is like a blowjob to a man 2. When a man's contempt for women surpasses his lust for them, only then shall he become wise 3. Women think all men are the same - that is their strength. Men think all women are different - that is their weakness 4. A man's facade of strength is his biggest weakness; a woman's facade of weakness is her biggest strength 5. Men fake interest, women fake orgasms A. Women are not to be loved; they are to be handled B. Women are not complicated; they are complicating C. A man must value his time the same way women put premiums on their body D. Men struggle for physical dominance but women opt for social domination E. Men compete; women conspire
awesome series, felt like the perfect length and gave great overview of the source material while mixing in your own insights and outside resources. thanks!
I've just 'discovered' Ellul last year, by widening my general reading habits into technocracy related and metaphysic themes, so your comments on his work are appreciated. Thank You! :-)
I think Ellul puts too much power in the hands of pharmacology. The media and communication technology is more effective in replacing the family, the erotic, and a safe outlet for rage and hysteria.
My nephew was put on ritalin when he was only 4 years old because he apparently had "ADHD" though unsurprisingly his "ADHD" symptoms only seemed to appear when he was doing class work. He would have no trouble playing games or watching shows, he would sit perfectly still. Now he's been on it for 2 years and is underweight and sickly looking, as a 6 year old but he's several years ahead of his peers. He wakes up in the morning and takes the pills himself, without anyone being around, because of how stimulating the drug is, they now have him on a sleeping medication to take at night. Neurogenesis is the process by which new neurons are formed in the brain. The younger you are, the more easy you are to soak up information. By inhibiting the reuptake of dopamine to levels that is supraphysiological, beyond even that of having sex, he's able to sit there and get tunnel vision onto any one topic. That is the end goal, that is the wonderful technique to turn children into nothing more then mindless machines. 1 in 6 Americans are on SSRIs so they don't kill themselves. Think of how absurdly high that number is, people that would otherwise end their own life if it wasn't for something that altered them internally to allow them to cope with a sick world. Pharmacology isn't about replacing the family, the erotic, it's about turning people into docile and effective slaves.
The physical impact of technique on the biosphere has driven the biosphere far beyond equilibrium into self-reinforcing positive feedback loops, such as disruptions to jet streams and ocean currents due to Arctic warming. Global climate change (physical technique if you will) has effectively - in Ellul's terms - become autonomous. This is a very predictable outcome of human technique, which endlessly drives towards refinements, increased complexity, and expanded material processing, all of which requires more energy to support and produces more waste in both material and heat form. The laws of biology also apply here, whereby species inexorably expand to fill their ecological niche as long as nutrients are available. The problem is that homo stupidus applied primitive technique early on (fire being a good example) to take over the ecological niches of other species, wiping them out in the process, and looking forward will ultimately lead to biosphere crash. The ultimate question is whether homo stupidus is smarter than yeast? I'm afraid that homo stupidus has irretrievably run down a well-worn path to the destination reached by 99%+ of all species, that being extinction.
If we grant that technology has its' own telos, a telos that we cannot know but only follow, then the project of humanization of the means of production will be largely consumed with course correction inside the machine of scientific rationality. Every attempt at correction will only cause the further expansion and extension of technology. Communism and Capitalism within the framework scientific rationality come to late to a game in which they are only marginal players who can only slow the game down or speed it up.
