(Die Perfektion der Technik, 1946)

The new German edition is headed with threats that I would be hounded by Technicians of the law, in all their argumentative perfection, across this machine world should I quote a single line of Junger’s ingenious work. In case this publisher is an actual relation of Junger, I will honor that, and at once relieve myself of two burdens: of quoting the words of a better writer, and of trying to reduce via summary his penetrating evaluation of technological thinking and organizations. The density of worldly wisdom, in the reposing light of Eternity, in this book exceeds any I have read, including all sacred texts.

The 38 essays of Georg’s study, progressively reveals that the perfection of technical form reveals the ultimate failure of achieving utopia or paradise through technological development. The forward by a California-based German of the 1950s, explains, as does Georg later, that perfection in German does not translate to the Anglo mind. That German perfection is the realization of potential, where the Anglo ideal—especially in America—is the realization of an aim, such as satisfying the insatiable greed and need of the technologically organized—or automated—man. To the ancient mind, Georg reveals, such a result is tantamount to damnation. Please keep in mind, that God, His works, messengers and his Eternal Son, all come to us through the ancient prism, even if our denomination is recently adjusted. Junger never wanders from this axis.

The chapters are brutally and beautifully concise. The distillation of one man’s thought upon the applied thought of his predecessors is an amazing read, sublime, poetical, free of hysteria and ideology, respectful of vision, and ultimately aimed at an audience with Eternity. No book has impressed me more. None, though Luke comes close.

Even our sacred texts are the product of conclaves, councils, editorial wrangling over the merits of inspired, and even divine, words. While respecting these, Georg penetrates with a mind of a nature that is perpendicular to technology, and somehow understands these technologies.

George explains various aspects of the sinking human condition which many of our fellows now fight against. I am in one of the largest urban areas of North America, as I write this, in Los Angeles. Seen from the train, it appears as from Junger’s nightmare of the automated demonic city, where man’s technology has enslaved elemental forces which seek by their nature to escape, and run us over and crush us as a bi-product of their remorseless function. From the train and highway, I see stacked towers of glass, concrete and steel, rivers of concrete trickling near death, imported palm trees the only anthem of life visible above a sky line starkly absent bird life. Yet here, in the corner of this house, between two green hills, within the city limits, I hear chickens outside in the yard to my left. To my right I hear a mother cooking breakfast to the music of an infant strapped to her apron front and a boy and girl toddler helping with breakfast.

The father is at work, who brought me here to train in fighting, to be able to protect and survive, even as he and his wife affront the machine nation which owns the ethics that only things—not people—should reproduce. I arrived five hours late by train, yesterday, while reading Georg’s great book. Why? Because freight takes precedence. Every time a machine is directed to move dead things, we the living, are directed by the capitalist dispatcher to wait on the siding while our hallowed heaps of consumable goods parade like a 20th Century army on by.

There are four general points that Georg makes in his eloquence, as I note that this writing machine is changing his name from Georg to George!

-1. Dead Time: The rise of technological thinking brings into being ‘Dead Time.’ Abidence to the dictates of Dead Time, drives human organization to conform to machine parameters, making a man an automaton. This seems to be prefigured in the workshop of Vulcan, making the Shield of Achilles, when he is served by intelligent machines with silver tongues. Those automatons, in Georg’s concept, are reduced men, human robots. This explains why ancient Greek science abhorred the mathematical ideal of infinity as explained by Spengler in Decline of the West. They knew, either by instinct or the fate of Atlantis, that the mathematical mind applied to human organization was the raising of a demon, a demon of willful make and mind.

-2. Tool of Tools: this is a fighting concept, the importance of wrestling and boxing to the weapon fighter, the lesson that the hand is the tool of tools and that the tool, being based on the hand, when amplified and evolved along measurable potentials, will be controlled by a method of organization that is applicable to man as an individual and collective, but also to a corrosive effect, reducing man, by stages, to a tool. The organization of tools and men prefigure conformity, delusion and hysteria. Life under such control is made bearable by movement and spectating at rituals, and ultimately being hypnotized by dreams via drugs, mass sports events, movies, TV. Here those socially maimed souls dream through avatars of strength, becoming the worshipers of athletes and actors. The hunger persists, most notably a thirst for movement, to give a temporary feeling of life in Dead Time.

-3. The Technician and Demagogue are symbiotic. From the earliest times priesthoods and kings are displaced by demagogues and tyrants by using the technician, who in his earliest guise is a combination banker/mine operator, slave trader, who manages artisans and scribes as tools. To the banker even the tyrant, the general the high priest, are merely tools. Pure power is the motive of the amoral technician, not evil, but power. The need to organize labor makes of every decision a closed conspiracy, for conspiracy is cooperative management, a necessity of technical, planned, causal organization when applied to humanity. Thus, the rise of the popular orator, and the importance of oratory in antiquity, in such a figure as Demosthenes [Peoplestrength] provides the shadowy technician, rarely a figure that fails to be loathed by the working man, with a tool for interface with men. In the Early Modern context, this gives rise to Ideology and is refined to advertising and propaganda, which disposes even of ideology as if a spent arrow that is embedded too deeply in the target to withdraw without warning the sleeping soldiers that their sentry has been slain.

-4. Prometheus is finally, in all my mythic reading, understandable to me in a modern context. Junger alone figured him out, properly transposing Hesiod’s age of iron upon that fettered titan’s shoulders. The fire that Prometheus stole from the gods to give to man was from the Sun, it was the atomic article, not taken from the workshop of Vulcan. The sun nourished man of old; man already had its boon. The wrath of Zeus was that Prometheus enslaved the Sacred Fire, that fire that modern man still maintains in servitude.

Georg Junger does not advocate against technology, but rather demonstrates through exact examination that the mindset of technically organized man demands constant and active conspiracy, to include mental and emotional manipulation on mass and individual levels; that technology deals with masses of material, and that to compel humanity to serve the machinery that deals with masses of elemental material, that methods for processing mankind as a mass, as an ever homogenizing collective, naturally follow in the name of efficiency. And finally, we confront the ancient horror of infinity, the soul-hunger experienced by mechanized, robotic man, as he stampedes ever more rapidly along the arc of the hunger generated by his social evolution into a tool.

Somewhere beyond the veil of True Time I hope to have the honor to shake hands with Friedrich Georg Junger.