The entire What's Wrong With Society series below is now compiled and updated on my blog here.

What’s wrong with society? Part 2.

We’re morally impoverished while thinking we’re morally wealthy.

Most of our moral reasoning is tribal. Our lives matter but your tribe’s lives don’t.

What makes one tribe’s moral reason superior to another? What the leaders say is moral and whichever group is stronger.

Much of our moral reasoning is a cover story for power plays.

Jesse Nigro summarizes the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre’s work.

Here’s some key insights.

- MacIntyre’s “disquieting suggestion” is that our capacity for ethical discourse is long gone, even if we never noticed its absence.

- Nowadays, we have a lot of people making appeals to “objective” ethical standards that are incompatible.

- Emotivism is the theory that all moral speech is actually just a disguise for arbitrarily asserting one’s opinion or will.

- This is the default position of societies where competing ethical theories render moral terms (like “just” or “good”) meaningless.

What is wrong with society?

Part 6A. The Machine.

We have created a machine. We’re all working on different parts of it. Some of us are working on it while thinking we’re fighting the machine.

Paul Kingsnorth writes about the machine. Over the years and through his studies, he became a Christian after exploring many alternatives and resisting the idea. You can read about his story here

The machine is a societal and technological manifestation of the “autonomous self” ideology. And it is totalitarian in its core. Things are rapidly unfolding. There’s probably not much we can do to stop the machine.

Paul Kingsnorth writes about the machine. Over the years and through his studies, he became a Christian after exploring many alternatives and resisting the idea. You can read about his story at the link below.

What's Wrong With Society?

Part 6B. The Machine.

Kingsnorth describes the machine as follows:

“The ultimate project of modernity, I have come believe, is to replace nature with technology, and to rebuild the world in purely human shape, the better to fulfill the most ancient human dream: to become gods. What I call the Machine is the nexus of power, wealth, ideology and technology that has emerged to make this happen.“

At the heart of the machine, is the answer to the question, what does it mean to be human?

Kingsnorth again…

“[the machine's]modus operandi is the abolition of all borders, boundaries, categories, essences and truths: the uprooting of all previous ways of living in the name of pure individualism and perfect subjectivity. We are not made by the world now; we make it. And we can make anything we want. Or so we want to believe.”

There are things we can do to live in the machine but not be a part of the machine (in the world, but not of the world).