One of the principal themes of Jünger, a poet with a strong sense for metaphor, is that modern man’s veneration of technology reveals his distant kinship to the Titans of myth. In the Western tradition, the Titans rebelled against the Olympian Gods and sought to usurp their power for themselves. Most famous of all was Prometheus, who stole the primordial flame and thereby came to symbolize the dangers of human striving and overreach. “All technology is of titanic mold,” Jünger writes, “and man the maker is always of the race of the titans. From his titanic kinship stems his love for the enormous, the gigantic, the colossal; his delight in towering works that impress by their quantity and mass, the vastness of their piled up matter.”
For Jünger, this ‘titanic’ impulse expresses itself through our technology-driven industrial economy, which has grown from its humble origins in western Europe to cover the whole earth, determining every aspect of life from the air we breathe to the food we eat. Whereas a healthy, humane economy would take care to preserve the underlying substance with which it works, whether in terms of manpower or natural resources, the modern “global economy” seeks to maximize production and consumption above all else. Although couched in the language of freedom—of free enterprise and free markets—it often seems that persons exist to serve the economy and keep it functioning rather than the other way around.
By Matthew Phenege Friedrich-Georg Jünger on Technology & Prometheanism
Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. I think we're being run by maniacs for maniacal ends and I think I'm liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That's what's insane about it." - John Lennon