Escaping the Machine: Truth, Connection, and the Discipline of Being Human
The modern struggle in an age that offers unlimited distractions.
My daughter fired a question from the back of the car: “What if everyone saw colors differently? How would we know which color was which?” She’s twelve, the oldest of three girls. Each day after school they pile into the car, buzzing with ideas. I couldn’t get a word in—until a pause let me answer.
I said, “It doesn’t matter whatever they say they see, we would come to an agreement as to what is brown or blue or yellow. It’s like that for every word. There has to be an agreed upon meaning—there has to be one truth—otherwise we couldn’t properly talk to each other.”
They didn’t like that answer and moved onto another subject. But it stuck with me.
The truth is getting harder to figure out today. With the thousands of mobile apps and platforms to obtain information every second of the day worldwide, there is too much effort to evaluate what is being presented to us (and the amount of news and information coming out each day is absurd). I now have to ask: Who is providing the information? What are their motivations for providing it? What have they reported on before? Instead of being able to take the information at face value, I now have to take the time to figure out if the story is being told accurately and fully. Who has time for that? It’s easier to stay in a bubble, with people we already trust. In other words, we self-isolate.
Truth
Pope Leo recently spoke at a gathering of news agencies about the duty of journalism to defend the truth in a time of confusion. He warned that totalitarian regimes thrive when “the distinction between fact and fiction, and the distinction between true and false, no longer exist.” Information, he said, is a public good.
In other words: truth is a public good.
But it’s imperative to have broad agreement on what that truth is. If someone wanted to sow chaos in a society, they need only change the meaning of words or history. Then assign absurd motivations to those who disagree and let the people battle it out, destroying the culture.
This is our world today.
But how do we come to agreement on the truth from our bubbles?
Connection
To be able to have honest dialog, we must have a connection to one another, not through social media, but in real life. The scaled connections offered by technology—being “connected” to everyone and everything—is not a human connection. We are but nodes in today’s global network. Humanity began outside in the real world, together. Then we moved inside, together. We’re now inside, alone, connected virtually but not in reality.
I’m reading (and not yet finished) a fascinating book by Paul Kingsnorth, Against The Machine. It’s about the unmaking of humanity that began long ago from something he calls the Machine. The Machine is made from the economic and social forces that move humanity from our natural rural areas that allowed the forming of good, in real life, relationships with one another to the efficient, cold, technological but isolating connections in urban areas. This process began thousands of years ago and continues today, he says.
With all the benefit that Western economies have brought (and there are many), the “want”, as Kingsnorth calls it, is the fuel that drives the Machine. The want is the unbridled desire of an ever growing middle class to obtain more. The want, he says, is “an old, surging force, one that stems from within us.” He goes on:
A force which has driven all this onwards, which is the lifeblood of the Machine, and which, through its untrammelling, acts as an acid which burns through all past structures and values. An acid which is now acting to dissolve our ecosystems and cultural norms, as it has dissolved so much else.
The progress of humanity through inventions, medical breakthroughs and technology are not bad things. Millions of lives have emerged from poverty; we live longer and healthier. Western, capitalistic and free societies have led to this progress. But it also feeds the Machine. And the Machine must grow.
The progress provided by the Machine pushes us from the fields—away from one another—into isolated walls of cities. There, we have all the comforts needed to perform for it, feeding it with our labor so that it can grow. Meanwhile, we become more and more alone. We are funneled into the Machine.
How do we escape it? The solution, Kingsnorth says, is just step away from it by making different choices in our lives.
As I write that, I feel like the rich young man who followed all the commandments and thought he did all that he needed to get eternal life (Matthew 19, 16:22). He asked Jesus what else he needed to do to get in heaven. Jesus responded:
If you wish to be perfect, go, sell what you have and give to [the] poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.
Ouch. The rich young man walked away, dejected, knowing he couldn’t give up his riches.
Similarly, Kingsnorth’s solution for us to save ourselves is to disconnect from the Machine, to walk away and give it all up. And then begin the work of connecting to one another in real life. Indeed, Kingsnorth writes from rural Ireland. Not entirely disconnected of course, but no longer in a city.
David Foster Wallace predicted the disconnection of humanity before the internet was really the internet. Ted Gioia wrote on his blog, The Honest Broker, that in 1996 Wallace, a prominent personality and author, gave an interview to Rolling Stone who was pushing a story about Wallace’s addiction to heroine. It turns out that Wallace wasn’t addicted to drugs, but rather, television. The story wasn’t interesting enough and was never reported until Wallace’s suicide in 2008. A movie was made about his story in 2015, The End of the Tour.
I encourage you to read Gioia’s illuminating article on Wallace’s foresight thirty years ago. He walks you through the warnings of Wallace and applies that to the troubles we are having today. He supports the prescience of Wallace with this quote from that Rolling Stone article:
At a certain point we’re gonna have to build up some machinery, inside our guts, to help us deal with this. Because the technology is just gonna get better and better and better and better. And it’s gonna get easier and easier and more and more convenient, and more and more pleasurable, to be alone with images on a screen, given to us by by people who do not love us but want our money.
Again, this is in 1996.
Gioia says that Wallace didn’t own a television and avoided the internet. He stepped away from it all because of his addiction to screens. Sadly, it wasn’t enough to save him.
It takes self-rule and discipline to leave the Machine.
Discipline
The Machine grows and grows. And as it does, it makes stepping away from it even harder. But is it stepping away—or stepping toward something else? With the truth as our foundation, we should step to one another to maintain real life connections. Watch a movie together. Go to a show or sporting event together. Read a book and share it with a friend or a book club. Our culture is formed by art. Truths about one another, about our humanity, can be brought forth to us through art, shedding light on the darkness caused by the isolating Machine.
Thomas Salerno’s essay “Light and High Beauty: JRR Tolkien’s Antidote to Despair” explores how Tolkien’s literary vision offers hope amid modern cultural pessimism. He acknowledges the widespread fear and fatalism permeating social media and public discourse, especially in light of political violence and societal unrest. He warns against allowing this fear to devolve into despair, which paralyzes the human spirit and blinds us to everyday beauty and goodness. Drawing from Tolkien’s experience writing The Lord of the Rings during World War II, Salerno highlights how the author continued crafting stories even as the world around him descended into chaos.
Salerno contrasts two characters from Tolkien’s work—Denethor and Samwise Gamgee—to illustrate responses to darkness. Denethor, consumed by despair after gazing into the Palantír, loses hope and succumbs to nihilism. Sam, however, finds strength in a fleeting glimpse of a star above Mordor, realizing that “the Shadow was only a small and passing thing.” Sam’s endurance, Salerno argues, is rooted in spiritual hope rather than institutional power, exemplifies the kind of courage needed in our own troubled times.
Salerno urges us not to retreat into anxiety or melancholy but to “light little candles” by creating art—writing, painting, sculpting, or storytelling. When we make art, he says, we mirror the “light and high beauty” that predates the stars. Salerno insists that, in a world increasingly fractured and fearful, our stories and creative works are not escapism but essential acts of resistance and renewal. What I call a shared culture.
Escaping the Machine
But won’t the Machine consume the art? Won’t it distribute it everywhere, monetizing it and us as labor creating art?
Yes, the Machine feeds on everything. It will consume it all through the fuel of want. And that is the key. The motivation for our lives must not be materialistic. Wanting must be held in check. Wanting less is the solution. Connecting more is the process to achieve it. Having the discipline to focus on creating art or at least experiening it together to form a shared culture is part of building and maintaining that connection. And all must be held into account by truth.
Basking in the Creator’s truth allows us to speak to one another with goodwill in our heart. Our words will have the same meaning as we engage in real life. But the Machine can’t feed on real life, inefficient, human relationships. It cannot grow on love. Love exists outside the Machine—coming down from the heavens, permeating the universe. Love is and will always be there for us.
When we emerge from isolation—from the screens and the walls of our cities—we are outside the Machine. We see ourselves in one another, to love again.
How do we escape the Machine?
Truth. Connection. Discipline. But always, start with the truth.
Peace.