The Flying Jacobin

Predictive programming is a technique the anti-Christian power structure uses to condition the masses to accept changes that those twisted people want to introduce into the world.  It is often used by them in Hollywood TV and film productions.  Star Trek is a frightfully good illustration:  AI computer assistants and computer tablet reading devices were featured in this series decades ago, to give only a couple of examples from the long-running series. 
 
We have recently watched Back to the Future Part II, which features predictions about the year 2015 (the movie was released in 1989), and found the same process at work.  There are hints of things to come, like the use of biometric data (to open locks on doors) and a completely man-controlled ‘weather service’ (likened in the movie to the regularity of the postal service); both biometrics and geoengineering are becoming more accepted and widespread around the world.  Featured most prominently in the film are flying cars:  the year 2015 was portrayed as being full of them. 
 
Well, it’s 2025, and they’re ain’t any flyin’ cars around, so we’re a little behind schedule.  But the technocratic elite still want to shove as many of us as possible into flying automobiles.  The news about their development is starting to trickle out.  Orlando, Florida, home of Disney fantasy land, is living up to its reputation, getting ready to build a ‘vertiport’ for flying cars, which the city wants to have ready by 2028. 
 
Alef Aeronautics, which publicly ties itself to Back to the Future Part II and its flying car (predictive programming – mission accomplished!), is taking pre-orders for their own version, but it’ll cost you a few hundred thousand dollars (I think I’ll save my stash for eggs, the way prices are going).  Mass production of Alef’s Model A has reportedly begun. 
 
Dr. Russell Kirk had a special hatred for the standard automobile that we have all been driving since the early 20th century, calling it a ‘mechanical Jacobin,’ since it broke up the long-established patterns of living that had grown up organically across Christendom and the rest of the world.  Dixie’s own Andrew Lytle in ‘The Hind Tit,’ his essay in I’ll Take My Stand, was no better inclined towards them. 
 
We covered this matter of the motor car and other related things in an essay written about a dozen years ago.  Dr. Robert Peters once referred to it as being somewhat ill-tempered.  We agree.  And we will now be just as ill-tempered in our response to the appearance of flying cars.  Conventional automobiles that roll along the ground at least have the virtue of keeping us connected to that same ground to a small degree, however much of a blur it usually is as we whiz over and by it.  But flying cars, these flying Jacobins, will disconnect us from it completely, making the earth and its places even more distant and abstract to us, increasing the likelihood that we will be even less hesitant than we are today to tear it to pieces, to deconstruct and reconstruct it, for the sake of some hair-brained, Gnostic, nihilistic scheme of economic development, scientific advancement, or non-sensical entertainment. 
 
As Southerners, we must stand against the rising tide of tech.  We have witnessed the deadliness of it for generations now – from women and children being mangled in the early factories to hydrogen bombs incinerating Japanese cities to suicides tied to social media.  The prophetic English writer Paul Kingsnorth is helpful at this moment.  He points out two paths that traditional Southerners (and other like-minded peoples) can take as it regards technology, which he calls ‘cooked asceticism’ and ‘raw asceticism.’  In his own words (from his essay ‘The Neon God’): 

  The Cooked Ascetic ​

Technological askesis for the cooked barbarian, who must exist in the world that the technium built, consists mainly in the careful drawing of lines. We choose the limits of our engagement and then stick to them. Those limits might involve, for example, a proscription on the time spent engaging with screens, or a rule about the type of technology that will be used. Personally, for example, I have drawn my lines at smartphones, ‘health passports’, scanning a QR code or using a state-run digital currency. Oh, and implanting a chip in my brain. The lines have to be updated all the time. I have never engaged with an AI, for example, and I never will if I can help it: but the question now is whether I will even know it’s happening. And what new tech lies around the corner that I will soon have to decide about? 
 
What happens when the line you have drawn become hard to hold? As Shari suggested when we spoke: you just hold it, and take the consequences. If you refuse a smartphone, there might be jobs you can’t do or clubs you can’t join. You will miss out on things, just as you would if you refused a car. But such a refusal can enrich rather than impoverish you. Those of us who refused the vaccine passport system during the pandemic, for example, had to live with being shut out of society and demonised as conspiratorial loonies, but for me, at least, it turned out to be a strengthening experience. 
 
