The Altar of Convenience

A modern Westerner can live an entire life without ever being more than a few steps removed from everything he needs — and without ever making a single thing of what he consumes.

Think it through in earnest, for we no longer see it; it is too close, like the air we breathe. You turn a tap and clean water comes out. You lay a finger on a little screen and food comes, from the other side of the world, to your door within a day. You click and the light goes on, generated by fuel you have never seen, brought in by people you will never meet, over lines you could not point to. We are the most comfortable people who have ever lived. And precisely for that reason we have also become something else, something we would rather not face: the least self-reliant people who have ever lived. The softest target in history.

This chapter is about that one fact, for without it you will not understand why the shock, when it comes, can be so devastating. The rest of this book describes the hand that will spring the trap. This chapter describes why the mouse walks into it so willingly.

The King Who Sold His Fields

Picture a king who grew rich, immensely rich, and who one day made a sensible calculation. Why should I still work fields, he thought, if I can buy grain, cheaper than I can grow it myself? And so he sold his fields. Why should I keep a forge, if I can buy weapons, better than I can forge them myself? He sold his forge. Why keep a granary full, dig a well, herd a flock — when the market opened every morning and brought everything he desired, for money he had in abundance? One by one he sold them: the field, the forge, the granary, the well. And he felt richer and freer with every sale, for he no longer had to toil for anything. Everything was for sale.

Until the day the market did not open.

That is, in a single parable, the West of the twenty-first century. We traded prosperity for resilience and called it progress. Free trade, world trade, buying at the cheapest price anywhere on earth, a disposition that runs deeper than economics — the post-colonial belief that with enough money truly everything is for sale. And so we have outsourced our own capacities: our production to distant factories, our energy to distant fields, our food to distant fields, even our medicines to a handful of distant suppliers. We became incredibly rich. And we became utterly dependent. It is not strength. It is the wealth of a man who has filled in his well because the water main always works anyway.

Three Days

And how thin that thread really is, almost no one wants to know.

Consider how much food lies in your house — not for today, but for the weeks to come, if nothing more arrives. For most Western households the answer is disgraceful: a few days, at most. And the store you must restock from is not much better off itself. The modern supermarket runs on a system called "just-in-time": no large stocks in the warehouse, but a continuous, perfectly timed supply, so that the shelves stand full again every morning. It is efficient to the point of perfection. It also means that an average city never has more than about three days of food within its borders.

Three days. On that our whole civilization stands. Not on granaries that bridge a winter, not on cellars full of preserves, but on a supply chain that must arrive again, precisely on time, every single day. In the spring of 2020 we got a faint foretaste of it: one shock in demand, and within days the shelves lay empty, not from a real shortage, but because the "lean" machine could not handle the sudden pressure. A family with three days of food in the house stands, it turned out, in a fundamentally different position from a family with three weeks. For the first, hunger — and the unrest that comes with hunger — is a matter of days, not months.

The Day One File Brought the World to a Standstill

And then there is the second thread, thinner still than the first, and utterly invisible: everything we do hangs on computers.

Not only your email. Your money is a number on a server. The supply chain that brings your food is governed by software. The power grid, the water treatment, the hospitals, the traffic lights, your very identity — everything is digitally controlled, everything hangs on the same electronic nerve pathways. And nerve pathways can be severed.

On Friday, July 19, 2024, we got the warning, free of charge. One security company rolled out one faulty update — no attack, no enemy, just an error in one file — and within a few hours some eight and a half million computers worldwide went down. Planes grounded, thousands of flights canceled. Hospitals that had to call off operations. Banks, payment systems, broadcasters, all paralyzed at once. By one small error, on one Friday, without anyone meaning harm.

Let that sink in, and then imagine what a man with evil intent could do — a targeted attack, a calculated sabotage. Or, worse still, a disaster that strikes the physical infrastructure itself: the undersea cables, the transformers, the satellites. For unlike our grandparents, we no longer have any analog fallback. Cash is disappearing; more and more often you cannot buy bread without a working screen. When the screen goes black, not one thing becomes difficult. Then everything stops at once.

