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Gadfly Academy | Herman Middleton @gadflyacademy.bsky.social · 7h

Every human being needs to have multiple roots. It is necessary for him to draw well nigh the whole of his moral, intellectual and spiritual life by way of the environment of which he forms a natural part.”
~ Simone Weil, The Need For Roots (as quoted in #AgainstTheMachine...)

Gadfly Academy | Herman Middleton @gadflyacademy.bsky.social · 7h

"A human being has roots by virtue of his real, active and natural participation in the life of a community which preserves in living shape certain particular treasures of the past and certain particular expectations of the future”
~ Simone Weil, The Need For Roots (as quoted in #AgainstTheMachine)

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Gadfly Academy | Herman Middleton @gadflyacademy.bsky.social · 7h

"To be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul. It is one of the hardest to define...”
~ Simone Weil, The Need For Roots (as quoted in #AgainstTheMachine...)

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Gadfly Academy | Herman Middleton @gadflyacademy.bsky.social · 23h

"The quest for perfection is a quest for homogeneity and control, and it leads to the gulag and the guillotine, the death camp and the holy war. Even if we could agree on what perfection amounted to, we would none of us be equipped to build it.” #PaulKingsnorth, #AgainstTheMachine, p. 14

Gadfly Academy | Herman Middleton @gadflyacademy.bsky.social · 23h

"What is ‘perfection’ anyway? It is a concept designed by a part of the modern human mind—the part that likes clean lines, easy answers, plots that end by neatly tying up all the threads..."

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Gadfly Academy | Herman Middleton @gadflyacademy.bsky.social · 23h

“There is no such thing as a perfect society, and anyone who tries to build one will either go mad or become a tyrant. Humans are fallen, or just natural, and both of those words are synonyms for ‘imperfect’..."

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Gadfly Academy | Herman Middleton @gadflyacademy.bsky.social · 2d

"to the vacuum that has replaced it—a vacuum which something must come to fill.” Paul Kingsnorth, Against The Machine, p. 12

Gadfly Academy | Herman Middleton @gadflyacademy.bsky.social · 2d

"...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 civilization’. Western civilization is already dead—and both sides of the current ‘war’ are reacting, in their own particular ways..."

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Gadfly Academy | Herman Middleton @gadflyacademy.bsky.social · 2d

“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...” Paul Kingsnorth, Against The Machine, p. 12

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Gadfly Academy | Herman Middleton @gadflyacademy.bsky.social · 3d

Please join us...going live now! www.youtube.com/watch?v=_QEH...

Against The Machine Book Study - Livestream #1 - Introduction, Ch. 1 & 2

YouTube video by Gadfly Academy / You Are Not A Machine

www.youtube.com

Gadfly Academy | Herman Middleton @gadflyacademy.bsky.social · 6d

“It is easy for me to imagine 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.”
~ Wendell Berry

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Gadfly Academy | Herman Middleton @gadflyacademy.bsky.social · 11d

Join us for our Against the Machine book study! → gadflyacademy.substack.com/p/paul-kings...
#PaulKingsnorth #TheMachine #Philosophy #Orthodoxy

Paul Kingsnorth's Against The Machine

Join Our Book Study!

gadflyacademy.substack.com

Gadfly Academy | Herman Middleton @gadflyacademy.bsky.social · 11d

AI may change the world—but it can only destroy the soul if you allow it to...

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Gadfly Academy | Herman Middleton @gadflyacademy.bsky.social · 11d

Light small fires. Cultivate truth. Prepare the soil for what might come after...

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Gadfly Academy | Herman Middleton @gadflyacademy.bsky.social · 11d

His message: stop fighting for or against “progress.” Build new, and better things, on the margins instead...

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Gadfly Academy | Herman Middleton @gadflyacademy.bsky.social · 11d

Kingsnorth says the real crisis is spiritual. We’ve replaced mystery with mechanism...

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Gadfly Academy | Herman Middleton @gadflyacademy.bsky.social · 11d

They all warned us: the problem isn’t individual technologies—it’s the technological mindset that treats the world as a machine...

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Gadfly Academy | Herman Middleton @gadflyacademy.bsky.social · 11d

Paul Kingsnorth’s Against the Machine continues the prophetic tradition of thinkers like Jacques Ellul and Ivan Illich...

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Gadfly Academy | Herman Middleton @gadflyacademy.bsky.social · 11d

AI isn’t the problem. It’s just a symptom. 🧵

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Gadfly Academy | Herman Middleton @gadflyacademy.bsky.social · 19d

…The machine appeared
In the distance, singing to itself
Of money. Its song was the web
They were caught in, men and women
Together. The villages were as flies
To be sucked empty.
God secreted
A tear. Enough, enough,
He commanded, but the machine
Looked at him and went on singing.
‘Other,’ RS Thomas

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Gadfly Academy | Herman Middleton @gadflyacademy.bsky.social · 19d

"Modern technology has become a total phenomenon for civilization, the defining force of a new social order in which efficiency is no longer an option but a necessity imposed on all human activity." ~ Jacques Ellul

Gadfly Academy | Herman Middleton @gadflyacademy.bsky.social · 20d

“Meanwhile, out in what is fondly called ‘the real world’ by people who often don't know very much about reality, you are living in a metastasizing machine which is closing in around you, polluting your skies...woods and your past and your imagination…” Paul Kingsnorth, Against The Machine, p. xiv

Gadfly Academy | Herman Middleton @gadflyacademy.bsky.social · 20d

"To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will certainly be wrung... If you want to make sure of keeping it intact...lock it up safe... But in that casket..it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable." ~ CS Lewis

Gadfly Academy | Herman Middleton @gadflyacademy.bsky.social · 21d

"The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency - the belief that the here and now is all there is." ~ Allan Bloom

Gadfly Academy | Herman Middleton @gadflyacademy.bsky.social · 25d

"What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one." ~ Neil Postman