Daily Inspiration Quote by Jacques Ellul

Ellul lands the blow with an almost bureaucratic chill: “In sum” signals a verdict, not a musing, as if the case has already been tried and the sentence is ready. The real provocation is his choice of “rendered.” Thought hasn’t died of neglect; it has been made pointless by design pressures outside the individual. That passive construction quietly shifts blame away from personal laziness and toward systems that engineer our attention, our pace, and even our sense of what counts as “acting.”

The subtext is Ellul’s lifelong quarrel with technological society: not gadgets, but technique as a governing logic that prizes efficiency, predictability, and measurable output. In that world, reflection becomes a luxury with no institutional home. Decisions are pre-formatted by procedures, metrics, and deadlines; reflection is tolerated only when it can be converted into “actionable insights.” Ellul’s cynicism isn’t anti-intellectual posturing. It’s a diagnosis of a culture that treats thinking as a stall, a friction in the machine, something to be compressed into a productivity hack.

“Modern men and women” matters, too. He’s not scolding a decadent elite; he’s talking about ordinary life under administrative and technological regimes. The sting is that he implicates both “live” and “act”: even private life is colonized by the same imperatives shaping public behavior. Ellul’s intent is less to mourn contemplation than to expose how modernity rigs the game so that reflection feels futile - and then congratulates us for moving fast anyway.