On The Role of Technology, Self-Sufficiency, and the Wisdom of Exiting the Developed World.
[The following is from an ongoing conversation between myself and a Christian philanthropist and technologist named Zack (his real identity is concealed out of respect for his privacy). Zack is an expert in cyber-security, crypto currency, media-communications, and artificial intelligence. I myself am an expert in theology, philosophy, sustainable agriculture and off-grid homesteading. I am representing the Christian Exodus Project and Zack is representing his interests as a potential supporter of this project.
In spite of the differences, this conversation is ultimately between two men who have a common background in the working class of Appalachia and growing up in a church that was constantly, and before our eyes, wrecked by cultural defeat and internal scandal and failure. We likewise, being from Appalachia, are acutely aware of the real-world poverty of the white working class and their marginalization in the oppression Olympics of our identitarian society and the destruction of heartland America from the off-shoring of industrial jobs, cultural erosion, the sexual revolution, environmental damage, the opioid crisis, immigration, urbanization, and technological shifts.
You will see, in the midst of this conversation, which can be edgy and harsh at times, the deep concern we both have for God’s people, our country, and the future. I will be representing the view that the creation of Christian communities outside the United States and the developed world is ultimately valuable and prudent and should be explored vigorously and that self-sufficiency should be an essential virtue in such a community and that technology has largely been destructive of traditional patriarchal Christian society and therefore should be circumvented and regulated within Christian communities to a place of greater subservience and lesser impact.
Zack, will be pushing back on this idea as well as the idea that Christians should leave the USA; however, you will see in the midst of this conversation that both sides come to greater harmony through debate, which is the goal of all Christian discourse, which is why we share it here now. Enjoy.]
I. Zack Riktor
(responding to my remarks that technology has undermined traditional Christian morality and that Christians in the developed world should create primitive self-sufficient villages in the global south in rural and undeveloped areas of the poorer nations and that it was those who sought self-sufficiency and fled urban areas who survived past societal collapses):
1. On Technology and Cities:
Obviously as a crypto-amish and big fan of Ted Kaczynski and Jacques Ellul I'm very sympathetic but I think it’s more complicated than being pro/anti tech.
The reality is that almost everything is technology. Do you use a car? Do you brush your teeth? Do you use power tools? Tech tech tech. So when you say anti-technology it’s more of a negotiation than a clear line. I would like to mine my own cobalt as well to make the battery in my devices, but how realistic is that? Are you using the internet right now?
What is the end game? The New Jerusalem. A city 1400 miles square. Lot of tech to build a 1400 mile tall skyscraper. Lot of population density too. The idea that tech is somehow fundamentally anti-human is just not true. Granted human efforts like Babel do usually end in confusion and rubble… But I think there is stark contrast between Noah’s call which STARTED with God’s calling and then he provided all the technology needs (the tar and pitch was rather innovative) vs. Babel which actually started with technology first, “ahh ha, by baking the bricks we can build taller structures that reach to heaven” — technology is great if you start with God first. We have to reject city-bad, country-good thinking. Yes historically that is often the case, but it doesn’t have to be. There is not something fundamentally immoral about the city because God himself will dwell in one. Besides, experiencing the beautiful creation while you’re tweaking in your double-wide seems to be rather popular these days.
It’s probably just unhelpful to even frame it as being pro or anti technology. You have to be pro technology. God said go have dominion and we’re not doing that with loin clothes and sticks, so technology is a perfectly normal and expected and GOOD thing that comes out of God’s own creativity. I would look to Ivan Illich, Tools for Conviviality, are the technology tools we’re creating really conducive to human flourishing? And yes, we have to view the whole ecosystem not just some narrow application. The anabaptists have this understanding— they would not say they are anti-technology as much as technology-circumspect.
Practically speaking to the degree you are reliant on a national or global supply chain you are much more vulnerable. Very possible globalization might unwind soon and so hard it will be absolutely brutal. Hard to predict the exact timing on these things but tick-tock.
