Jacques Ellul: Betrayal of the West (excerpt)
We are racing toward the end of the world and have no plan of escape, but it is considered impolite to acknowledge that fact in public…
We see the mistakes we have made, but we continue to make them with an apparent blind obstinacy … We know the implications of pollution, but we go on calmly polluting the air, the rivers and the oceans. We know people are going mad from living in huge conglomerations, but we, like automatons, go on building them. We know the dangers of pesticides and chemical fertilizers, but we continue to use them in increasingly massive doses. We know all this, but we are like the masochist who knows others have put a little arsenic in each bowl of soup he eats, but who goes on eating it day after day, as though impelled by an irresistable force.
Our speed is constantly increasing, and it does not matter where we are going. We are caught up in the madness and hubris of the dance of death: the important thing is the dance, the Saturnalia, the Bacchanalia, the Lupercalia. We are not longer worried about what will emerge from it or about the void it points to. We are content to die of dancing. Our generation is not even capable of cynicism. It takes a kind of terrible greatness to say, “After me, the deluge.” No one says that today; on the contrary, everyone is glutted with promises and regards the mad dance as a way to authentic renewal. Yet there is no goal, nothing transcendent, no value to light the way; the movement is enough.
The nihilistic revolution has succeeded. Today’s political activists who still claim to be revolutionaries have nothing to put in nihilism’s place. Movement for movement’s sake, thorough study for the study’s sake, the revolution for the revolution’s sake: that, they say, is the only way to escape the system. It is a remarkable thing, however, that this system renders mad not only those who are part of it but those who reject it as well. The system is now the god that makes us mad, but it is a god we have created with our own minds.”
From 1978 book The Betrayal of the West by Jacques Ellul – as published in the September/October edition of Adbusters – the “Thought Control in Economics” issue
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