“No social, human, or spiritual fact is so important as the fact of technique in the modern world, and yet no subject is so little understood”
Jacques Ellul. The Technological Society. 1954
If a survey were conducted among the population living in today's urban-industrial cities and they were asked what is the main daily problem they face in their lives, a very high proportion of the responses would refer to economic problems and to the problem of the search for happiness. It would not be a coincidence that these two problems were mentioned together in the responses to such a survey, since the values that govern modern urban-industrial societies are precisely those that have defined material happiness as the meaning of human life since the 19th century.
In order to offer a clearer range of responses to such a survey, the main thesis of these books is to show the reader that the actual problems faced by individuals living in the urban-industrial societies of our times are essentially technical problems, and that such problems affect all social strata, far beyond the boundaries defined by the professional groups commonly associated with such problems, that is, specialist technicians, engineers, etc.
From the baby lying in the cradle, the teenager playing with his video game console, the couple on their honeymoon in the Caribbean, to the parents going shopping at the supermarket, the issue of technique addressed in these books imposes its demands on the most diverse social groups. And although in the survey described above these groups claim that their problem is that of seeking material well-being, the combination that I present in these books of a comprehensive and detailed view can help us to perceive that, in regard to the effective means required to achieve these ends of material well-being, these means are of a technical nature.
One of the most striking aspects that I show in these books is that the thesis of the dominance of technique in most of the practical everyday problems takes place in times when the sector formed by intellectuals, journalists, academia, scientists, technicians and engineers are the most ignorant of the issue of technique. How can this contradiction be explained?...
To answer this question, these books argue that the cultural debate on the question of technique was almost aborted in the middle of the last century, and that one of the main reasons for this is that first in the West and then in the East, both science and technology began to be conceived as means that can be hypothetically used to affirm political, economic and social objectives. In these books I show that this subordination of such means to such ends only occurs very superficially in techno-industrial development, and that technique, like a very powerful trunk, determines in practice which specific branches of science and technology will be operative and functional, independently of the objectives that the political classes and other figures of public influence propose to their voters and followers. I also insistently show that the fact that we rarely perceive this power of technique over the feasibility of human decisions is because large sectors of our societies continue to believe wholeheartedly that "technology is neither good nor bad but depends on how it is used" an expression that affirms a way of thinking that is implicitly loaded with misunderstandings, and in which perhaps the most serious mistake is to refer to the concept of `technology´ with a very vague idea of the concept, in such a way that this term is commonly used to refer to machines, artifacts, tools, engineering, systems, architectures, devices, etc. and even this concept is often confused with science itself.
The last authors to address the question of technique were men of great culture stature such as Lewis Mumford, Jacques Ellul or Oswald Spengler, and yet these authors failed to provide a definitive definition of technique. As I show in these books, one of the main reasons for this is that scientific discourse on technique (that is, techno-logy [τέχνη téchnē -technique- and λόγος -lógos-) was impoverished a century ago by the paradigmatic limits that affected science itself, and for this reason the progressive approach to the definition of technique that I develop in these books is accompanied by a constant overcoming of such limits, above all by incorporating the important advances that have taken place since the 1960s in the sciences linked to processes of high energy dissipation. This definition contributes to defining technique in a way equivalent to how energy is defined, that is, through its manifestations. But the most important thing about this definition of technique is that it demonstrates the intuition of the great German writer and war hero, Ernst Jünger, in the 1930s, an intuition about the total character of technique that has very decisive implications in political and institutional decision-making, since it conditions the practical effectiveness of such decisions to the extent that they converge with what is determined by such totality.
Because of this total character of technique, it is no coincidence that we live in times when we very rarely see individuals and organizations succeeding in affirming in practice the life goals that they set in advance autonomously and freely, and we can also see that they only succeed in affirming such goals if the goals are already convergent with those determined by technique. In this sense, it is set forth in these books that the individual search for material well-being is an objective that is only feasible if the individual serves -even without being aware of it- the goals determined by technique, or in other words, I set forth in these books that such a search for material well-being does not serve in practice the goals determined by the individual but rather the continuous and unstoppable development of technique, which is demonstrated by the commonly observed fact that the individual dominated by the power of technique is rarely satisfied after having achieved the amount of material well-being that such individual initially aimed for.