Some people stayed in Rome while it fell and were crushed. Other technologists saw the writing on the wall and used innovative technology to build castles and moats and agricultural implements in the hinterlands.
You just have to really understand each piece of technology, how it is produced, what the supply chain looks like, etc. But also if you can buy a $2000 singer sewing machine that’s made in china but built like a tank or with parts you can machine yourself do it. Or buy things that have open specs and you can 3D print replacement parts.
I’m sure you probably saw the wireless crystals we’re building on the website. Is it a fun clever piece of art? Yes. Is it also a long distance, low power, encrypted, off-grid communication device? Yes. If they try to shut down grid like they did with the canadian truckers probably be good to have alternative options so you’re not a sitting duck.
You even see this in places like Cuba that are severely repressed and have little tech— there are actually some great hackers there because they have to get resourceful with the limited tech they do have. Is it possible we go all the way back to the Stone Age? Possible, but if we get to that point it will probably be the culmination of all things.
2. On Self-Sufficiency and Freedom
You mention being “free” and “self-sufficient” okay okay, I have libertarian-anarchist tendencies as well. But how Christian is that really? I run into lots of self sufficient pagan freedom people in Texas. To what end? Self-sufficient is not exactly a fruit of the spirit. God-sufficient? Yeah I can get behind that. I run into a good number of Texas Freedom Christians and it’s amazing how often they have a spirit of fear. Like they have incredible insight into what’s going on, that’s great, but the spirit of fear is antithetical to Christ. The real safety and security does not come from having preps or guns or well water. All prudent things to have. But you can have all those things and still be totally faithless.
Being free/self-sufficient is not fundamentally spiritual. Is it? Doesn’t the NT tell us to be a Good Slaves? We’re all jewish slaves now of some sort or another. I dunno. I think it’s more just aligning with God’s specific purposes and plans and using your gifts to build his kingdom. Buy your freedom if you can. But God can also take you to Nineveh and it might be quite catastrophic if you run the other way.
3. On Staying in America and Fighting for a New Future in the Developed World.
I’ve had plenty of dealings with the legal system. It’s wicked. If I had my total druthers I would be far far away from the great mystery Babylon… or whatever this thing is. I don’t have that luxury right now. (Although would be nice if the Lord opens the doors)… but I have to stay here cuz that’s where God has me. At some point you can’t run for safety any more, you have to stand and fight. Pick up the stones from the riverbed. Ellul has a beautiful perspective on this. You fight even though you know you’re probably gonna lose from a human perspective. But maybe the stones will grow wings. The latest expert analysis shows 99% probability that you will just be another dumb nameless dead shepherd boy getting picked at by crows and entirely forgotten by history. But just maybe…. just maybe you will get to take the giant’s head on a little victory tour through Jerusalem.
Also think about it from God’s perspective. America is getting spanked because we rejected him. The Christians rejected him. So the spanking is coming and has already arrived. But God is still moving. And when he moves its always in dire circumstances. God’s wants nothing to do with a 51% Trump-49% Biden electoral victory cuz he won’t get the victory. The real action. The God action. The CRAZY shit happens when the circumstances get dire. I’m EXCITED for the dire circumstances cuz it’s gonna get wiiiild when God moves. It’s being outnumbered 35,000 to 200,000 and God says send 34,500 guys home. THEN we get a real God-story cooking. Don’t forget Moses wasn’t out there being comfy in the dessert. For a time maybe. Then he rolled up and told the Pharoah-God to get stuffed. Now that’s some G faith right there LETS GOOOOOO. And truthfully when you compare our circumstances in America to people in various places throughout time and history we still have ALOT going for us. It could get much much worse and almost certainly will. Don’t care, God is in control and meets our needs.
I mean fuck the communists and God haters and preachers. They are bringing about their own destruction. God will protect his people— in life or death. Why not stick around in America. This is our land. We have a lot of guns. It’s really just in the minds of the people. And that can change. People can choose to repent. Even in the midst of decay there are already small signs of new life emerging.