Choosing the path of the cooked ascetic means you must be prepared, at some stage, for life to get seriously inconvenient, or worse. But in exchange, you get to keep your soul. You also get the chance to use the Machine against itself: to use the Internet to read or write essays like this, or to connect with others, or to learn the kind of skills necessary to keep pushing your refusal out further, if you want to. 
 
For some detailed practical guidance on what a cooked approach might look like, I can recommend this recent essay on ‘digital minimalism’ from the worthwhile Substack School of the Unconformed. 
 ​

The Raw Ascetic ​

The cooked barbarian applies a form of necessary moderation to his or her digital involvement. But there’s a problem with that approach: if the digital rabbit hole contains real spiritual rabbits, ‘moderation’ is not going to cut it. If you are being used, piece by piece and day by day, to construct your own replacement - if something unholy is manifesting through the wires - then ‘moderating’ this process is hardly going to be adequate. At some point, the lines you have drawn may be not just crossed, but rendered obsolete.  . . .  
 
The world of the raw ascetic is one in which you take a hammer to your smartphone, sell your laptop, turn off the Internet forever and find others who think like you. Perhaps you have already found them, through your years online in the cooked world. You band together with them, you build an analogue, real-world community and you never swipe another screen. You bring your children up to understand that the blue light is as dangerous as cocaine, and as delicious. You see the Amish as your lodestones. You make real things with your hands, you pursue nature and truth and beauty. You have all the best jokes, because you have had to fight to tell them, and you know what the real world tastes like. 
 
The raw ascetic understands that he or she is fighting a spiritual war, and never makes the rookie mistake of treating technology as ‘neutral.’ The front line in this war is moving very fast, and much - perhaps everything - is at stake. Raw techno-askesis envisages a world in which creating non-digital spaces is necessary for survival and human sanity. If things go as fast as they might, it could be that many of us currently cooked barbarians will end up with a binary choice: go raw, or be absorbed into the technium wholesale. 
 
Both of these ascetic paths, that of the raw and that of the cooked, are made up of two simple elements. First, drawing a line, and saying ‘no further’. Second, making sure that you pass any technologies you do use through a sieve of critical judgement. What - or who - do they ultimately serve? Humanity or the Machine? Nature or the technium? God or His adversary? Everything you touch you should be interrogated in this way. The difference between the two approaches is simply where the line is drawn. 
 
 . . . The walls have been breached and the hour is late. Technological askesis will sound to most like the madman’s path. Naive, paranoid, ridiculous. But if you have read this far, you are probably immune to this sort of complaint. And if you are alert to the whispers on the breeze - to the sound of the approach - then you can already feel that something is wrong. It is up to all of us to decide what to do about it. ​

In that vein, Southrons should resolve to limit our uptake of new technology.  No flying cars, no smart phones, no AI, etc., or at least greatly restrict our use of such things.  We should do as much as we can to re-establish the agrarian ethos of our forefathers, difficult though it be in our rushed and tech-obsessed age.  A story from the life of St Nikephoros of Chios (reposed in 1821), a saint from among the same Greek people Southerners have often praised over the years, shows how beautiful and beneficial the agrarian life is when practiced: ​

The saint dwelt at Resta for about twenty years.  He greatly improved the landed estate here, occupying himself in it during this entire period.  Thus, he planted pines on the small hills on the right and on the left side, which are such a delightful sight today.  The other trees there:  olives and fig-trees (the latter formerly abounded), as well as the cypresses, are creations of industrious and tree-loving Nikephoros.  He also developed a nursery in this estate, and gave away young trees abundantly to all.  Going about often in villages, he incited continually the peasants to plant trees, giving his blessings and offering his holy prayers to those who planted young trees.  It is known that he sold the landed estates which he inherited from his father and used the money he received from their sale for rewards to those who planted many olive-trees, both in his native town of Kardamyla and in many other places (Constantine Cavarnos, St. Nikephoros of Chios, Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, Belmont, Mass., 1986, pgs. 57-8). ​

​Like the Saint, let us also here at the South be tree lovers, tree planters, soil-builders, animal keepers, and so on, even to the smallest extent, and encourage our children, grandchildren, neighbors, etc., to do the same.  Modern technology is turning the world into hell itself.  But by practicing Christian agrarianism, we can help return some small slivers of it to the comely and abundant garden God intended for it to be.