Although in our times material well-being is commonly considered a vital objective, an end in itself, the knowledge of the technical phenomenon that I expose in these books allows us to recognize that, in practice, such well-being is a means, a “bait” that ultimately serves the divine power of technique, that is, it serves the “power for the sake of power over matter” that in classical Greece was mythically represented by the Titans. Of course, this does not prevent the existence of a considerable percentage of the population that still believes that our lives are subordinated to the decisions of influential and millionaire people (George Soros, Elon Musk, Donald Trump, etc.) but even such a belief is, in itself, a product of technique because, as I show in these books, the economy, finance, politics and the media are only functional if they also serve technique, far beyond any public or private interest.
In these books I present that this reversal of material well-being brought about by technique from the position of an end to that of a means is a reversal of enormous significance, especially considering that precisely in traditional societies material conditions are not necessarily considered as ends, but as means that serve the individual to embody the meaning of his/her life. In such traditional societies this transcendent objective is closely linked to the validity of very diverse religious values that were eroded in the lifestyle of Westerners since the emergence of scientific-materialist thought and religious reforms (i.e. Protestantism) during the 16th-17th centuries. The emergence of these two cultural movements meant that since the advent of modernity the individual believed himself/herself free to choose his/her own destiny, at last being able to free himself/herself from the severe hierarchical, feudal and religious constraints of feudal existing in the previous medieval “Dark Ages” But let us imagine for a moment a medieval craftsman who participates in the construction of a cathedral that takes 250 years to erect and who therefore does not live long enough to finally see its completion. As we can also imagine, the fact that this craftsman does not succeed in visualizing during his lifetime the architectural purpose of his craft does not imply that this purpose does not exist, and even doesn´t imply that the craftsman doubts about the existence of such a purpose. On the contrary, the individual who lives within urban-industrial societies can persuade himself/herself that he/she is free to choose his/her own destiny, but -as I show in these books- the feasible options are given by the dynamics of techno-industrial development, which limit human destiny to the incessant search for material happiness, virtualizing all other freedom of human choice to the domain of consumption and entertainment. Therefore, discernment of the degrees of freedom granted by technique is essential for making free, autonomous and effective decisions, both in the case of individuals and organizations.
The domain where this recognition is most urgent is in the domain of ecology and in projects that aim to achieve sustainability, especially considering the great challenges that the physical limits of the planet impose on life on earth in the near future. Even today, it can be verified that those who direct these projects maintain a utilitarian vision of technology, especially in the field of renewable energy technologies, but what I have verified that is missing in these initiatives is a recognition of the cultural value of technique, as it was conceived in traditional crafts or in classical Greece when technique was linked to arts and crafts (Latin: techné ), serving to operatively develop the divine faculties of the human senses in connection with nature. In this regard, it is very instructive to present in these books my personal experience when I designed the main guidelines of the 'Fondo Natural' project of the Obra Social Caixa Galicia in 2006, a project initially budgeted at €40 million, and which aspired to revolutionize the relationship between economy, culture and nature in the region of Galicia (Spain). This project was however aborted by decree, by the same administrative authorities that were responsible for 3 of the 4 ecological catastrophes that occurred on the Galician coast (Urquiola, 1976, Casón, 1987, Mar Egeo, 1992, Prestige, 2002) and in 2007 I wrongly concluded that the termination of the project had been caused by a coalition of interests existing between the regional political classes of Galicia and the central Government of Spain. But what I also share with the reader in these books is my early discovery that the main lines of the `Fondo Natural´ project could not be successfully established in Galician society because they did not converge with the dynamics of techno-industrial development determined by the technical phenomenon, which affirm in practice the values that a given society embraces, and I expose the first need to urgently recognize the physical unsustainability of such development based on material exploitation, raising the opportunity offered by the recognition of the technical phenomenon to understand that its total force not only obeys the profane values lived by a given society but also obeys its sacred values.