For without freedom, there is physical cause and effect, but no understanding and truth. The cause-and-effect mechanism can never recognize and describe its own activity at the very highest level, and then transform itself to an even higher level. But that is exactly what we do when we understand; all understanding is self- understanding and self-transformation, another name for which is freedom.
And in those same cracks of freedom our entire future lies -- the only future possessed of human meaning, the only future free of the machine's increasingly universal determinations, the only future not eternally frozen to the shape of our own past natures.
Cracks cannot exist except as fissures breaking through a resistant material, and in this sense our technological achievements may turn out to have provided the necessary resistance against which we can establish a human future. If, for example, we are now learning to manipulate our own genetic inheritances, this technical ability must lead all but the hopelessly somnolent to a sense of desperation: "What sort of men should we make ourselves?" It is the same question we see reflected back at us from the uncomprehending face of the cleverest robot. There is no technological answer.
How might we find an answer? Only by looking within ourselves. Not at what moves in lockstep with all the external machinery of our lives, but, to begin with, at the silent places. They are like the sanctuary we find ourselves passing through for a few moments upon waking in the morning. Just before we come fully to ourselves -- recollecting who we were, bowing beneath all the necessities of the preceding days -- we may feel ourselves ever so briefly on the threshold of new possibilities, remembering whispered hopes borne upon distant breezes. We know at such moments the freedom -- yes, just the tiniest cracks of freedom, for Ellul was, after all, right -- to awaken a different self. "Must I be fully determined by the crushing burdens of the past? Or is something new being asked of me -- some slight shift in my own stance that, in the end, may transform all the surrounding machinery of my existence, like the stuff of so many dreams?"
Man is he who knows and transforms himself -- and the world -- from within. He is the future speaking.
