Blog
Rootlessness is the great disease A review of “Against the Machine” by Paul Kingsnorth Part Two
Thursday 13th August 2026
Mike Mullins
The Machine has created unprecedented mobility and connectivity. Yet many people feel uprooted, placeless and culturally homeless. We can travel everywhere but belong nowhere."We built the Machine. Now the Machine runs us." It’s not a secret conspiracy though, the Machine has emerged from human desires, ambitions, fears and choices.
Human beings are formed by stories, customs , language, rituals, ancestors and places. Culture provides a framework of meaning. When culture weakens, people become easier for the Machine to reshape, to control and manipulate.
Kingsnorth proposes four elements every healthy culture requires. These four Ps are what the Machine is eroding:
1. Past: A sense of where a culture comes from: history, memory and ancestry.
2. People: A sense of belonging to a people. Shared identity and shared obligations.
3. Place: Connection to a specific landscape. A local ecology and a home.
4. Prayer: A relationship with something transcendent. A spiritual horizon beyond material life.
Against the Four Ps he proposes the Four Ss:
1. Science: Not science properly understood but science elevated into a complete worldview, scientism, a religion which sees itself as the only way of knowing. Think of Brian Cox.
2. Self: The autonomous individual becomes the highest authority.
3. Sex: Identity increasingly grounded in desire and self-expression.
4. Screen: The digital interface through which reality is increasingly experienced.
The Four Ss have become a kind of secular credo. Traditional freedom meant freedom for something. Freedom to serve, flourish, fulfil obligations and become virtuous. Modern freedom increasingly means freedom from constraints. Freedom from tradition, religion, family expectations and communal obligations. Old folk culture is rooted, inherited, local and participatory. Whereas mass culture is global, standardised, commercial and manufactured. The Machine steadily replaces the first with the second. Wherever we travel we increasingly find identical shopping centres, identical architecture, identical brands, identical media. The result is cultural flattening.
The "culture war" is not fundamentally about politics. He argues it is the result of a civilisation that has lost confidence in itself. The old pillars of meaning: Christianity, patriotism, local culture, inherited traditions and historical continuity have been dismantled, or delegitimised. What emerges is what he calls a "culture of inversion." People increasingly define themselves not by what they are but by what they reject. As he puts it: "We define ourselves now by what we are not." Much contemporary activism is not primarily driven by a positive vision of the future. Instead, it is driven by negation. The emphasis is on deconstruction, rather than construction. Civilisation reaches a dangerous point when everything inherited becomes suspect. This is happening through attacks on historical figures, dismantling national myths, suspicion of ancestry, rejection of inherited loyalties. I confess that even though I’m of the so called progressive left, I really struggle with the recent spate of attacks upon the figure of Winston Churchill. As if his life’s work and contribution to saving western democracy during World War Two could be dismissed because of his hostility to Ghandi and how he failed to stop the Bengal famine. Kingsnorth stresses that many reforms are justified and necessary but he believes the deeper impulse goes beyond reform. It seeks to dissolve meaning itself.
Western societies increasingly treat their own traditions the way colonial powers once treated foreign cultures. The culture now condemns its own history, dismantles its own norms, rejects its own inheritance. He calls this a form of self-colonisation. Whether one agrees or not and I have sympathy with his view, this becomes central to his explanation of cultural fragmentation.
Kingsnorth says older societies asked what is good? Modern societies increasingly ask: Who has the right to tell me what to do? The issue shifts from virtue to autonomy. From truth to freedom. From wisdom to choice.
He uses one of my favourite films The Matrix as a powerful cultural metaphor. The Matrix is not merely a computer simulation. For him it symbolises a civilisation that distracts people from reality. The Machine creates endless diversions: entertainment, consumerism, outrage, ideology and digital immersion. Anything that keeps people from confronting deeper questions.
Reading Against the Machine for me was like Morpheus offering Neo (AKA Keanu Reeves) the choice between the red and blue pill. The blue pill is about staying in a comfortable ignorance inside the simulated world (the Matrix), or in our case the “Machine”. Whereas the Red pill is about staying in reality and confronting and fighting the “Machine”, however harsh and unsettling it is. I ask myself if I will have the moral courage and resolve to do this?
In the third film in the series “Matrix resurrections” Neo and we, indirectly, are confronted with the question of how do we remain genuinely free once we know that every system, even rebellion, can be absorbed into the “Machine"?
Kingsnorth identifies three instincts that arise when we realise something is wrong. See if you can recognise these instincts in yourself?
1. Fight: Join the culture war. Pick a side. Attack enemies and seek victory. An understandable impulse but ultimately forlorn.
2. Retreat: Withdraw completely and move to the woods, live off grid. Or perhaps enter a monastery and reject society.
3. Repair: This is the only productive path. Remain engaged staying local committed to rebuilding culture and community from the bottom up. Recovering what is worth saving. Healing what can be healed.
I can see all three instincts in myself but realise repair is key and yet the hardest. Repair is the work my wife Paula is dedicated to in our local Balham community. Whether its organising street parties, playstreets for local children, monthly Restart gatherings to help people mend broken electrical goods, so creating a circular economy, rewilding our back garden or Clapham Common.
Much of today's rage is actually disguised grief. People are mourning something they cannot fully name. The antidote is not political salvation, defeating the “Machine” through elections or online battles. Instead, it’s about repair. Rebuild families and communities, recovering a spirituality of humility, recovering commitment, limits and intergenerational responsibility and learning how to become adults again. We need to "to dig down to those foundations and begin the work of repair."
How should we live now? This is the book's central concern. Kingsnorth argues that if there is a battle, it is primarily spiritual rather than political. The first enemy is not "them." The first enemy is within its us. The right kind of warrior against the “Machine” resists self-righteousness, hatred, and tribalism. They seek truth, cultivate discipline and confronts his / her own darkness. Echoes of the Desert Fathers, Buddhist practice, Stoicism, Sufi spirituality and Christian contemplative practice.
We needs a homecoming, not a revolution, a return to nature, place, land, community, roots, limits, belonging and the sacred. Not a return to the past but a recovery of what modernity has discarded. The antidote to the Machine is:
• Rootedness rather than rootlessness
• Belonging to somewhere rather than anywhere
• Reverence rather than exploitation
• Community rather than individualism
• Limits rather than endless growth / progress
• Wisdom rather than information
• Culture that grows organically rather than systems that are engineered
• Living in harmony with the living Earth rather than mastery over it.
Modernity has falsely taught us to see ourselves as masters standing above nature. Healing begins when we remember humility and that we are creatures living within it.
Kingsnorth only hints at what the antidote to the machine is. In my next blog in September I'll set out some hopeful and inspiring ideas based on interviews I have recently conducted with community leaders attempting to combat the pernicious effects of the machine: Maitrinara one of the leaders of the Brixton, south London, Triratna Buddhist community, Rev. Jonathan Herbert of Hilfield Friary Dorset and Paul Wenham leader of Ashburnham Place retreat centre in Sussex.