Blog
Finding our way out of the machine
Sunday 1st November 2026
Mike Mullins
Reading Paul Kingsnorth book “Against the Machine”, and his powerful idea of how the machine uproots us from what it means to be truly human, made me reflect if there are people and communities who are successfully combating the machine? I recently interviewed three faith community leaders who embodied the five antidotes of rootedness that allowed them to live in society whilst not being consumed by the machine. Two are Christian: Paul Wenham of Ashburnham Place and Rev. Jonathan Herbert of Hilfield Friary and the third is Buddhist, Maitrinara Farquarson of the Triratna Buddhist community in Brixton London. In this blog I’ve attempted to draw out the shared themes of how each combat the machine. First a little background about each of these faith leaders.
Paul Wenham’s earliest memories are of solitary wild places, birds, flowers and the life of his Oxfordshire village. His father was a vicar who knew everyone, whether they went to church or not. People in need found their way to the family home, those who were homeless, asylum seekers, those that had been abused and young offenders. His mother and father met them with gentleness and hospitality. Paul remembers fishing, watching kingfishers and spending long days walking and cycling with friends. He grew up with a strong sense that he was loved for who he was, not for what he achieved. Looking back, he says, “He lived the antidote to the machine.” Paul sees the all-consuming nature of the machine. It's all about the next horizon, work, growth. Growth without questioning and as you move down the hierarchy of society, or organisations those pressures get worse. The machine is an all-consuming drive, it sucks in human life. At Ashburnham Place you can breathe, you can relax. The machine tries to envelope everything. It's easy to be bought into its values and to decide that Ashburnham needs to grow, but should it?
As an adult, Paul became uneasy with a church that seemed to duplicate its activities and draw resources inward. He wanted to find where churches were working together across boundaries, serving their neighbours rather than simply sustaining themselves. Today he leads the community at Ashburnham Place in Sussex, where people come to work with the soil, walk the land, find quiet and be accompanied through grief. His own spiritual life is rooted in place. Each morning he runs and swims in the lake at Ashburnham, where one morning a tench startled him by grabbing his ankle. The moment became a lesson in moving into and meeting fear rather than avoiding it.
Maitrinara Farquarson’s story begins in a different kind of landscape. He had built a successful physiotherapy business and bought a flat, yet he felt lonely and stuck. He had tried to become more confident, earn more and succeed in relationships but those efforts had brought him to “so many dead ends”. Buddhism had first attracted him because it seemed true and offered a new way of relating to other people. At first, he was wary, even holding a “don’t sign me up” attitude. What changed things was being noticed. An older Buddhist took an interest in him, became a friend and supported his growth. Later Maitrinara was invited to live in a Buddhist community in Bethnal Green. The joy of friendship he found there now shapes his work in Brixton, where he teaches, meditates and mentors young men.
Jonathan Herbert’s work at Hilfield Friary is also about creating the conditions in which people can belong, heal and thrive. Having worked with those recovering from addiction and now chaplain to the Roma and Traveller community, he sees people arriving exhausted, anxious, lonely and short of meaning. They are drawn by the chance to share meals and conversation, follow the daily rhythm of the Franciscan friary, pray or spend time in nature. Jonathan calls this discovering an “inner monastery”: a quieter pattern of life that can be carried back into the world.
His new book, Nurturing the Beloved Community, explores the practical building blocks of life together: vision, trust, boundaries, humility, responding to need, shared work and play and gratitude.
The three stories are different but they meet in a simple recognition, many of us are lonely and hungry for a deeper connection and meaning in our lives. The Machine offers endless activity, consumption and so called “improvement”, while leaving us lonely, distracted and unsure what we are for. Its promises are often promises of more: more growth, more experiences, more success, more speed, more convenience, more control. Paul, Jonathan and Maitrinara each spoke about a different way of flourishing as human beings.
Connection
Paul described the epidemic of mental health problems in modern society. People at the edge are being spat out by the machine. People from the local NHS mental health community come to Ashburnham Place to work with the soil, to grow plants, to slow down and live at a gentle pace, to find healing.
For Paul, healing and connection begins with knowing a place: noticing when the swifts return, where the grebes nest, when the glow-worms appear. At Ashburnham Place, stopping the regular mowing has brought back butterflies and swifts. The land has responded to being given room. Foraging, growing plants and working with the soil help people discover what is already there, and what the place can offer.
Similarly, Jonathan was troubled by the suffering of young people, their mental health and the anxiety people are living with all the time. In the people that come to Hilfield, he sees a lot of exhaustion, a lack of meaning. Many come to Hilfield because they are lonely, they feel isolated. So, they love the community and join in, sitting at table, talking to others. They come searching for belonging, peace, order and structure.
For Jonathan this malaise has deeper historical social roots. If you’re settled the concept of “ownership” of property, can consume you, rather than seeing everything as a gift. Entitlement is one of the major spiritual problems in society. Jonathan is against unregulated capitalism. This idea that we need to produce more and more. The scarcity model that’s pushed to make believe they haven’t got enough. The nomadic way of life was hard, but it put you in touch with the earth. Just take enough so next time you came back there was something left.
