#51 - Chris Arnade and the Good New World / Paul Kingsnorth and the Big Dread
The third door in the moor
Every so often in our lives we feel like we get let into another level. Turning points in our evolution as people that feel transformational somehow. You could probably plot them on a graph1, as if they’re every 10 years or so, but I don’t think it’s predictable that way. It’s likely more a function of learning something that you put into action in the real world, and the turning point is whatever happens next. You remember before the decision to act, and after. There’s no going back.
The latest for me is the fundamental lesson of the Stutz-school of mental health - can you live in reality and still move forward productively? There are layers to the onion, but the overwhelming point is that most of us in the 21st century don’t live in reality because it’s too hard, isn’t exciting enough, or we just don’t want to. We don’t talk how we’d normally talk when we’re at work, we sit all the time, we’re often bored, we escape with streaming and food, and we don’t want to admit when things are bad so we change the words we use to describe them instead of actually changing them.
Living in reality means confronting our predicament, here and now. And that reality comes with the recognition that we ought to shape up and change some things because they’re just not working. No easy task! Living in reality feels like being let into another level because somehow you suddenly know what you ought to do. It’s a felt sense more than rational, and we know this because of how irrational most people actually are. You can talk yourself into anything if you’re not careful.
I’ve puzzled over this for years. At some point you encounter that wonderfully unnerving feeling of knowing. Again, this is actually a great burden for moderns because that means there is something to be done, and I bet my piggy-bank that it is very hard to do that thing in 2026.
Learned that our screens and man-made EMFs that we depend on socially and economically are harmful to our health? Good luck avoiding them.
Learned how many toxic chemicals are in our food? Sorry, they’re everywhere.
Learned that circadian rhythm is essential to the health of a diurnal species like us? I give you a sedentary education and a career that never changes, even as the seasons do!
For ancients, it seems, knowing and doing both came in the same package. There was no question, it was just the thing you ought to do. Roles in society were more concrete and so even if you did have questions or felt some kind of a way about what you ought to do, there wasn’t much you could do about it.
This probably came from being so close to the land. When most of life was in small, independent communities of food producers, you lived and died by the cycles and rhythms of nature, so there was no confusion about how to spend your time, or what was happening, or what you were going to do when you woke up tomorrow, next month, or 5 years from now2.
Now, in the 21st century, the knowing is akin to being confronted by a bear - especially if it doesn’t fit the established mold. I have something inside of me! — you say. Perhaps you only scream it on the inside because you’re too afraid to say it out loud, for a host of reasons. I know that I know, but I can’t seem to actually do the damn thing and so I feel a sense of dread and stuckness. A sense of misery and hopelessness about my current state, because my current state is working remote, alone, on my computer, at home, with a company of people I only see as avatars on a screen, for a customer I rarely meet, getting AI generated email replies. The Pacific Ocean exists and I go bee-boo-bee-boop in Microsoft Office!
There is a sense of unease, off-ness, or - as we will discover shortly - uprootedness that we all seem to feel, but can’t accurately describe. I know, I know, but how do I know, I know? What are these inclinations? These things that feel as important to me as breathing. What are the risks if I don’t find out what all of this means and my uniqueness - my almost impossible existence - goes to 0 because I limited myself to working in the State Farm Insurance IT department.
The point of this post is that there is nothing wrong with you. This modern malaise that you feel is a perfectly natural response to an almost impossibly absurd situation. You are on a big spinning rock, held tight by gravity, hurling through infinite space, and yet you’re aware of that fact and so you can either laugh or assume the fetal position. Your choice bucko.
Ironically, the period we’re living through is better than any other in a material sense, and yet we feel a genuine dread about our times spiritually and socially.
The question then is - what’s wrong with you? What’s wrong with us?
