Gadfly Academy | Herman Middleton
@gadflyacademy.bsky.social
How do we get out of this mess? Download “The How Did We Get Here? Reading List” and join us down the rabbit hole...and out of the matrix: https://sleek.bio/gadflyacademy
“An ideology built on remaking nature for human needs will inevitably include human nature in that project. Humanity can no more survive the mechanistic or scientific revolutions intact than can the forests or the oceans.”
~ #PaulKingsnorth, #AgainstTheMachine, p. 70
* #BookStudy @GadflyAcademy-YT
~ #PaulKingsnorth, #AgainstTheMachine, p. 70
* #BookStudy @GadflyAcademy-YT
December 23, 2025 at 6:01 PM
“An ideology built on remaking nature for human needs will inevitably include human nature in that project. Humanity can no more survive the mechanistic or scientific revolutions intact than can the forests or the oceans.”
~ #PaulKingsnorth, #AgainstTheMachine, p. 70
* #BookStudy @GadflyAcademy-YT
~ #PaulKingsnorth, #AgainstTheMachine, p. 70
* #BookStudy @GadflyAcademy-YT
“[I]f a machine is the metaphor you use to represent other living beings, then a machine is what you will make of the world.”
~ #PaulKingsnorth, #AgainstTheMachine, p. 69
*Join our #BookClub @GadflyAcademy on YouTube!
~ #PaulKingsnorth, #AgainstTheMachine, p. 69
*Join our #BookClub @GadflyAcademy on YouTube!
December 22, 2025 at 7:49 PM
“[I]f a machine is the metaphor you use to represent other living beings, then a machine is what you will make of the world.”
~ #PaulKingsnorth, #AgainstTheMachine, p. 69
*Join our #BookClub @GadflyAcademy on YouTube!
~ #PaulKingsnorth, #AgainstTheMachine, p. 69
*Join our #BookClub @GadflyAcademy on YouTube!
“Our daily experience of life is of being embedded; but the mechanistic revolution told us that the world was governed by set laws which could be ‘objectively’ known, as if observed, somehow, from outside..."
December 18, 2025 at 2:50 PM
“Our daily experience of life is of being embedded; but the mechanistic revolution told us that the world was governed by set laws which could be ‘objectively’ known, as if observed, somehow, from outside..."
“Liberal modernity, in short, is doomed.
If this is true, then another conclusion also suggests itself: that older ways of seeing and speaking—mythology, folk cultures and the mystical underpinnings of religious faith—might have been on to something..."
If this is true, then another conclusion also suggests itself: that older ways of seeing and speaking—mythology, folk cultures and the mystical underpinnings of religious faith—might have been on to something..."
December 17, 2025 at 2:08 PM
“Liberal modernity, in short, is doomed.
If this is true, then another conclusion also suggests itself: that older ways of seeing and speaking—mythology, folk cultures and the mystical underpinnings of religious faith—might have been on to something..."
If this is true, then another conclusion also suggests itself: that older ways of seeing and speaking—mythology, folk cultures and the mystical underpinnings of religious faith—might have been on to something..."
“Reason, it turned out, was not a superior alternative to intuition, emotion or instinct, but a manifestation of it. There could be no mind without the body, no unprejudiced concepts or unpolluted models of reality..."
December 16, 2025 at 2:46 PM
“Reason, it turned out, was not a superior alternative to intuition, emotion or instinct, but a manifestation of it. There could be no mind without the body, no unprejudiced concepts or unpolluted models of reality..."
"The Real Crisis Isn't Political"
December 12, 2025 at 8:38 PM
"The Real Crisis Isn't Political"
“The eighteenth century's two revolutions—the revolution of Reason and the revolution of Technology—were supposed to walk us towards a universal paradise. Instead, we live in a time of mass extinction and cultural disintegration.”
~ #PaulKingsnorth, #AgainstTheMachine, p. 62
*Join our #bookstudy!
~ #PaulKingsnorth, #AgainstTheMachine, p. 62
*Join our #bookstudy!
December 11, 2025 at 2:45 PM
“The eighteenth century's two revolutions—the revolution of Reason and the revolution of Technology—were supposed to walk us towards a universal paradise. Instead, we live in a time of mass extinction and cultural disintegration.”
~ #PaulKingsnorth, #AgainstTheMachine, p. 62
*Join our #bookstudy!
