Post-modernism is a non-ideological criticism movement. It’s all about deconstructing to find weaknesses and fallacies. The majority support that you’ve mentioned is what all movements are fighting for - because it gives them credibility and adds to the power. It’s much cheaper to bring people on-board than to fight them.
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That view is wrong on 2 accounts - the people that you’ve labeled as the super rich are not demonic humans, they only subscribe to a certain worldview that they internalised and served them well by earning them a lot of capital within the rules of the dominant system (within which we all live).
Second problem is that you can’t “get rid of them” because the people who want to do so are not strong (clever, capable) enough. Otherwise, they’d be on the top. What we’re seeing in the States is an in-fighting of the elites. Similar to mafia syndicates vying for power.
Trump is also working on “capacity-buildling” through his populist policies and rhetorics.
Post-modernism is a non-ideological criticism movement.
It may have begun as that. It turned into an ideology itself. An anti-epistemological ideology.
The majority support that you’ve mentioned is what all movements are fighting for - because it gives them credibility and adds to the power. It’s much cheaper to bring people on-board than to fight them.
I have to defend democracy. If I do not do that then I will be accused of eco-fascism. Therefore I have to provide a theoretical means of how a democracy could create an ecocivilisation. I don’t see how that is going to be possible without majority support.
That view is wrong on 2 accounts - the people that you’ve labeled as the super rich are not demonic humans, they only subscribe to a certain worldview that they internalised and served them well by earning them a lot of capital within the rules of the dominant system (within which we all live).
I did not say they were demonic. I am saying they are a serious obstacle on the path to ecocivilisation. We cannot have those levels of economic inequality. They are not socio-politically sustainable.
Second problem is that you can’t “get rid of them” because the people who want to do so are not strong (clever, capable) enough. Otherwise, they’d be on the top. What we’re seeing in the States is an in-fighting of the elites. Similar to mafia syndicates vying for power.
What is happening in the US may not necessarily be repeated across the rest of the Western world. In fact I think that is highly unlikely. I believe Europe will follow a significantly different path.
Hi Geoff,
I want to thank you again for sharing parts of your book and your vision—it’s clear that you’ve poured a lot of care, conviction, and energy into it. I also sense that you’re hoping it might offer a framework or clarity for others who are navigating big questions.
I’ve been sitting with our exchanges, and I notice that what I’m longing for isn’t more explanation, but more exploration—with you, not just through you. Something more dialogical, less certain. Less about answers, more about composting what we think we know.
I wonder: what are the questions that still unsettle you? Where does your theory feel porous or unfinished? What does it ask of you emotionally or relationally, not just intellectually?
These are the spaces where I tend to learn the most—when someone shares not only their clarity, but also their doubts, their wounds, their paradoxes.
I don’t need you to be unsure, but I’d love to know where the edges of your own understanding lie. Not to poke holes in it, but to find the places where we might meet not as adherents or critics, but as fellow travellers walking into the unknown, together.
Would you be open to that kind of exchange?
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I have read that book and would be interested in discussing it. What did you think of the book? Does it speak to you? My feelings are mixed. Rolling back modernity in a literal sense does not strike me as an attractive plan. However, if there are more subtle or sequenced versions of that, it might be intriguing.
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Hi Robert,
I’m about 50% of the way through it, and it has shaken me up to the core. I’ve been digging pretty deeply into the topic of what Jonathan Rowson calls “the metacrisis” from my background in project management, systems thinking, complexity science, and (oddly enough) theology. What the book laid bare for me, is how deeply I have bought into what the author calls the “single story of progress, development, and human evolution.”
I only started reading the book a couple of days ago, but I had already written about similar themes a few months ago, e.g. Stories, Metaphors, and Myths: Rethinking the Foundations of Progress - In Search of Wisdom
But Vanessa Machado’s stories and analysis went much deeper, and cut through my armour, so that I found myself having to compost many experiences (good and bad) together to see with any sort of clarity how thoroughly the prevailing culture permeates my perception.
What did you make of it? Did she touch you viscerally with her stories?
