Jacques Ellul. A Noological Sociology of Modernity II

Jacques Ellul's works offer an excellent reading. It provides insights in the true motivation of man, and into the nature of modernity. He sees man as he is, as a spiritual being and modernity as a Zeitalter driven by an infinite will to power. Man has been created free and is a being that can invent himself and become whatever he wants. This is the answer that he gives to God thereby forgetting that he is still a creature. In this ongoing process of transgression and self-invention, mankind looses its freedom and becomes entangled and under the mastery of the technological system. Power is efficiency is what the man craves, and most of the transformations that take place in society are just the expression of the expansion of the technological system. Hope exists, but it depends on the transcendent liberty that is God and man's willingness to abstain from making use of the means of power at his disposal.