Industrialism is a manifestation of Evil

Nature, in the organic radical tradition, is regarded as the manifestation of Good.

Whether seen as the self-realisation of divinity or as its precious creation, it represents all that is sacred to us: life, authenticity, beauty.

But what about the other side of the coin? How might we regard the abstract notion of Evil as manifesting in our world?

It would have to take the form of everything that opposes the force of Good we have already identified, everything that impedes its thriving, blocks its divine light.

Within the human mind, we could identify this as the ego, the little self who is only interested in his own narrow desires and thus, like soul-selling Faust, puts himself at the service of Evil.

But when a world is dominated by individuals who have deliberately embraced selfishness, unashamedly and even jubilantly, this germ of inner Evil will then expand to assume a social and physical form.

Certain apologists for the current industrial system like to claim that the enormous social and environmental problems associated with it are the result only of the specific way in which our society is being run at the moment.

The technology, or Technik, involved, they insist, is itself “neutral” – it is merely the way in which it is used which is problematic.

However, to fairly assess this so-called “neutrality”, we need to consider what lies behind the industrial impulse.

While the official narrative insists that its aim has always been to relieve people of the need for manual labour, to lift them out of poverty, to elevate humankind to greater cultural and civilisational heights, this is just window-dressing for something much less worthy.

Industrialism is about profit.

Labour-saving machinery has always been about saving the costs of human labour for the machine’s owners and thus increasing their profit margins.

Increases in scale, in productivity, in efficiency, in quantity and in speed are likewise all aimed at increasing profit.

Those who “invest” in the latest “innovations” are doing so in the hope of extracting the greatest possible financial profit.

Property development is about making profit from destroying our countryside and sustainable development is about continuing to profit from the pillaging of the living world while pretending to be “green”.

Industrialism, from the First Industrial Revolution of steam engines and factories through to the proposed Fourth Industrial Revolution of transhumanism and nanotechnology, has always been – and always will be – a means of making money.

This, in itself, is damning.

Christian teaching tells us that “the love of money is the root of all evil” and this understanding is part of traditional human wisdom.

But when we look at the effects of this industrialist money-love on our world, the force fuelling its advance becomes even more obvious.

While nature is beautiful, industrialism is ugly, on the inside and the outside.

For centuries it has been ravaging, raping and defiling the sacred place to which we belong.

Rivers poisoned, air blackened, seas polluted, forests felled, landscapes desecrated.

Factories, pylons, motorways, airports, phone masts.

Plastic, concrete, chemicals, fumes, radiation.

And at the same time generations of human beings have been ripped from their native soil, shipped all over the world and shovelled into the jaws of the Machine.

Human capital. Fodder for the investors. Sacrificial victims for Moloch.

Industrialism is, in fact, a physical manifestation of Evil, as many have seen.

William Blake did not speak lightly of “dark Satanic mills” blighting England’s green and pleasant land and neither was Mohandas Gandhi exaggerating when he declared: “Machinery is the chief symbol of modern civilization; it represents a great sin”.

Ludwig Klages, too, described how “the will that emancipates itself from life, and imperiously enslaves it, brings forth evil (the despicable, the satanic)”, warning of “this Mammon which is taking hold of humankind as a tool with which to eliminate every form of terrestrial life”.

It is true that Evil also becomes real and physical in certain actions of human beings unrelated to industrialism.

But the sheer scale of the industrial Evil puts it in a different league to the little incidences.

After all, what could be more evil than an all-out assault on life itself?

Industrialism is the negation of divine nature in all its living beauty and authenticity.

Of course, the Evil One is an expert in both deception and temptation and has succeeded in persuading the majority that his malevolent works are to our advantage.

Rendered helplessly dependent on his devilish inventions, people can no longer imagine a life without his little luxuries, without his artificial light, without his constant supply of hell-heated water, without the flickering hypnotic images of his “entertainment”.

And all the time they force themselves not to be able to see where all this is heading – where it was always heading.

Perhaps in the 19th century people could be forgiven – despite all the child labour and industrial disease – for imagining that technological Progress was a real thing, that one day it would come good.

But today there is no excuse. We have seen all too well what industrialism has done to us and we have heard all too clearly what it wants to do to us next.

The Covid moment and the announcement of the Great Reset, aka the Fourth Industrial Revolution, was a wake-up call to which we urgently need to respond.

We face a future of genetically-modified embryos grown in artificial wombs and sold to de-sexed, de-natured, de-humanised locked-down smart-city couch-consumers whose data is harvested, whose lives are tracked, traced and traded, whose illnesses are a source of profit and whose deaths are medically accelerated, bringing to a premature end an existence that has been meaningless, virtual, sterile and soulless.

The trees will all have to be chopped down to generate more electricity to fuel the Matrix, with fields and hills smothered with industrial solar panels and wind turbines before these fall apart and have to be buried elsewhere in Mother Earth’s defiled flesh.

We will be trapped inside a world plunging towards a choking, toxic death, while everyone is forced to put on a synthetic smile and pretend that we are heading upwards towards a glorious gleaming future.

Is that what we want?

Do we want industrialism to continue its cancerous growth until it has killed everything and everyone?

Do we want the Evil of artifice and destruction to prevail over the Good of nature and life?

Or is it time to think again, to dare to imagine a quite different future?

[Audio version]