The Vise

And on top of those two thin threads now comes a third layer, which casts everything that went before it in a new and chilling light: the race for sovereign artificial intelligence — what I will call, for convenience, the SAGI.

Understand what is at stake here. We are building intelligences that think faster, deeper, and more comprehensively than any government, any bank, or any general can keep up with. It is an arms race, but for a weapon that does not fire: a digital superweapon. For whoever possesses the best autonomous intelligence, together with the data of billions of people, can read the operating systems of everyone else — and what you can read, you can steer, and what you can steer, you can break. Imagine a power that holds energy in hand, and the digital keys, and the settlement of the money traffic — all three at once, in one fist.

That is not science fiction. That is a vise. For a population that lets its food, its money, its warmth, and its identity all run through that same digital system can be tightened down by the hand that controls that system — not with an army, not with a bomb, but with a switch. No battle. A setting that goes to "off." And the world we have built installed that switch itself, and laid the wires obligingly toward it, out of love for convenience.

Convenience Is the Trap

And now the shudder around which this chapter turns, for here the modern vulnerability touches the oldest prophecy.

Do you remember the first chapter, the brick on the plain of Shinar — the made that displaces the given? The West has brought that movement to its utmost perfection. We have made the made so perfect, so omnipresent, so effortless, that without the made we can no longer live. And a man who cannot feed himself for one week, who cannot buy or sell for one day without the system — what will such a man do when the hand that operates the switch says: one condition, and the system stays open for you?

There it stands, the verse that for two thousand years seemed almost unthinkable: "and it causes that no one can buy or sell except the one who has the mark" (Revelation 13:17). For centuries readers wondered: how could anyone ever control all buying and selling? It could not be imagined. And now we, with our own hands, out of pure love for comfort, have built precisely the infrastructure that makes it not only possible but effortless. One network, one identity, one system through which every purchase runs — and one switch that can decide who is let in and who is dropped out.

Convenience is the trap. The man who has sold his fields, his forge, his granary, and his well will — when the market closes and hunger comes — take every mark, swear every oath, bow before anyone who holds the switch in hand. Not because he is wicked. Because he has nothing else left. We have made the counterfeit redeemer a gift of his greatest weapon, and it is not a sword. It is our dependence.

The Spring No One Can Shut Off

But this chapter does not end at the trap, for there is a way out, and it is older than all systems.

The deepest reason the West has become so defenseless is not economic and not technical. It is spiritual. A civilization that forgot the Giver came first to trust the gift, and then the system that delivers the gift. We did not only lose our granaries; we lost our God — and a people that no longer dares to be dependent on God ends up inevitably dependent on whatever can cut off its bread.

And precisely over against this stands a wholly different way of living, which Scripture sketches from beginning to end. A people that ate for forty years in a wilderness where there was no market at all, fed with manna that you could not even hoard — whoever did try to keep it until the next day found it spoiled in the morning (Exodus 16). A prophet who was fed by ravens at a brook (1 Kings 17). And a Lord who taught His children to pray, not "give us a stocked pantry," but "give us this day our daily bread" (Matthew 6:11), and who said: look at the ravens, they neither sow nor reap and have no barn, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them (Luke 12:24). That is the opposite of the altar of convenience. It is the altar of dependence — not on the system, but on the Giver Himself.

And that is the question that the end time, beneath all its technology, really puts to you. Not first of all: have you stocked up enough? Wisdom stocks up, and it is good to fill a barn. But the deepest question is: on whom are you dependent? For there comes a day when the system can switch off everyone who has handed himself over to the system. But there is a dependence that no switch can reach — that of the child who never had his bread lying in the warehouse, but in the hand of his Father.

Convenience is the trap. But the trap has no power over the one who never placed his provision in the system. Build your security, therefore, not on the made. Build it on the Giver. When the switch is thrown, only those will remain standing whose bread never lay in the pantry — but in the hand of Him who feeds the ravens, and who has sworn on the mountain: I will provide.