For Jonathan nature is a way back into relationship. He speaks of getting our hands in the soil, working with animals and looking closely at the world. He calls this attentive seeing “lectio visio”: looking again and again, until we begin to notice. He describes contemplation, in the words of Carmelite James McNamara, as taking a “long loving look at life”.
Working with animals does something amazing for people. They are reliable, steadfast, they don’t make things up or have great fantasies, they have a constancy about them. Working together, having common purpose, common vision. Playing together is really important. Having enough rest, or down time. Having to share what we have is good, we need to negotiate with each other. Having a common story a common vision. The story of St Francis and the Christian story inspires Jonathan. Easter is a very profound thing for people. Entering into that ancient story, the march into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday. The joy of things going well then it all going badly wrong. Loss, betrayal, human suffering, grief, emptiness. Then out of that lamentation come something new, unexpected, something is born ... the resurrection.
Maitrinara’s emphasis is less on knowing a particular landscape and more on the transformation that becomes possible through spiritual friendship. In Buddhism, the Sangha, the community of practitioners, is one of the Three Jewels, alongside the Buddha and the Dharma. People learn and grow through friendship that offers warmth, challenge and support. As Maitrinara describes it, “As you step in and you become more available to the community, the community steps towards you.”
Working closely with men between the ages of 18 up to the late 30s Maitrinara is most concerned about their sense of insecurity. The landscape that young people are experiencing now is so changeable. Five years ago, you could get a job doing coding. Now with AI coding has gone as a career route. Young men and young women don't know where to put their energies their ambition. There's a crisis of masculinity. How can men lead a full, whole life. When they are experiencing financial insecurity. Where do they find meaning in an insecure world? On top of that they see a world bereft of a moral compass and yet they themselves aren't jaded they’re full of idealism. This crisis of masculinity leaves them at a loss with what to do with their competitiveness, their ambition, their aggression and their anger.
This crisis of masculinity comes out of a hurt a sense of insecurity which often leads them into two false ways of being. One is doubling down on their masculinity otherwise know as the “manosphere” or a kind of racist “ethno nationalism”. Or alternatively denying their masculinity and deciding to go for a “premature androgyny”. The answer though is whole balanced men will be able to integrate and hold both of these tendencies in balance.
At its heart he feels society now is undergirded by a materialism. A materialistic view of the world of the universe a form of “scientism”. That the world is inanimate just matter and consciousness is just a byproduct of the chemical and biological complexities of the brain. That we're here just to consume, to get things done to, to get better.
At the heart of this is the core delusion that we’re not separate. There is no separate me. It's only when we begin to feel that we are separate from others that we experience, greed, craving, delusion.
Across all three conversations, connection is not a private feeling. It grows through repeated, ordinary acts: eating together, working alongside one another, listening well, mentoring, praying, meditating, dancing. These are not grand solutions. They are ways of giving our attention to one another and to the life around us.
Limits, rest and enough
All three interviewees also challenged the idea that life must always expand. Paul asks whether Ashburnham needs to grow simply because growth is expected. He worries about a world in which people consume compulsively and have no time to ask themselves who they are or how they are. What is enough? His response is not withdrawal from the world, but a shared life with room for silence, art, imperfection and play. Rest matters too. A regular pause for lunch, tea or a sit-down can be a small refusal of the demand to keep producing.
Maitrinara’s Buddhist challenge is more inward. He questions the belief that we are separate selves, here only to consume, achieve and get better. In his account, the feeling of separateness feeds greed and craving. The path he describes is a practical one: ethics, wisdom and meditation, supported by a community travelling in the same direction.
There are some real differences in their answers. Jonathan speaks most explicitly through Christian story, prayer and liturgy. The Easter story, with its movement through betrayal, suffering, lament and unexpected new life, can hold the full range of human experience. It gives people a shared language for grief and hope. His vision of the antidote to the Machine is rooted in the divine, in gratitude, and in a community with rhythms and boundaries.
Paul shares that Christian grounding, but his attention falls especially on place and on how communities live their values. He is alert to the ways even churches can become competitive, inward-looking and attached to growth. He values collaboration across denominations and asks what it means to live lightly on the land. He is also candid about the inner cost of resisting the Machine. Activists may face a painful gap between the world as it is, the world as it could be, and the imperfect person they are. Paul believes we need unconditional love, beauty and self-deprecating humour to keep going.
Maitrinara’s Buddhist framework is different again. He speaks of enlightenment and the possibility of human transformation, rather than Christian salvation or resurrection.
Yet these differences do not cancel out the deeper agreement. Each interviewee believes that a life shaped by the Machine can be interrupted. Each points towards friendship, shared practices and a purpose larger than individual success. Each believes we need to recover the ability to pay attention: to the person in front of us, to the living world, to our own fears and grief, and to what gives life meaning.
Paul puts it simply: “Anything that stills you is an antidote to the machine.” Stillness may begin in a walk, a meal, a meditation, a piece of work done by hand, or the courage to stay with grief instead of distracting ourselves from it. It may mean learning the names of the plants under our feet, or allowing someone to become a friend.
Perhaps the way out is not a single path. It is a turning towards what the Machine teaches us to overlook, the gift of enough, the wisdom of the body, the presence of another person, and the life of the other than human, nature and place and the land. We find our way back not by escaping the world but by learning to belong to it again.