Somewhere in a laboratory – perhaps in Leiden, Missouri, or Basel – a technician bends over a microscope, examining the cellular structure of a crop. A few kilometers away, in an office tower of steel and glass, a lawyer types a new clause into a patent application. Elsewhere again, deep in the servers of a data center, an algorithm is being updated that calculates how many ‘carbon credits’ a farmer in the Flevopolder must surrender for the privilege of grazing his cattle.

At first glance these look like unrelated episodes of modern progress: science, law, economics. But anyone who looks at this scene through narrowed eyes – in the spirit of the Church Fathers and the ancient philosophers – sees no progress at all. He sees a centuries-old ritual. He sees an attempt at a cosmic coup d’état.

What we euphemistically call ‘biotechnology,’ ‘sustainability,’ or ‘intellectual property’ is in essence a theological drama. It is the completion of a process that began a thousand years ago with a wrong turning in our thinking and now culminates in the largest expropriation in human history: the privatization of creation itself.

Modern man is told that he must be a ‘steward’ of the planet. But the real agenda is darker. An elite of technocrats and corporatists, driven by a deep Invidia (envy) toward the Origin, is seeking to install itself as the owner of nature. They are building a tollgate in the Garden of Eden. Whoever wishes to eat, breathe, or live will first have to pass by their counter.

I. From Sacrament to Raw Material

To grasp this theft, we must return to the foundation of our perception. How do we look at a tree, a river, or a human being?

For pre-modern man – the man who lived with a ‘Hebrew gaze’ or within the Christian synthesis of the Middle Ages – the material world was a window. A tree was never ‘merely’ wood. The tree was a Logos, an uttered word of God. Nature possessed an inherent dignity and holiness because it was given. The rain fell “on the just and on the unjust” as a free act of grace (Gratia).

The world was what was once called the Commons: the common patrimony, given by the Creator to mankind to use, to keep, and to hand on. Man could harvest what the earth gave, but he could never own the earth in any absolute sense. The earth was, after all, as the Psalmist sings, “the Lord’s.”

The fault line opened in the late Middle Ages with the rise of nominalism. The thought crept in that words and names are not pointers toward a divine essence, but only labels we human beings stick on things. This may sound like academic hair-splitting, but the consequences were disastrous. If a forest has no intrinsic ‘forest-ness’ willed by God, but is merely a collection of individual trees on which we paste the label ‘forest,’ then nature loses her sacred protection.

The ensouled world slowly became Descartes’ Res Extensa: dead matter in motion. It became ‘Resource.’ Raw material. Something simply lying about, waiting for the human will to give it form. Here the way was cleared for the technocrat: if creation is not holy, it is manipulable. And if it is manipulable, it is patentable.

II. The Simia Dei: The Ape of God

Here we run into the psychology of the usurper. Why does the modern elite want not merely to use nature, but to redesign her? Whence the obsession with synthetic meat, genetically modified seed, and the blocking of the sun (geoengineering)?

Traditional theology speaks of the devil as the Simia Dei, the ‘Ape of God.’ The adversary cannot create. To create (creatio ex nihilo) is the prerogative of the Godhead. The adversary can only mimic, parody, and – when this fails – deform.

Modern technocracy is driven by this Luciferian impulse. It is the jealousy of the stepfather who knows the children are not his own. Because the technocrat cannot create life (he cannot make a single blade of grass without using the cell, the soil, and the sun that already exist), he searches for a juridical sleight of hand by which to claim ownership.

This is the secret behind ‘Intellectual Property’ in living nature.
Take a company like Monsanto (now Bayer). What do they actually do? They take a corn plant – a marvelous organism that has unfolded over thousands of years in a dance with God’s seasons. After a few cuttings they call it Product X. It is ours.

It is an administrative conjuring trick. It is as if someone were to scribble his signature on the Night Watch with a marker and then start charging admission to anyone who looks at it. They claim copyright on a work they did not write.

This goes deeper than mere profit-seeking. It is a metaphysical claim. By pretending that they can “rewrite” the code of life, they are attempting to usurp the status of Creator. They want to detach the Bet (the form of creation) and the Ruach (the breath of life) from God and house them inside a corporate structure. The aim is autonomy: a world in which man no longer has to wait for the rain from above, but takes out a subscription to the irrigation services of the state.

III. Redefinition as a Weapon

The method by which this privatization proceeds is language. This is where the Anti-Logos enters the picture. Because they cannot change reality (every seed still needs the soil; a solar panel still needs the sun), they must change the words.

We are witnessing a gigantic operation of Newspeak, designed to disguise the theft of the Commons as benevolence.

Consider the term “Ecosystem Services.” This is the language of economists colonizing nature. Clean air, fertile soil, and pollination by bees are no longer gifts; they are ‘services’ to which a price tag must be attached. Once you put a price on something, you can trade it. And whatever can be traded can be monopolized.