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In the 1980s I visited Peru, and my family has lived in and among indigenous peoples of the Pacific NW for over a century and a half, so my emotions about indigenous culture and experience are more pre-processed. Our local tribes run sophisticated business models based on casinos, hotels, discount groceries and gas. They reinvest the profits into tribal social services, salmon restoration, and old growth forest preservation. They also encourage the transmission of ancestral language and culture and run media campaigns promoting tribal identity. Is that “hospicing modernity?” Well … the tribes are finding ways to persist pre-modern values in today’s world. They do that with sophisticated legal and business strategies that seem thoroughly modern.
The “single story of progress, development, and human evolution” fails all sorts of empirical tests. I can get there through the work of Jared Diamond, Ian Morris, Nate Hagens, Joe Brewer, many others. (Anyone who can do math should be able to figure it out. ) The only way to persist the progress story much longer is to pull nanotech, AI, and space travel genies out of a bottle, which of course is exactly what Ray Kurzweil and tech bro culture are trying to do. In the existential battle against forces like Musk-MAGA, do Vanessa’s ideas hurt or help? I can see arguments both ways.
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There are many ways of answering that question. Certainly there is a massive question about the future of democracy. I have found myself forced to defend democracy, because I have no faith that even the most ecologically-minded sort of authoritarianism can relied on not to go bad. I also want to avoid any risk of being accused of “ecofascism”. And yet my faith in humans to be able to find a democratic solution to the problem is draining away all the time, especially given recent events in the US. So that’s one thing that I am rather covering up with a figleaf – if we lose democracy in Europe then I think we’re in very serious trouble. We may never get it back again. So there’s questions there both about faith in humans (especially Western humans) and about whether I’m really being realistic in this respect. Especially if we’re not allowed to lie to people about the prospects of individuated life after death – it seems that humans who believe that physical death is the end of “their” existence are very reluctant to actually care about what happens after they’ve gone. Would the Christian martyrs have sacrificed their lives if they didn’t believe in bodily resurrection for themselves?
I have left out the deeply spiritual stuff. Part of the book is autobiographical, describing my own journey from atheist-naturalist activist into magical realist, but I do not tell the whole of that story. It is left to the reader to imagine what I left out, if they want to try. I’m not sure how many people would believe it anyway. All I’ll say is that I was “called”, and some things happened, but I quite soon realised that I simply wasn’t up to the job. The problem was partly that I was a complete mess myself – I had given up on my own life 15 years beforehand and was in no position to start living like a saint. But an even bigger problem was that I did not have my message straight. Even then what I wanted was to bring the scientific community with me rather than walking that path on my own. But I didn’t have any message sorted out (not least because I had no time to prepare any such thing) so I was no use in that role. Which meant I had to back out – I had to “renege on the deal”. And then the magic turned from a dream into an indescribable nightmare, at least until I was set free from the “contract” I hadn’t understood when I “signed” it. At that point I felt I owed a debt to Reality, or whatever you want to call it. I have indeed put a great deal of time and effort into sorting some sort of message out, and getting myself into a position where that message might be got out there. Not that I’ve done it all myself – I’ve had “help” all along the way. I’ve been “lucky” in all sorts of ways. Finishing this book feels like paying off that debt, and therefore a new start. My life is going to be my own again, without feeling I have unfinished business to deal with.
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What is it advocating? How can we go backwards? I don’t see how that is possible.
Talking of “rolling back modernity”…
Yesterday I was flattening the latest molehills in our goose pen and I spotted this. I know the local rocks in this part of West Wales very well – it is entirely sandstones, mudstones and quartz. This is flint, which I also know very well because it occurs in veins in chalk and I lived most of my life on the chalk downs of south-east England. There is no naturally occurring flint within 200 miles of here. This also isn’t any natural piece of flint – it has since been confirmed as a hide scraper, lost or discarded by a human being a very long time ago.
I don’t think there can be any going backwards.
Modernity bad. Radical mind shift.
When Alexis de Tocqueville visited the US in the early 19th century, he marveled at the ability of Americans to self-organize frontier communities. Those skills have atrophied. I honestly have no idea if democracy has a future at the US macro level. But any hope for it will come from regaining face-to-face organization and communication skills at the very local level.
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That’s a fairly common experience. Out of the ordinary, to be sure, but in certain circles quite well known. Happened to me a couple years ago. Luckily, I knew the theory of it already, so it was more exciting than scary. But “reality” was not all that obvious for awhile.
This article helped confirm for me what was going on. Good idea to connect with a community that can relate to the experience.
