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 be the victor, but only by submitting irreparably to technical slavery. In effect he has no freedom of choice.
Reality is itself a combination of determinisms, and freedom consists in overcoming and transcending these determinisms.
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.
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.
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.
The computer is an enigma. Not in its making or its usage, but because man appears incapable of foreseeing anything about the computer’s influence on society and humanity. We have most likely never dealt with such an ambiguous apparatus, an instrument that seems to contain the best and the worst, and, above all, a device whose true potentials we are unable to scrutinize.
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.
Technological society leads to increasing numbers of people who cannot adapt to the inhuman rhythm of modern life with its emphasis on specialization. A class of people is growing up who are unexploitable because they are not worth employing even for the minimum wage. Technological progress makes whole categories of people useless without making it possible to support them with the wealth produced by the progress.
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.
Enclosed within his artificial creation, man finds that there is “no exit”; that he cannot pierce the shell of technology again to find the ancient milieu to which he was adapted for hundreds of thousands of years. In our cities there is no more day or night or heat or cold. But there is overpopulation, thralldom to press and television, total absence of purpose. All men are constrained by means external to them to ends equally external. The further the technical mechanism develops that allows us to escape natural necessity, the more we are subjected to artificial technical necessities.