The choices we make each day are filled with great meaning, though we often do not realize it. Each one determines whether one’s union with God through Christ grows more complete or undergoes destruction; whether one’s community likewise grows in the virtues or the vices - whether its economic, political, etc. institutions manifest the divine reality (which is the only reality) in which they are rooted or whether they manifest a satanic anti-reality.
Such things we must keep in mind when presented with the prospect of progress. By applauding Google and the other leaders of transhumanism, of man joining with machine in order to open up a new and higher and better plane of existence, by adopting every new piece of technology they throw our way for the sake of convenience, we condemn ourselves to spiritual death, which will eventually lead to destruction of the physical world around us. (And is this not what are we seeing now?)
Transhumanism or humble agrarian living; international corporations or family farms and stores; Christ or Antichrist; good or evil - every choice effects us and all the world around us. We must at all costs reject things like this:
Dugan, who is Head of Advanced Technology at (Google-owned) Motorola, told an audience at the All Things D11 Conference that the company was working on a microchip inside a pill that users would swallow daily in order obtain the “superpower” of having their entire body act as a biological authentication system for cellphones, cars, doors and other devices.
“This pill has a small chip inside of it with a switch,” said Dugan. “It also has what amounts to an inside out potato battery. When you swallow it, the acids in your stomach serve as the electrolyte and that powers it up. And the switch goes on and off and creates an 18 bit ECG wide signal in your body and essentially your entire body becomes your authentication token.”
Dugan added that the chip had already been FDA approved and could be taken 30 times a day for someone’s entire life without effecting their health, a seemingly dubious claim.
Would you swallow a Google microchip every day simply to access your cellphone?
Privacy advocates will wince at the thought, especially given Dugan’s former role as head of DARPA, the Pentagon agency that many see as being at the top of the pyramid when it comes to the Big Brother technocracy.
Indeed, when host Walt Mossberg asked Dugan, “Does Google now know everything I do and everywhere I go because let’s face it….you’re from Google,” she responded by laughing and saying Mossberg should just swallow the pill.
In addition to the edible microchip, Motorola is also working on a wearable e-tattoo that could also read a user’s mind by detecting the unvocalized words in their throat.
And instead follow the advice of men like Father Matthew Raphael Johnson. From his review of The Essential Agrarian Reader, edited by Norman Wirzba:
iii.
This is only the beginning however. Industrialism and urbanism are themselves saturated with moral and philosophical content. Consider this: pretend you’re in Walmart. What do you see? Shelves and shelves of items, thousands of choices, all at a relatively low price. One can shop in pleasant surroundings and can be helped in a minute by any staff member. One can take care of a week’s worth of shopping in one store, at one time. Things that decades ago were luxuries for the rich are now easily obtainable by any middling citizen of America. Apparently, capitalism has won, and has provided even the poorest in America with the possibility of a lifetime of labor-saving devices, entertainment and cheap food. Immanuel Kant would call this a “phenomenon.” The problem is that behind a phenomenon is a noumenon, that is, the basis from which the sense impressions are generated. Sense impressions do not exist by themselves, generated out of nowhere, but derive from something, something, frankly, more real than the sense impression itself. I’m going a bit beyond what Kant would agree with, but one can say that the purpose of philosophical inquiry (and I use this broadly) is to discover, not merely this coherence of sense impressions, but rather the origin of the impression itself.
Starting from there, the shadows on the Walmart cave are seen as just that. One can now turn around to see who is castig those shadows, and might even be able to converse with the caster and see what motivated him in so doing. What does Walmart look like then?
As the colorful items on the shelf begin to melt away in the light of truly critical inquiry, as the generic muzak fades, one sees the essence of modern capitalism. One sees the army of security personnel watching thousands of TV screens which monitor and document every move of every shopper. One sees the “walkers,” or spies hired by management to follow workers around, making sure they are working to full capacity. One sees corporate board room meetings where the image of Walmart is discussed. One sees the offices of an ad agency, where the image of corporate America is created and broadcast to the world. One sees thousands of minimum wage workers toiling at the megafarms who supply Walmart with its cheap food. One sees well dressed lobbyists visiting the offices of Senators, Congressmen and staff members, arguing the merits of maintaining the privileges of megafarms and corporate America in general. One sees Walmart managers, who work on average 75 hours a week, monitored minute by minute by the array of cameras whose images are beamed throughout the corporate infrastructure of Sam’s empire.
