Seven reasons why I am an anti-industrialist
Having written a couple of recent articles advancing an anti-industrialist position, I have been reminded that this viewpoint is very much a minority one, even amongst those with whom I am generally in agreement.
I know that to many it seems like an utterly outlandish proposition. “What, no electricity? We’d all just die!“
If my mission in life was to gain popularity, followers and subscriptions, I would no doubt be well advised to keep quiet about this subject, write about something else and try to come across as a bit more mainstream.
But that is not at all the aim of my writing, through which, for many years now, I have been trying to evolve and communicate a holistic political philosophy in which opposition to industrialism plays a central part.
So I’m going to have another shot at explaining why I think the way I do on this rather important issue.
I’m presenting my reasons in a very personal way because I want to make it clear that I am not trying to impose them on anyone else.
I don’t expect people to necessarily agree with me or to miraculously change their mind on a subject of such vast significance merely on account of a few words.
However, what I would like to do is to help open up discussion on what has long been a taboo subject and has lately been pushed still further into inaccessibility by the cynical abuse of the language of anti-industrialism by industrialists peddling a fake-green agenda.
I hope that readers will at least agree that it is generally unwise to keep rushing headlong in the same direction without ever taking the time to make sure that it is the right one!
So. I am anti-industrialist:
Because industrial life just doesn’t feel right
In my teenage years, I started to notice that something was deeply wrong about the world in which I was living. Initially, I internalised this feeling, concluding that it was me who was in some way weird or inadequate, but I eventually managed to convert it into a defiance, a conviction that it was because this world was one without values that my own thirst for values set me apart from it.
But what was it that was fundamentally wrong with the contemporary world and what were the values I needed to embrace in authentic opposition to it? I thrashed around desperately for years trying (and failing) to answer these questions and I don’t think it is coincidental that the picture only began to become clearer when I finally escaped the grey suburban world of Greater London and started the next phase of my life in Sussex.
This was, needless to say, still part of the broader industrial world! But I suddenly had daily access to nature, which had previously been an occasional weekend or holiday treat. I could walk out of the newspaper office at lunchtime, down a beautiful old street, past the parish church, over a wooden bridge and – what joy! – into the lush green woods and fields of the southern English countryside.
Our minds and spirits are moulded by the physical reality around us. What kind of thoughts and attitudes are going to be created by the constant absorption of harsh, artificial, grey, linear forms; of brutal, loud, mechanical noise; of exhaust fumes and polluted urban air?
And what will be the reaction of a human soul to regular exposure to the harmonious, diverse, colourful beauty of nature; to the gentle music of rustling leaves, flowing water and birdsong; to the scent of earth and flower, of the fresh air blown in from the distant ocean?
More and more, I could feel a qualitative difference between my experience of being alive when surrounded by nature and when in a town or city. A sense of belonging to nature won my heart and thus threats of urban encroachment into that nature were now effectively threats to my own extended body.
Because industrialism is murder
There are, of course, entities, interests and motivations behind industrialism. Industrialism is not the murderer, but it is the murder.
Because they tell me I can’t be
You’re not really allowed to be an anti-industrialist. It’s not supposed to be a position that can legitimately be held in the 21st century. People will sneer at you, make up insults, tell you to shut up. For people like me, that’s all the encouragement we need to double down on our belief!
Because technology is not neutral
It’s not the tool, they say, but the way it is used – and the person who uses it – that is the problem. But tools are made to serve a specific purpose. A machine gun is made to kill people. It can’t be used to make cheese or darn socks. Factories were invented to increase productivity and drive down labour costs, to make more money from the “human resources” available to the owners. Industrial Technik was made to exploit and control people and can’t be used to empower and liberate them.
Because industrialism is not an advance in human evolution
The myth says that humanity has been enjoying steady progress for many thousands of years, its capacity for innovation allowing it to invent various means with which to make life richer, safer and more enjoyable. Trying to deny this tendency would therefore be to block human genius, to prevent us from fulfilling our evolutionary potential, from marching on towards our triumphant destiny. And yet the reverse is true. Industrialism does not channel or encourage human genius, it stifles and crushes it. People are reduced to the limited roles they play in its machineries, deprived of autonomy, of the possibility to follow their own consciences, to shape their own lives, to participate in any meaningful way in society. Community as a living organism depends on the sensitivity, intuition, creativity and ethical antennae of the individuals that make up its flesh. Industrial society is a dead thing, a zombie being. Human intelligence, spirit and awareness are paralysed and the population decays into numbed, dead-eyed, dull-witted subservience.