II. Josh Johnson (the Response):
1. A Critique of Technology and Cities.
Well as a big fan of Kaczynski and Ellul (and I would add Ivan Illich, Martin Heidegger, and Oswald Spengler), the proper definition and understanding of what tech is and is not, in terms of what they are critiquing, is rightly defined and you should already know that it wouldn’t include a toothbrush or a shovel; however it would include being entirely weak and helpless through an utter dependence of forces outside of your individual control, forces created with often anti-human aims and ends. The issue is slavery to tech; the issue is not the tech itself per se. If we are presently in a state of slavery to our technology then we should seek to be liberated progressively and overtime (not cold turkey) as we learn freedom though self-sufficiency. In the end, such technologies could always still be used, so long as it remains a free-relation (as Heidegger calls it); wherein, it is restored to its proper place as a tool under our dominion. You mention Illich’s “Tools for Convivality,” and if you really have read him, you would remember the whole point of that book can be boiled down to the fact that we have a real problem when the tools starting using us instead of the other way around (which is Ellul’s point in “the Technological Society” as well.). If we had a self-sufficient community where we threshed our own grain and knitted our own blankets, I don’t really care if a smartphone linked to a Bluetooth speaker is playing Beethoven’s ninth somewhere in the background (that analogy illustrates my understanding completely and demonstrates a proper free-relation, so long as playing music doesn’t prevent people from learning how to make it).
Personally, I wouldn’t take the dimensions of the New Jerusalem too literally unless we really expect a multi-headed dragon to come out of the sea to rule the world; however, we also have other descriptions of the future Jerusalem, in the midst of which, is the tree of life. The New Jerusalem is a restoration of Eden, a garden. We are being restored to our original design. This great city will look far more like Tolkien’s Shire than Tokyo city.
So is “tech” anti-human? Well it depends on the technology doesn’t it? Nuclear warheads? Mustard gas? The morning after pill? Perhaps none has been more anti-human without a good moral justification for its existence than the condom, but that is a conversation for another time.
Obviously this conversation goes nowhere unless we understand that the critique of technology occurs precisely where it makes us slaves and nowhere else. If technology enslaves you and robs you of your dignity, then it is absolutely anti-human and that is clearly true. Our problem in the west especially is that we are unable to be free because of a self-perpetuating system of increased efficiency, regardless of the human expense, generated by the pursuit and accelerated development of technology which at root is motivated by no other human impulse than that of “convenience” which is a type of moral defect, namely, to be selfish.
Regarding the question of the Bible’s view of technology and urbanism, if you read Jasques Ellul’s work “The Meaning of the City” you will find that the biblical case against both urbanism and technophilia is strong. It was the line of Cain that deviated from the simple life of the line of Seth (which was soley dedicated to living off the land and worshipping God) and after Noah, there was a return (by his example) to families living off of God’s direct providence….but then comes Babel which deviates from this design and out of the same motivation as has always been the case with evil rebellion, that is, “to sinfully desire be like God and not what God designed man to be like.” The Anabaptists have rightly noted in their own works that technophilia, urban centers, warfare, polygamy, blood vengeance, nomadicism, and professional entertainment all emerged from the cursed line.
Does this mean that Christians can’t use technology that was only possible because of the fall? Of course not, for warfare, slavery, and polygamy are all things that emerged as a condition of the fall and sin and not as part of the original design or ideal purpose for mankind, and yet, God permits them to Christians and Christians can receive grace and blessing though their moral use of such. Most of our technology is no different morally speaking than slavery or war or taking multiple wives; technically permissible, but not ideal.
The technological systems we currently use are, according to the standard you yourself invoke, unequivocally and undisputedly contrary to human flourishing and the situation is a hundred fold worse than when Illich was writing his works fifty years ago and he obviously had a good point way back then. If the Unabomber didn’t have a point, then he wouldn’t have been able to live past his infamy and have a resurgence in serious intellectual circles, which he absolutely has as of late and all because he is now more or less to be regarded as a secular prophet, though many of our own (Christians) prophesied as much as well. The Anabaptists saw it before anyone.