~ #PaulKingsnorth, #AgainstTheMachine, p. 62
*Join our #bookstudy!
“Reason is appealing, because it implies that humans can use their faculties to order the universe, and that the universe will respond in kind..."
December 10, 2025 at 3:30 PM
“Reason is appealing, because it implies that humans can use their faculties to order the universe, and that the universe will respond in kind..."
“Industrialism's physical clearances—the enclosures of land and the destruction of artisanship in the peasantry—were mirrored by the French tsunami in which monarchy, aristocracy, church and customs of all kinds..."
December 8, 2025 at 4:19 PM
“Industrialism's physical clearances—the enclosures of land and the destruction of artisanship in the peasantry—were mirrored by the French tsunami in which monarchy, aristocracy, church and customs of all kinds..."
"The Spiritual Formation of Capitalism" youtu.be/oRl1YHZ3SEI?...
The Spiritual Formation of Capitalism | Paul Kingsnorth Thematic Book Study #5
YouTube video by Protecting Veil
youtu.be
December 6, 2025 at 9:50 PM
"The Spiritual Formation of Capitalism" youtu.be/oRl1YHZ3SEI?...
“[Kingsnorth’s to Jeff Bezos] It's always worth spending time with the unquestioned assumptions in passages like this. Here, for example, we see that our lives are ‘ever improving,’ that there is a universal ‘we’ in the ‘developed world’ that can be ‘improved’ with more ‘growing’;..."
December 6, 2025 at 7:19 PM
“[Kingsnorth’s to Jeff Bezos] It's always worth spending time with the unquestioned assumptions in passages like this. Here, for example, we see that our lives are ‘ever improving,’ that there is a universal ‘we’ in the ‘developed world’ that can be ‘improved’ with more ‘growing’;..."
“Like the Fen Tigers and many unnamed people who have stood up against the onward march of dehumanizing ‘progress’, general Ludd and his legions were fighting the monster from the desert, and their struggle was existential..."
December 5, 2025 at 4:09 PM
“Like the Fen Tigers and many unnamed people who have stood up against the onward march of dehumanizing ‘progress’, general Ludd and his legions were fighting the monster from the desert, and their struggle was existential..."
“[Quote from G. K. Chesterton] Nine times out of ten, an industrial civilization of the modern capitalist type does not arise wherever else it may arise in places where there has hitherto been a distributive civilization like that of a peasantry. Capitalism is a monster that grows in deserts..."
December 4, 2025 at 5:29 PM
“[Quote from G. K. Chesterton] Nine times out of ten, an industrial civilization of the modern capitalist type does not arise wherever else it may arise in places where there has hitherto been a distributive civilization like that of a peasantry. Capitalism is a monster that grows in deserts..."
“Enclosure is, more than anything else, a process of ground clearance. Its aim is not only to privatize land or resources, but to destroy older, more localised, customary communities and cultures..."
December 3, 2025 at 3:04 PM
“Enclosure is, more than anything else, a process of ground clearance. Its aim is not only to privatize land or resources, but to destroy older, more localised, customary communities and cultures..."
“England's social revolution had generated a new folk hero, the mythical ‘Ned Ludd’. The historian Kevin Binfield concludes that Ludd superseded the older arcadian figure of Robin Hood as a freedom fighter, more appropriate for the times..."
December 1, 2025 at 7:50 PM
“England's social revolution had generated a new folk hero, the mythical ‘Ned Ludd’. The historian Kevin Binfield concludes that Ludd superseded the older arcadian figure of Robin Hood as a freedom fighter, more appropriate for the times..."
“Taking away people’s ‘comfortable…partial independence’ and substituting it with ‘the precarious condition of mere hirelings’ has been the working basis of Machine capitalism worldwide since the 1700s.”
~ #PaulKingsnorth, #AgainstTheMachine, p. 46
~ #PaulKingsnorth, #AgainstTheMachine, p. 46
November 26, 2025 at 3:37 PM
“Taking away people’s ‘comfortable…partial independence’ and substituting it with ‘the precarious condition of mere hirelings’ has been the working basis of Machine capitalism worldwide since the 1700s.”
