What Exactly Did My Brother Say?

The context is my refusal to take a bank card. Here is one thing he said, with my translation:

Det är svårt att leva i dagens samhälle om man ska avstå det som tillhör "vår tid".

It is hard to live in today's society if one is to renounce what belongs to "our time".

Can one hope he didn't mean it exactly like I will analyse it? I think some do.

Here is my position.

1) I do not renounce every thing that "belongs to our time";
2) I certainly try as best as I can to renounce anything that reminds too much of the mark of the beast;
3) I also renounce things I find unnecessary, which normally I can function and have pleasure without (not to the point of reducing pleasure after pleasure because I try to show I can find pleasure without it);
4) however some people like to make a parody of this:

1) They say I (inconsistently) try to renounce everything that belongs to our time;
2) That I see the mark of the beast everywhere and anywhere;
3) That I hamper myself to the point of handicap;
4) And that they are therefore entitled to make it even harder for me, just to give me a lesson. And, incidentally, to show me what consistency would look like.

I have had electricity cut and showers cancelled in a dayshelter for the homeless. Did it have anything to do with me expressing a preference for the Middle Ages on the internet? If so, it was not paedagogic "consistency" but simply harrassment. Electricity didn't exist as a commodity in the Middle Ages, but warm baths were made available by other means, like fire. The homeless shelter not being built for that means it needs electricity to give me a bath.

I have had high escalators cut and their stairs are not built for commodity in simply walking up.

I have had people cut occasions to access internet, on the theory it didn't exist in the Middle Ages. No, but I could perhaps have been more content with just a quill and ink when that was the fast way of producing reading.

In each case, cutting one corner of modernity simply means making the rest of it harder for me, and unasked for. One thing should be clear. I don't owe modernity loyalty in order to have a right to use it. Their loyalty to it is no excuse for bullying those who express not sharing this loyalty.

Now, how does this apply to bank cards?

1) It doesn't simply belong to our time, like sidewalks vs car lanes, it used to be quite optional less than a decade ago;
2) if it all of a sudden becomes non-optional in order to have an account that can receive money (the one I have so far without a card has been receiving money more than once in the past), that sounds a bit too much like "neither buy nor sell, unless one hath the mark of the beast" especially as paying by card has become heavily promoted a) first (openly) to combat contagion of Covid by "contactless payment" and b) second (at least underhand) as a way for people to avoid giving cash in alms;
3) when I received money from grandmother 2011 and 2012, I used no card to get it out and the account without a card was fine with receiving it, when I've received money from my brother, 2019 and quite a few times more, later, dito;
4) all of a sudden, this is made harder for me, since, a) that account can no longer take in money and b) the account I'm offered to open would have a card.

1) It's untrue that I renounce the card just because it is modern, I renounce it because I shouldn't need it;
2) It's untrue that I see the mark of the beast in anything and everything that's modern (though it may seem to them so if bank cards and cell phones are their favourite selection for modern things, like I might seem to "reject all science" to someone whose favourite items are methodological atheism, heliocentrism, big bang, evolution and not least psychology);
3) I am being hampered by these new measures and in other ways too;
4) and the guys who feel entitled to do that seem to insist I should avoid any and all "Apocalyptic thinking" ... which is obviously overkill. For whatever reasonable purpose (if any at all) they are perhaps against it.

Mother told me, cards were everywhere in Sweden (before she died). They shouldn't be everywhere in France, and I shouldn't get pushed around as if for a readaptation to Sweden as if I were going to return there. Nor should people who find what I write disgusting abuse their power positions to get me humbled.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
IV. LD of Advent
21.XII.2025