Old Uncle Ted was right on the money though when he pointed out that there is nothing more hypocritical for tradcon pro-family conservatives than for them to cheer on global consumer capitalism and technological progress, for nothing has been more destructive of traditional family values than our technological society.
How is that trad-life going when your wife only knows how to use new “instant meal maker 9000?”
Why does she need to be home at all if the smartphone e-learning program educates the kids, the meal maker creates the food, the instawash tends the laundry, and the robot cleans the house? Pretty soon the vacuum bot will satisfy your sexual urges too with or without the VR added textures for a monthly subscription of only $9.99 when you add the promocode “suck me harder!”
No, I don’t care if a person uses a gun, but he should also know how to use a bow. I don’t care if a woman uses a washing machine, though she would without doubt be happier hand washing with ten other women at the river where they can complain about their own husbands to each other with a good chuckle while the toddlers splash around.
Examples could be multiplied.
2. On Self-Sufficiency as A Christian Virtue and The Spirit of Fear.
I currently use solar, but increasingly I am learning how to live without electricity altogether so that I am free of it and therefore I can use it with the dignity of knowing that I am not its slave and that my children’s survival doesn’t depend on some Chinese mine in the Congo and leftists in silicone valley who hate our God.
The key takeaway here is that I would still use electricity in the future if I was sufficiently self-sufficient; I just wouldn’t NEED it to survive. That’s the difference. That is my point.
There is a reason Tolkien’s shire resonates with us, or the valley of the wind from Miyazaki’s Nausicaa. It calls to us from an era most of us were born too late to see but of which every generation continues to long, for we long for the intention of our original design and an approximation of the world in which most of our ancestors experienced at least in some measure, which is a world where communities of people live together off the land and provide for each other and themselves, their wives, and their children.
You have also asked me how “Christian” it is to be self-sufficient and free and the example you mention to the counter is that you know many pagans who are self sufficient and godless people who also love freedom (ergothis somehow proves that self sufficiency and freedom are not Christian virtues).
However, under that logic we would have to reject that “being a good husband” is “Christian” because I happen to know many pagans who are good husbands or know many godless people who don’t murder their wives for burning the toast. LOL.
Obviously you are not that retarded, so I will give you the benefit of the doubt.
The fact that you’ve run into Christians who are paranoid is a bit too anecdotal….
a “spirit of fear?” you say? in what way?
Do you have the spirit of fear because you wanted a foreign bug out locale outside the US at one point by your own admission?
Is owning a gun “living in the spirit of fear?” Of course not!
Obviously, if you are too afraid to take necessary risks or stand up for your faith or if you let yourself lose sleep or sin in other ways because you are consumed with anxiety and worry, then of course that is a problem; however, prudence is not the same thing as fear either.
Here is a biblical example I quoted from a text in Proverbs to our mutual friend Bob Petrowski
From Proverbs 27:12:
“The prudent sees danger and hides himself, but the simple go on and suffer for it.”
We cannot be quick to judge something that is merely prudent awareness as if it were irrational fear. Obviously people who are moving to red states from blue states are being accused of fear by their Christian relatives who decided to stay put.
I am sure some orthodox Christians in Russia were accusing their friends in 1917 of being cowards when they fled to New York as the iron curtain was falling; however, they got to see their children’s children while the “simple” who stayed behind died alone in the gulag.
Who was really living in fear in such an example? It seems to me the one too afraid to risk leaving his homeland was the one with irrational fear, not the one who took one look at the Bolsheviks and knew it was time to get his family out of dodge.
Faith is doing the hard thing; it is always the hard thing. That is just how it works. Having a family and trying to feed them yourself so they aren’t poisoned with bullshit and keep them (increasingly at legal risk) from schools and doctors that will surely harm them is an act of faith and that families want to be self-sufficient is the most obvious kind of prudence. If self-sufficiency is unrealistic, then Christians with children should have left this country decades ago and started a new America, but that time has long passed, self-sufficiency is now a necessity just to have safe food.