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Radical mind shift.
And then what?
Good question! I find Vanessa’s vision lacking on the practical solutions level.
If someone is 100% stuck in a capitalist materialist mindset, Vanessa’s book will provoke needed questions and open doors to different ways of thinking. (Very parallel to 2R). However, if someone already groks that infinite growth on a finite planet is impossible, and if that person is looking for practical strategies to head off the most destructive sorts of collapse scenarios, other books are far more useful.
OK. I don’t think I need to read that book then.
Thank you for this reply—it lands very differently than previous exchanges, and I appreciate you sharing more of your own journey with such raw honesty.
I can feel the weight of what you’ve carried—the calling, the sense of not being ready, the “deal” you weren’t sure you signed, and the desire to do justice to something you felt was larger than yourself. That’s not the usual terrain of forums like this, but I want to say I see it, and I don’t take it lightly.
What you wrote stirred something in me. I was “called” by the Anglican Church back in 1961—they even sponsored my theology degree—but I didn’t have the spiritual depth to respond fully until over 40 years later. In the intervening years, I tried to serve in other ways, but I’ve always felt a thread pulling at me, asking for more. So I resonate with what you describe: the weight of a calling, the inadequacy we feel in its presence, and the long, slow reckoning it can demand.
It sounds like your book is more than a theory—it may even be a kind of offering, perhaps a form of personal resolution. And that makes me want to ask less about your conclusions and more about how the process of writing has changed you.
You mentioned leaving out the deeply spiritual parts. I wonder whether that absence is felt not just by the reader, but by you too. Do you ever feel like what’s been written is only half of what wants to be said?
And I was struck by your reflection on belief in life after death. It makes me wonder: is it really belief in personal survival that matters—or is it the experience of belonging to something greater than the self? Something worth caring for, even if we never see the result?
That’s what I’m trying to explore—not from a place of certainty, but from a place of longing. If there’s space, I’d like to keep walking a bit further with you—not toward answers, but toward a kind of companionship in the questioning.
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Thanks for this—it’s a generous and layered response. You’ve clearly lived close to some of these questions, and I appreciate how you’re holding the complexity without needing to flatten it.
I don’t think Vanessa would dispute that many Indigenous communities today are navigating modernity with both pragmatism and cultural integrity—leveraging legal systems, business models, and infrastructure to support values that don’t originate in modernity, even if they’re now expressed through its tools. That doesn’t strike me as hypocrisy. If anything, it feels like deep strategy: co-opting the machinery of empire to regenerate something more enduring.
For me, what Hospicing Modernity offered wasn’t a blueprint or a purity test. It was more like a deep diagnostic: not just of systems, but of the subtle ways modernity has shaped how I think, feel, relate, and even hope. That’s the part that shook me—the recognition that even my “radical” responses were often running on modern fuel: certainty, control, mastery, rescue.
So I don’t know whether Vanessa’s ideas “help” or “hurt” in the existential battle. But I don’t think she’s trying to win that battle in the conventional sense. I think she’s asking whether the way we’re fighting might already be conceding too much.
For example, if we defeat Musk-MAGA but build our resistance on fear, purity, or domination in another form… have we really composted modernity, or just rearranged its furniture?
That said, I do wrestle with your question about urgency. Does this work prepare us for collapse, or distract us from fighting back effectively? I suspect it depends on how it’s metabolized—whether we treat it as reflection before action, or a way of being within action.
I’m still learning to live that question. Curious where it takes you too.
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Complexity is a good framing. We likely need a whole new thread on “modernity”, but modernity is not my Satan. Satan is not even my Satan. I take Nietzsche very seriously about casting out devils - I basically just let all my devils right in and invited them to make themselves right at home. All that anger is just how I am - it’s raw energy - needing direction.
Vanessa is a shaman or a curandera. She’s magic, for sure. It’s simply that my head has been blown on several occasions already (first time on liquor, later just on life), so her medicine leads to where I more or less already am. For example, it’s not like I want to take down the tech bros because I want all their money and power for myself. Just looking out for Gaia, essentially. Spiritual warfare is still warfare - except when it isn’t - except when it is. I’m picturing jungle vines embracing the tech bros and ever so slowly pulling them blissfully into the bosom of the Earth.
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