In other words, what is being described is that the glittering display of cheap items is part of the realm of unreality. It is an alchemically induced illusion, where the images of the television, the manipulations of ad and PR agencies, and even the expectations of post-modern shoppers conspire to transmit a hologram, that of a peaceful, prosperous America, able to have cheap food and many gadgets promising one convenience or another, without ever really having to pay the bills in terms of resource depletion, suppression of wages and unionization, the destruction of the family farm and local retail stores, and the wars necessary to maintain a cheap supply of oil (among other things) to keep the production machine rolling. It is in this transmission of specifically crafted images that finally reaches the telos of ancient gnosis or the alchemical processing of entire populations to reflect the perspectival point of view of the ruling classes. In the ancient world of the Near East, the banks, or the center of the economy, were the temples, overseen by a god, or a fetishization of some social or natural force. The public veneration of this totem was a crude cover for the centralized control of the moneyed powers. The central reason why the Greek oligarchy put Socrates to death was that by arguing that the fetishized gods were a hoax, he was causing a run on the banks. The power of finance, from Nimrod to Hyde Park, has been cloaked in mystification, and this mystification, in the esoteria of the esoteria of the Freemasons, is the cover for oligarchical rule, the rule of matter over spirit, and the dogmatic alchemists mantra that matter is the cause of spirit and the cause of life, the very ontological basis of magick.
iv.
I’ve gone slightly afield. The purpose of this set of essays is to lay out a theoretical and practical ground for the re-emergence of the family farm, for a healthy provincialism expressed in a true stewardship for the land and local resources, and, importantly, a reorienting of priorities from the glittering hallucination of the Walmart shelf to the very health and well being of the land and of the local community. The essays presented here do that, and they do it well.
Agrarianism is not just about the protection of the land and the family farm. It would be a worthy endeavor if it were just that, but it is more. Agrarianism is a mindset. It is a mindset that prefers the quiet beauty of a sunset through the mountains over the Walmart shelf. It is a mindset that prefers the harvest festival to the television. It is a mindset that prefers true community, that is, a foundation of social life based on what one has in common, a close identity of interests and self-definitions, to the atomization of post-modern consumerism. It is a mindset that prefers reality to the image.
These are not just romantic slogans. Of course, there is nothing wrong with romance, for it is these quite natural connections to the land, to natural beauty, to a local landscape which, again quite naturally, conjures up feelings of wonder, enjoyment and belonging. Romance is the engine which drives agrarianism–not some feminine desire for the symbolic over the actual–but rather, a true sense of connection, the sense described by Tolstoy in his famous The Cossacks, a sense of love and integration rather than alienation, an alienation that comes from living in a world of images, images generated by elite rulers in secret settings for purposes even economists have yet to fathom. In agrarianism, the arrogance of Chekov’s anti-hero is replaced by the humility of the farmer who is intimately knowledgeable of his own limits, the limits of nature, and the limits of the locality. The artificially isolated consumer of the post-modern McEmpire is told that he lives in a world without limits, but the images that manifest that message are the creation of a massive infrastructure of manipulation, corporate greed and ideological brainwashing; none of it is actually real.
AntiChrist will appear in much the same manner as Cargill–he will tell a gullible world that he can feed all men, that he ill solve all ideological problems, end nationalism (of course), war and greed, if and only if they will bow down to him. The religions of the world will be all too quick to bow, a few of the ascetics will refuse, and will be called romantic obscurantists for so doing. May God grant that we be so obscurantist.
True progress, spiritual progress, is obtained through labors, deprivations, and abstinences of various kinds. A highly mechanized society of ease and comfort - the things associated with progress today (which is a false progress) - are inimical to it. Our choices will lead us toward one or the other. May the Lord grant us wisdom.