3. How Christian Self-Sufficiency is Different than Libertarian Self-Sufficiency.
Being free and self-sufficient is spiritual, but not in the individualistic sense. The difference is that Christians should be open to sharing property in common as the Apostles did in the Church of Jerusalem (something that is also clearly taught by the Anabaptists, and the early church both). So when I talk about self-sufficiency and being technocircumspect and being free, I am not talking about individualist freedom, I mean freedom from dependency on forces other than God’s people (the church). A child of a slave is born in slavery, but a child of a freeman, though dependent on his father and mother, is nonetheless born free. Thus, a Christian alone in a non-Christian place should be very libertarian and have his own homestead on his own private property; however, a community of biblically dedicated Christians will increasingly overtime have no need of private property and would be more like Theocratic socialists ( I say this a little facetiously).
I am off-grid right now, so why would I want to leave when I have my own little libertarian paradise? Because though this life God has given me is a blessing, it is still missing something God intended for us and all Christians, which is community. Scripture gives us the road map; we just have to start the journey.
4. On The Future of America and the Wisdom of Christian Exodus.
We agree that God is judging America because of Christian apostasy, I mean we agree like 100% on that for sure; however, you are excited for these darks times and the dire circumstances that it will require for this people to repent, if they ever even do so in our lifetimes (which I seriously doubt).
The books Exodus, Judges, and 1 and 2 Kings were written for our instruction and the eras of apostasy in those days often lasted longer than America has even existed before there was repentance. God even had to put His people (that He had just redeemed visibly by miracles) in the wilderness for 40 years until that generation (their equivalent of the “boomers”) had completely died out.
I will bet you a case of beer RIGHT NOW, you won’t see the giant’s head paraded through Jerusalem, though you may see the city leveled with your children drug off with rings in their nose pulled by chains, probably to where the Uygher Muslims are currently, in order to make batteries for the new Chinese phone market in Bangladesh.
At what point do we heed what GOD SAYS about how we are to act in relation to Mystery Babylon?
“Then I heard another voice from heaven saying, “Come out of her, my people, lest you take part in her sins, lest you share in her plagues.” (Revelation 18:4)
Why would you, with your Anabaptist leanings towards pacificism as stated in your Jesus Manifesto, want to stay in the US and fight a war? I wouldn’t even call myself a pacificist and I am still clear enough of mind to know that there is no way this is a war Christians should want anything to do with.
Do you think God is going to bless the obese meth head rednecks of rural America in their war against basically everyone else in both business and government and the major population centers, all the armed forces, and without any outside military support.
Our ancestors killed people over a tax on tea and stamps and they are cutting our kids dicks off and we don’t even bat an eye?
We deserve destruction, we deserve the wrath of God and it is coming and already here.
Christians will not be blessed for fighting a rebellion alongside heathen over oppression that they absolutely deserve. Make no mistake about it.
You might be excited, but I have no interest in my sons being drafted to fight in Bob’s Army of the New Confederate States of Trump (where he will surely die) or (oppositely) being forced into compulsory education where they have to register for the right to breed via lottery by order of the “white-person-reduction-act.”
I joke, but seriously, f**k all of that.
Obviously God is in control, but prudence dictates that it is time to either jump ship or bunker down and you’d have to be an idiot or have few responsibilities to the lives of others to think otherwise.
Why not stick around America you ask? Because with that attitude my ancestors would’ve stayed in Slovakia and been commies or dead, or remained in England and been forced to be Catholic against their will, or Ireland where they would have starved. Leaving for Freedom is the American way more than anything else and any where we can be free is our birthright as Christians and Americans. I will not make the same mistake as others in history and let my covenant bloodline and the bloodline of other Christians be extinguished under an iron curtain because I was too much of a pussy to go to a strange land, a risk for which Abraham earned the title “father of the faithful.”