More cynical still is the language surrounding climate. Carbon (C) is the building block of all life. We human beings, the trees, the animals: we are carbon-creatures. We exhale CO2 as a byproduct of life (the breath). By branding carbon as ‘pollution’ and then erecting a system of taxation and exchange around it (Carbon Credits), the technocracy has managed to levy a tax on existence itself.

This is the ultimate feudal dream. In the Middle Ages a serf had to surrender part of his grain to his lord. In the technocratic future man must pay for the ‘carbon space’ he occupies on earth. The air is no longer God’s; the air is administered by a supranational institution that determines how much you may exhale. It is the privatization of the Ruach.

IV. Gnosticism with a Profit Margin

Beneath all of this lies an old heresy that has become virulent in our time: Gnosticism. The Gnostics believed that material reality (the flesh, the earth) was evil or imperfect, made by a lower, incompetent deity (the Demiurge). Salvation consisted in escape by means of special knowledge (gnosis).

Our technocratic elite is, at the deepest level, gnostic. They hate “messy” nature.

• Natural reproduction is unpredictable? Let us turn to laboratories and genetic selection.
• Real meat requires the death of an animal (the tragedy of life)? Let us grow lab meat in sterile vats.
• The farmer is dependent on the weather? Let us move food production into ‘vertical farms’ under LED lights.

The lie we are sold is that nature is “broken” and that man (with his technology) must repair her. “Build Back Better” is the secular variant of gnostic redemption. It implies that the original creation (“Built by God”) was insufficient.

But anyone who looks closely will see that these so-called repairs always end in decay. Lab-grown food lacks the vitality and nutrients of the living earth. Artificial ecosystems collapse. Attempts to control the weather produce drought elsewhere.
The technocratic gnostic stands with a screwdriver inside a watch he did not build and whose mechanism he does not understand. While the springs and gears fly past his ears, he demands that we admire him for his “repair work.”

V. The Impotence of the Sorcerer

And yet, in the midst of this dark analysis, there is reason for a grim sort of hope. For if we return to Realism – to the perception of what is – we will see that the power of these new owners is largely illusory.

You, the reader, may feel afraid before this all-powerful Moloch. The fear of gene-tech, nanobots, social engineering, and the Great Reset. But that fear is precisely what feeds the system. The system wants us to believe in its godlike status.

The truth, however, is this: they have never cracked the safe.
The core of life remains a closed book to them. Despite billions spent on research, modern science still does not understand what consciousness is. They do not know how a seed truly knows it must become a tree. They cannot control the weather; at most, they can disturb it locally and temporarily. They cannot reprogram the human soul, only confuse it.

Their gene-tech seeds are not new creations; they are often weakened plants that survive only thanks to massive doses of poison. Their ‘food transition’ depends on enormous quantities of energy that they cannot generate without fossil fuels (the earth again!).
Their entire kingdom is built on bluff. They are parasites upon the body of God’s creation. And as every biologist knows: a parasite can sicken the host, but it cannot live without the host.

The privatization of creation may be a juridical fact, but ontologically (in the reality of being) it is an impossibility. You cannot patent God. Nature, in the end, will always spring back and overturn the fences of ‘Intellectual Property.’ The weed grows up straight through the asphalt of utopia.

VI. Resistance through Presence

What, then, is our answer? How do we resist the tollgate?
Not by fighting along inside their abstractions. Not by losing ourselves in conspiracy theories that magnify the enemy beyond his real stature (that, too, is a form of idolatry).

True resistance is a return to reality. A radical Realism.
It is the refusal to speak the language of the enemy.

• Call a loan a debt again.
• Do not call manipulation ‘care.’
• Do not call data ‘knowledge.’
• And above all: treat the world around you not as raw material, but as creation.

We must inhabit the ‘Bet’ (the House) once more. Live locally. Grow something yourself, repair something, look another person in the eye. In an age in which everything is becoming virtual and patented, planting an illegal (because patent-free) seed in your own backyard is a revolutionary act.
It is to acknowledge that there is a law higher than the laws of the WHO or the patent office.

The philosopher Pierre Duhem taught us that we must not confuse scientific models with reality. Models are merely instruments; reality is the mystery. We are called to be the guardians of that mystery.
Let them build their tollgates and write their contracts. We know that the rain is free. We know that love – the Agape that holds the cosmos together – cannot be captured in a blockchain.

The Anti-Logos can make a great deal of noise with its drums and screens, and can make us dizzy with its terrifying projections. But it lacks one thing. It lacks the Ruach. It lacks the vibration of true life. And because it does not live, it cannot, in the end, endure. The lie requires maintenance, energy, coercion, and propaganda. The truth simply is.

While the technocrats try to dim the sun with their models, we would do well simply to walk outside, lift our face, and feel what is really there.
So long as we keep doing that – keep looking, and keep giving things their right names – creation has not been privatized. It still belongs to Him, and through Him, to us.