~ #PaulKingsnorth, #AgainstTheMachine, p. 46
~ #PaulKingsnorth, #AgainstTheMachine, p. 46
“This is a story from seventeenth-century England. It is also a story from nineteenth-century Africa, and from eighteenth-century South America, and from twentieth-century Indonesia and China and continental Europe..."
November 25, 2025 at 2:05 PM
“This is a story from seventeenth-century England. It is also a story from nineteenth-century Africa, and from eighteenth-century South America, and from twentieth-century Indonesia and China and continental Europe..."
“[Quote from Lewis Mumford:] For those of us who have thrown off the myth of the machine, the next move is ours. For the gates of the technocratic prison will open automatically, despite their rusty, ancient hinges, as soon as we choose to walk out.”
~ #PaulKingsnorth, #AgainstTheMachine, p. 42
~ #PaulKingsnorth, #AgainstTheMachine, p. 42
November 24, 2025 at 3:03 PM
“[Quote from Lewis Mumford:] For those of us who have thrown off the myth of the machine, the next move is ours. For the gates of the technocratic prison will open automatically, despite their rusty, ancient hinges, as soon as we choose to walk out.”
~ #PaulKingsnorth, #AgainstTheMachine, p. 42
~ #PaulKingsnorth, #AgainstTheMachine, p. 42
“If the machine is a story, then the first step to its dismantling is neither monkey-wrenching nor revolution—it is to stop believing the story. The second step is to stop telling it to others; and the third is to begin the search for a better one.”
~ #PaulKingsnorth, #AgainstTheMachine, p.42
~ #PaulKingsnorth, #AgainstTheMachine, p.42
November 23, 2025 at 7:33 PM
“If the machine is a story, then the first step to its dismantling is neither monkey-wrenching nor revolution—it is to stop believing the story. The second step is to stop telling it to others; and the third is to begin the search for a better one.”
~ #PaulKingsnorth, #AgainstTheMachine, p.42
~ #PaulKingsnorth, #AgainstTheMachine, p.42
“The values of that Machine are now so ubiquitous that we treat them as if they were as natural as rain or wind. Progress; ‘openness’; an objection to limits and borders; therapeutic individualism; universalism; the rejection of roots, place and history; pure materialism;..."
November 22, 2025 at 7:12 PM
“The values of that Machine are now so ubiquitous that we treat them as if they were as natural as rain or wind. Progress; ‘openness’; an objection to limits and borders; therapeutic individualism; universalism; the rejection of roots, place and history; pure materialism;..."
“A movement [environmentalism] which began by calling for more simplicity and slowness, closeness to nature and simple living, has mutated into a crusade to coat wild landscapes with glass and metal, abolish farming, further industrialize the global food supply,..."
November 21, 2025 at 3:28 PM
“A movement [environmentalism] which began by calling for more simplicity and slowness, closeness to nature and simple living, has mutated into a crusade to coat wild landscapes with glass and metal, abolish farming, further industrialize the global food supply,..."
Are We All Colonists Now? youtu.be/cBUaZHABJUk
Are We All Colonists Now? | Paul Kingsnorth's Against The Machine: Ch. 7, 8 | Book Study # 6
YouTube video by Gadfly Academy / You Are Not A Machine
youtu.be
November 20, 2025 at 9:39 PM
Are We All Colonists Now? youtu.be/cBUaZHABJUk
“Across the spectrum, from conservatives to liberals, Marxists to fascists, believers to atheists, very little serious criticism of the entwined myths of progress, growth and materialism will ever be heard in the public sphere..."
November 20, 2025 at 5:31 PM
“Across the spectrum, from conservatives to liberals, Marxists to fascists, believers to atheists, very little serious criticism of the entwined myths of progress, growth and materialism will ever be heard in the public sphere..."
“‘Communities never exert themselves to the utmost, still less curtail the individual life’, claims Mumford, ‘except for what they regard as a great religious end…"
November 18, 2025 at 2:43 PM
“‘Communities never exert themselves to the utmost, still less curtail the individual life’, claims Mumford, ‘except for what they regard as a great religious end…"
“The machine is not simply a vast, soulless mechanism for accruing material wealth. It is, in some deadly fashion, a sacral object in itself. It is its own enchantment..."
November 17, 2025 at 2:58 PM
“The machine is not simply a vast, soulless mechanism for accruing material wealth. It is, in some deadly fashion, a sacral object in itself. It is its own enchantment..."