Some will be called to stay and be martyrs, this is obvious, and Godspeed to them.
After all, if it weren’t for the heroes who survived soviet Russia we might not have our tiktok Orthobros today right?! LOL.
So of course there are going to be signs of new spiritual life in America right now, but it is not really “new life,” for what you are seeing is God revealing his elect, separating wheat and chaff, which always happens once persecution starts.
Once the boomers are dead (and pretend Christianity with it) the only people who will call themselves Christians will be serious believers because it will be too risky to “pretend” to be a Christian as a wishy-washy flake. This changing situation gives the illusion that Christianity is growing or getting more based, but in reality it is just that the weeds have been removed and you can actually see how much real wheat was actually in the field.
Proselytizing rates stagnated years ago and Christians are now losing record numbers every year to apostasy or old age. The only areas where Christianity is growing is among big-family Christians and old order Amish. They are retaining their numbers since they’ve stopped sending their kids to college; however, they are also the most vulnerable targets in our present situation and since they are the most valuable Christian-making institution (through their breeding) they need to be kept safe at all costs, that should be the church’s firm conviction and mission.
5. Summary and Conclusion.
My mission is to help Christians (and especially young families) get somewhere safe where they can be useful in helping the next Christendom (which is in the global south or third world). Big families will like the third world and can help educate and bolster Christians there that still live their faith and take it somewhat seriously (largely because they still live agrarian, as tech and money has always destroyed religion and fertility everywhere it has gone).
I of course agree that evangelicals did not have a worldview and kingdom view and wasted time virtue signaling in Africa, especially since Africans knew how to live just fine in Africa without us bringing them air-conditioning and Nike sneakers which has only accelerated their march down the same disasters for religion, community, and family we had done centuries earlier to ourselves. However, we can’t go back and change that can we?
It would be nice if we had started with God and made decentralized local technologies that empower Christian communities, but we didn’t. Rather, the godless Jew totalitarian digital gulags are here and you are never putting that Genie back in the bottle. The new digital age has accelerated the decline of the developed world, the destruction of the family, and of Christianity in the west. In no way has the Kingdom been aided where the internet has arisen, at one point 80% of conservative Christian facebook pages were just fake Russian accounts or were boosted by bots and now the majority of our boys are addicted to internet pornography (including evangelicals) and our girls are learning to be feminists, sluts, and trannies from tiktok. We really don’t need that shit, it can be a tool, but it’s a very risky tool. Letting anyone but programmers access the internet is like trusting your 8 year old with a box of hand grenades and expecting it to all go well.
I also don’t think it is right to call St. Paul and Jesus Christ incels, as they were just cels or vcels. After all, they weren’t “involuntarily celibate” they were voluntarily celibate, which is an enormous difference, basically the opposite meaning. Afterall, incels are losers or victims, but the voluntarily celibate are CHADS by definition. St. Paul acknowledged he had the right to take a sister as a wife, but also that he wished all would be like him and single and that he suggested that lifestyle due to present persecution that was going on in the Roman world. So you are right that they were onto something and we will see in coming years the increasing need of many Christians to be celibate as during the Roman times. I actually embrace this, what the early church called White Martyrdom, but we also need large families working the land, what was called Green Martyrdom…..I shouldn’t need to explain what Red martyrdom is, kinda self explanatory.
Indeed we have not faced a global persecution of the church as we are about to face since the Roman emperor Diocletian. We haven’t been here in so long and we don’t even have a united church as they did, God’s people are in deep shit and staying here is ridiculous.
You can be mad at boomer tradcons all you want for pushing their children away from the faith, but the ultratrad young couples (gen X and down) had to fight everyone in their life the moment they had more than 2.1 children and decided not to vaccinate or send them to school. Its unfair to compare them to those whose kids apostasied in our own day and I don’t want to see my people, God’s people, loaded onto trains. Call it a pastoral concern to keep as many away from that train ride as possible, preferably because we took a boat or plane ride the hell out of here.
-Josh Johnson
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