Heidegger saw technology as a vicious circle: technology breeds more technology, it “challenges” nature, and people live in a Gestell, or “frame,” of technology. In doing so, we lose elements of freedom. With technology so rampant and so ever-present, the original experience of Being. says Heidegger, is lost. We cannot let nature "be," we are less able to submit, to surrender to that experience of being; the “releasement towards things” is simply unavailable in a technological society: the poetic experience of the world is sidelined and overwhelmed by technology. This was reinforced by Heidegger’s views on America. The United States had often been the object of German thought. For Heine, America was the symbol of all that Romanticism detested. After a visit across the Atlantic, Nikolaus Lenau, sometimes called the German Byron, described the country as disfigured by its politics, with its culture imposed from outside. Nietzsche expected America to spread a spiritual emptiness (Geistlosigkeit) over Europe and neither Moeller van den Bruck nor Spengler cared much for it, though Ernst Jünger admired America’s ability to involve all the country in World War I. As we have seen, Freud thought America “a mistake” (whatever that might mean). For Heidegger, America was the symbol of the crisis of our age. “which is also the deepest crisis of all time.” It represents the greatest alienation of man, his profoundest loss of “authenticity,” and it was the supreme impediment to spiritual reawakening. America reduced everything to its lowest common denominator, all experience to routine—all was trivialized and rendered bland. Americans, said Heidegger, were “totally oblivious” to man's encounter with Being.” After the first space probes, Heidegger wrote that “there is no longer either ‘earth’ or ‘heaven,’ in the sense of poetic dwelling of man on this earth.” The age of technology is our fate and America the home of this “catastrophe.”

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