Against the Machine Quotes

“For now, the useful work seems to be that outlined by Joseph Campbell: ‘to conquer death by birth’. Simone Weil concluded her study of the rootless West by suggesting that the best response for we who find ourselves living in it is ‘the growing of roots’—the name she gave to the final section of her work. Pull up some of the exhausted old plants if you need to—carefully, now—but if you don’t have some new seed to grow in the bare soil, if you don’t tend it and weed it with love, if you don’t fertilise it and water it and help it grow: well, then your ground will not produce anything good for you. It will choke up with a chaos of thistles and weeds. This, in practical terms is, the slow, necessary, sometimes boring work to which I suspect people in our place and time are being called: to build new things, out on the margins. Not to exhaust our souls engaging in a daily war for or against a ‘West’ that is already gone, but to prepare the seedbed for what might, one day long after us, become the basis of a new culture. To go looking for truth. To light particular little fires—fires fuelled by the eternal things, the great and unchanging truths—and tend their sparks as best we can. To prepare the ground with love for a resurrection of the small, the real and the true. But first, we are going to have to be crucified.”
― Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity

“By basing their new version of the faith on the notion of sola scriptura—that there should be no authority but the Bible—they unleashed the radical individualism on which the modern world would be built. With tradition and authority demolished, reason would become the only ‘basis for argument about God, creation and morality’.”
― Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity

“Sometimes I lie awake at night, or I wander in the field behind my house, or I walk down the street in our local town and think I can see it all around me: the Grid. The veins and sinews of the Machine that surrounds us and pins us and provides for us and defines us now. I imagine a kind of network of shining lines in the air, glowing like a dewed spiderweb in the morning sun. I imagine the cables and the satellite links, the films and the words and the records and the opinions, the nodes and the data centres that track and record the details of my life. I imagine the mesh created by the bank transactions and the shopping trips, the passport applications and the text messages sent. I see this thing, whatever it is, being constructed, or constructing itself around me, I see it rising and tightening its grip, and I see that none of us can stop it from evolving into whatever it is becoming. I see the Machine, humming gently to itself as it binds us with its offerings, as it dangles its promises before us and slowly, slowly, slowly reels us in. I think of the part of it we interact with daily, the glowing white interface through which we volunteer every detail of our lives in exchange for information or pleasure or stories told by global entertainment corporations who commodify our culture and sell it back to us. I think of the words we use to describe this interface, which we carry with us in our pockets wherever we go, as we are tracked down every street and into every forest that remains: the web; the net. I think: These are things designed to trap prey.”
― Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity

“If the industrial revolution of the eighteenth century represented the replacement of human muscle by machinery”
― Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity

“It seems likely that within a decade or so there will be no part of the coast where it will be possible to stare out to sea and not see an industrial skyline”
― Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity

“When I visited London recently”
― Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity

“Now we spend”
― Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity

“We want to go home again”
― Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity

“Do you think you can build your country around nothing but money and then complain when people want to come in and earn some of it themselves?”
― Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity

“If people, place, prayer and the past are the ground upon which real culture is built, many of us today would have to look at our own countries and conclude that they have no real connection to any of these.”
― Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity

“Progress, by which we mean uniformity disguised as difference.”
― Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity

“America, said Bly, was ‘the first culture in history that has colonised itself’.[”
― Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity

“Hey, Johnny, what are you rebelling against?’ ‘Whaddya got?”
― Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity

“He called it a ‘sibling society’. In his book of the same name, published a quarter of a century ago, Bly took a prescient scalpel to the failures of Western modernity and identified what he believed to be a foundational problem: we had forgotten how to produce adults.”
― Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity

“The new values are predicated on the pursuit of liberation: a one-word descriptor of the essence of the Western programme since 1789. Our aim, stated or unstated, is to liberate ourselves from nature in all regards, so that we may conquer the stars, conquer death, and become as gods, knowing good and evil.”
― Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity

