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Before Heidegger, Junger, Devi or Kaczynski, there was Wagner in the battle against technology. In his revolutionary writings, Art and Revolution, The Artwork of the Future, Art and Climate, Opera and Drama and A Communication to My Friends, Wagner formulates a critique of Western civilisation in which technological supremacy, with its corresponding artificiality of culture, are seen as an inevitable climax to the departure from Greece. As the solution, he endorses a return to the Greek evaluation of Man, and a return to Nature revealed to us in great art. In his 'Regeneration Writings', Against Vivisection, Religion and Art and Know Thyself, Wagner advocates for a de-Judaised, Buddhistic, vegetarian, esoteric Christianity. Modernity is now seen as a climax of a larger metaphysical evolution from a golden age, many thousands of years before Greece, to our present dark age, which must either end in extinction or salvation. In it he advocates for a religious evaluation of Nature which might save us from our technological world-dominion and its abuses of said Nature. Ernst Junger makes use of the imagery of Wagner's Ring:

>They know neither Greek myths nor Christian ethics nor French moralism nor German metaphusics nor the poetry of all the poets in the world. Before the true life, they are only dwarfs. But they are Goliath technicians – thus giants in every work of destruction, where they ultimately conceal their mission, that they ignore as such. They have a clarity and unusual precision about everything that is mechanical. They are confused, stunted, drowned, by all that is beauty and love. They are titans and cyclops, spirits of darkness, negators and enemies of all creative forces. Those who can reduce millions of years of organic development to nothing by a few meager efforts, without leaving anything behind that could equal the least spring of grass, the least grain of corn, the smaller wing of a mosquito. They are far from poems, wine, dreams, games, hopelessly lost in fallacious doctrines, articulated in the manner of pretentious professors. Nevertheless, they have their mission to accomplish.

And what does Alberich's ring represent, if not technology? It gives man omnipotence, reduces nature to a resource, and turns living beings into a means to an end. In Nibelheim is the most profound portrayal of capitalism. Through these myths, Wagner portrays the future of our own civilisation.