Because industrialism is the physical manifestation of usury
When money is loaned into circulation as interest-bearing debt, a spiral of necessary “growth” is conjured into existence. When governments are persuaded to borrow money for “badly-needed” industrial infrastructure, or modernisation, for Great Leaps Forward and Five Year Plans, the only way they are ever going to keep paying the interest on the debt is if there is further economic “growth” financed by further loans from the same sources. These financiers also happen to own the materials required for all this industrial development, for which they are paid with the money they have lent, at interest, to the government in question. Industrialism is the physical manifestation of usury, the way in which the system robs as well as kills.
Because industrialism is so obviously central to the New World Order
Klaus Schwab of the WEF wrote two books about the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The underlying structure of the globalists’ plans for the years ahead is provided by the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Development is the same thing as industrialism. Political movements controlled by the system invariably promote industrialism. The system’s buzzwords like “innovation” and “inclusivity” refer to the expansion of the industrialist matrix. Without industrialism – and the surveillance and control that it provides – there could be no New World Order. Opposing industrialism is, today, the same thing as opposing the New World Order.
Industrialism is what happened when capitalists got their hands on high density fuels. You know where I'm going with this. Suffice to say, it's better to look forward to the postindistrial future than fear it and try to run. Brighter future for those who make it. I agree with all your points, as usual.
The problem is, there was no golden age of rural bliss before the Industrial Revolution, at least not for thousands of years prior to industrialisation. Life was hard, very hard, for the peasants who worked the land under the system of Medieval feudalism, where the rich land owners were the main beneficiaries and the majority were basically enslaved on plantations. Prior to the emergence of farming and the rural economy, we lived as hunter-gatherers. No doubt we were much more in touch with Nature and our inner beings then, life was more meaningful, but in no sense can we imagine it to be idyllic. We lived on the edge of survival, just like all other creatures, exposed to the harsh elements, vulnerable to attack from other humans and animals.
The Industrial revolution, for all its ugliness, environmental degradation, and rampant exploitation of natural and human resources by the same rich ruling classes who lorded it over us during feudalistic times, eventually set the masses free from the chains of feudalism and granted us a degree of personal autonomy, independence and freedom, where we could at last spare the time to pursue our own goals in life. Of course, real freedom, for those trapped in the 9-5 culture, increasingly reliant upon technology to make their lives supposedly more comfortable and convenient, who increasingly became the prey, the consumed, rather than the consumers; real freedom, after drawing close in the heyday of the industrialised consumer society, then began to rapidly disappear over the horizon once again and here we are today - slaves to the 'new' digital technology. Schwab's Fourth Industrial revolution, aka the Great Reset, aka the Fourth Reich, would have us complete that process so that we are all inescapably enslaved to technology, entirely controlled by our human masters of course, the elite, the globalists, the descendants of the original feudalist landlords.
The way they are going to do this is to reverse the liberating benefits of the Third Industrial Revolution and replace them with the chains of the Fourth. Hence in Britain today, under the guise of 'saving the planet', we are witnessing the destruction of the manufacturing economy and de-industrialisation on a massive scale, which will result in increasing dependence upon imports, the loss of millions of jobs, the impoverishment of the majority in favour of vastly increasing the wealth of a small minority, and the eventual complete loss of the (limited) freedom and personal autonomy which the majority enjoyed as a direct consequence of industrialisation. Steel industry being shuttered, oil refineries closed, fertiliser manufacturing plants closed, vehicle manufacturing industry being destroyed, access to cheap freely available energy to run our economy and power our homes rationed and denied, as a means to achieve control over the masses. This is our dystopian future under the globalists, where once again we live mean, energy deprived and strictly controlled lives, no longer free to travel, to improve our lot in life by choosing our vocation and by working hard in an industrialised free enterprise capitalist society, but reduced to mere slaves of a governing technology completely under the control of the elite.
This is why so many people are wary now of talk of de-industrialisation, because de-industrialisation is THE means by which the elite intend to enslave us.