Daily Inspiration Quote by Jacques Ellul

Ellul’s line lands like an indictment of modern intelligence: not that we have stopped thinking, but that thinking has been demoted to a hobby. “Superfluous” is the tell. He’s not lamenting stupidity; he’s diagnosing irrelevance. In a society organized around technique and systems - his lifelong obsession - ideas don’t disappear, they get quarantined. Thought becomes “purely internal,” sealed off from consequence, like an app running in the background while the real decisions happen elsewhere.

The subtext is an attack on the prestige economy of intellect. When Ellul calls thinking “more or less a game,” he’s puncturing the comforting belief that reflective people are automatically agents of change. Games can be intricate, even beautiful, but they’re bounded: they have rules, they offer the sensation of mastery, and they end without altering the world outside the board. Ellul’s provocation is that modern life increasingly treats public debate, moral reasoning, even political argument as exactly that: a simulation of agency that produces heat, identity, and entertainment, but rarely leverage.

Context matters: writing in the shadow of mass media, bureaucratic expansion, and postwar technocracy, Ellul watched decisions migrate to institutions that run on efficiency, not persuasion. “Compelling force” signals what’s missing - the capacity for thought to bind action, to impose costs, to reorganize priorities. The sting is that Ellul implicates both the system and the thinker: we accept the bargain, trading influence for the pleasures of commentary. Thinking survives, but as an aesthetic experience - and that, for Ellul, is the real cultural defeat.