“If it is ‘the pursuit of the ideals and methods of modern science that has brought us into this catastrophic situation, clearly there can be no issue from it without the renunciation of those ideals and methods.’[12]

That renunciation has to be a long mental and spiritual effort: the sloughing off of a way of seeing; the refusal of the story we all grew up with and a return to an older one that lies, like the kingdom of God, both within and all around us. It’s hard work to change a story, especially when the society around you affirms it at every turn. At times like these, it is easy to become paranoid, angry, mistrustful: sometimes it can seem as if the entire internet was designed with just this purpose in mind. There is a reason that levels of trust in our cultures are measurably plummeting. Magic addles the mind. Somehow, though, the work must be to still the mind instead. To let go of the natural attachment to our cunning, serpentine will. We know where the path leads if we don’t; we see daily the path that magic and science will take us down. Do what thou wilt is the motto of our world: the motto of the Machine. Thy will be done is its older brother, and its challenger. We all want to live by the first of them, but we know that the work is to walk away from it a thousand times each day: to let the will go, and to listen instead for the old song which, however much we might think otherwise, has never stopped being sung in the woods and the waters and around the edges of the human heart.” —

Kingsnorth, Paul. Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity (pp. 77-78). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.