“We may be in the process of creating something unique in human history: a global anticulture, unmoored from reality and increasingly at war with”
― Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity

“We built the Machine to run the world for us. Now the Machine runs us.”
― Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity

“there are degrees of homelessness,”
― Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity

“It is easy for me to imagine’, wrote Wendell Berry in his extended essay Life Is a Miracle, ‘that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.”
― Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity

“If people, place, prayer and the past are the ground upon which real culture is built, many of us today would have to look at our own countries and conclude that they have no real connection to any of these. Blame the immigrants if you like—it’s always the easy option—but they didn’t strip the soul out of the nations of the West. We did. Do you think you can build your country around nothing but money and then complain when people want to come in and earn some of it themselves?”
― Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity

“I’ve long found myself in the uncomfortable position of valuing nations but usually being repelled by nationalism. I’m not sure what to do about this. It seems to me that if you hold your country lightly, it will nourish you, and even complete you. Attach yourself to it needily or defensively or angrily, though, and it will make mincemeat of you just as surely as if you had marched off into the trenches singing the national anthem, only to come face to face with the machine gun nests. Maybe this position is too delicate for these times. Maybe it is just too late. Or maybe it is missing the point. The point, I think, is to be found beneath the surface layer of politics, and beneath the lower layers of nationhood, ethnicity and culture too. The point, as ever, is spiritual.”
― Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity

“It seems to me that if you hold your country lightly, it will nourish you, and even complete you. Attach yourself to it needily or defensively or angrily, though, and it will make mincemeat of you just as surely as if you had marched off into the trenches singing the national anthem, only to come face to face with the machine gun nests. Maybe this position is too delicate for these times. Maybe it is just too late. Or maybe it is missing the point. The point, I think, is to be found beneath the surface layer of politics, and beneath the lower layers of nationhood, ethnicity and culture too. The point, as ever, is spiritual.”
― Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity

“carbonised dinosaurs,”
― Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity

“The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said ‘This is mine’, and found people naïve enough to believe him, that man was the true founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.[5]”
― Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity

“We—at least if we are among the lucky ones—have every gadget and recipe and website and storefront and exotic holiday in the world available to us, but we are lacking two things that we seem to need, but grasp at nonetheless: meaning, and roots.”
― Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity

“When a sacred order collapses, despair can ensue, even amongst those who would not want its return or who are not even aware of what is missing.”
― Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity

“A culture, I think now, is above all a spiritual creation. When the cult departs from the heart of the culture, the thing starts to fall apart. The centre cannot hold. This, I think, is where we are. If this is true, then the ‘culture war’ is the equivalent of two bald men fighting over a comb. We are not in an existential fight for the future of ‘Western civilisation’. Western civilisation is already dead—and both sides of the current ‘war’ are reacting, in their own particular ways, to the vacuum that has replaced it—a vacuum which something must come to fill.”
― Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity

“but the dethroning of the sovereign—Christ—who sat at the heart of the Western sacred order has not led to universal equality and justice.”
― Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity

“We forget the creator and worship ourselves. All of this happens inside us every day.”
― Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity

“every culture, whether it knows it or not, is built around a sacred order. This does not, of course, need to be a Christian order. It could be Islamic, Hindu or Daoist. It could be based around the veneration of ancestors or the worship of Odin. But there is a throne at the heart of every culture, and whoever sits on it will be the force you take your instruction from. The modern experiment has been the act of dethroning both literal human sovereigns and the representatives of the sacred order, and replacing them with purely human, and purely abstract, notions—‘the people’ or ‘liberty’ or ‘democracy’ or ‘progress’. I’m all for liberty, and it would be nice to give democracy a try one day too; but the dethroning of the sovereign—Christ—who sat at the heart of the Western sacred order has not led to universal equality and justice. It has led, via a bloody shortcut through Robespierre, Stalin and Hitler, to the complete triumph of the power of money, which has splintered our culture and our souls into a million angry shards.”
― Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity