Welcome to Socrates in the studio, which falls under the Aegis, but not today under the rubric of Socrates in the city.

Today, the city in which we find ourselves is New York City, and my guest is Paul Kingsnorth.

He is a novelist, a poet, and an essayist. He's been dubbed furiously gifted by the

Washington Post. But what do they know? Let's be honest. Today, we're going to be discussing

his book Against the Machine on the Unmaking of Humanity. I've read it. It's excellent. I'm excited to talk to Paul Kingsnorth about it.

If you've watched Socrates in the studio, you know I've interviewed Ian McGilchrist. He had this

to say about Paul Kingsnorth's book. The most powerful and important book I've read in years.

This book should be required reading not only for politicians, technocrats, teachers,

and all who help shape our world, but for every still-living soul in this terrifying age of the machine.

Wow. Paul Kingsnorth, wonderful to have you with us. Thanks for being here.

Thanks for having me. Well, I said to you before we started that, you know, not only have I read the book,

but I had a curious experience reading the book because I thought, I think along the lines of what you say in here very, very much.

I've not written a book about it, but it was an extraordinary thing to read your explication of what I have felt intuitively and sometimes not so intuitively.

So for those who don't know anything about you or your thesis,

what is the thesis of against the machine on the unmaking of humanity?

Well, this is really a book that comes at the end of about a 30-year process of trying to work out what the heck is going on in the modern world.

Would this be your 30-year process? This would be my 30-year process, perhaps starting from the same sort of intuition that you have, which I've had since I was a young man, that I look around the world in, I feel that there's something very broken about the values of it.

The things that I feel intuitively connected to, human scale culture, the natural world, especially,

a sense that there's something essential in humanity seems to me to be being stripped

away and replaced by something technocratic. And really the thesis of the book is that over a period of modern history in the Western

world, particularly over the last few hundred years, we have created a particular system

of thinking, a way of seeing, and a way of being, which is quite revolutionary in human

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