“...but you cannot explain or justify it in the terms which are now the terms we live by. You just know that something is wrong. Everybody tells you that you feel this because you are infected with something called ‘nostalgia,’ or that you picked up a dose of ‘Luddism’ or ‘Romanticism’ at a party or in a doctor’s waiting room. Basically, there is something wrong with you. You don’t understand Progress, which is always and everywhere a Good Thing.” - Paul Kingsnorth
Chris Arnade and the Good New World / Paul Kingsnorth and the Big Dread
Chris Arnade and Paul Kingsnorth are two of my favourite writers, and both puzzle over why the industrial revolution happened in England, and how the resulting, Machine-like, system swept the globe like a brush fire.
Another branch on the scenius tree - a combination of scene and genius, that asks the question of why it happened where it happened. After many years of puzzling over this myself, I don’t think it’s any great degree more complicated than a very fortunate confluence of people and place3.
For Kingsnorth, one of the reasons the industrial revolution happened in Britain, was the issue of land. Land and resources are the hard currency of the world, and will remain so forever because our very lives depend on it. It’s no surprise then that countries who are good at natural resources - oil, wheat, woodlands, etc. - are hard to sanction. You can’t do much of anything to them in the short-term, all you can do is try to stunt their growth long-term. We all remember the scene in Yellowstone. Or the now iconic opening of the Land Man pilot4.
According to Kingsnorth, England was jolly-well setup for centralizing and productizing land, because a good chunk of it was already owned by a relatively small group of people.
…The enclosure process set the scene…across England, and turbocharged the ensuing Industrial Revolution, both by concentrating resources in few hands, and by creating a landless underclass who had no choice but to traipse to the growing industrial zones and offer their labour to new industries.
Arnade, on the other hand, is intrigued more by the idea of a cultural meme that came out of the European ‘enlightenment.’
Why the Industrial Revolution happened in England rather than China or Germany is one of those questions that has launched a thousand books, careers, and theories, and Dr. Mokyr’s answer is (oversimplifying): England had a foundational belief in the abilities of man to shape their world, as a result of the Enlightenment, which enabled the creation of laws, institutions, and businesses focused on bettering society through innovation, technology, and economic progress.
That very British industrial revolution led to the rise of the runaway capitalism we know today, bubbling up anywhere and everywhere across the globe. Even though it now feels squarely based in the kind of adventure-globalism that the Americans launched in the Bush administration, it is perhaps even more rampant (ironically) in a part of the world Arnade knows well and is really quite fond of.
Materially, it doesn’t matter if we’re talking about the uber-technological prowess of the Americans, or the uber-production capacity of the modern Chinese, the global system that Kingsnorth calls The Machine is omnipresent and ever increasing.
In an obvious, tangible sense, we’ve never been richer. We’ve never had more stuff5. We absolutely love stuff. We have an insatiable appetite to create. To make stuff, build stuff, sell stuff, and buy stuff. Deep down, we’re all conflicted by this, and I spent the last post in this newsletter talking about that internal conflict - made ever more clear by encountering the very people who are feeling this conflict most acutely.
For all our destruction, it really is astounding what we, as a species, are capable of and to marvel at what we’ve built is not to deny the harm we’ve done along the way. Arnade, as he walks the world, does a lot of that marvelling for us and it is the dichotomy of how good modern life is vs what we’ve lost along the way, that makes his writing so hard to put down.
In my professional life - in the unfortunately named discipline of Economic Development, it becomes all the more obvious how our insatiable desire and ability to create is never ending, will never end, and is often a mixed bag of outcomes. It begs the important questions of what we actually want, if we’re maximizing for the wellness of the average citizen, or if market-cap and infinite growth are the real idols6.
The foundation of that system is population growth, followed by reliable energy to power, efficient transportation to move, and communication systems to coordinate all the productivity that the people make. A never ending treadmill of making and doing because that seems to be the human condition. For some reason - perhaps not such a mystery after all - all of this doing and making isn’t satisfying us.
My hunch is Larry Smith had an early inclination of this, and acted on his hunch by offering his own definition of what economic development ought to do and be ‘…a process by which a community works to achieve it’s full potential.’ This reinforces David Campbell’s idea that economic development is fundamentally local, and if it works, it is the truest form of a public good.
I much prefer to think of it as human development or public development - and it’s definition would be something like a process by which a people and place work to achieve their full potential. This would still be horribly unsatisfying to Paul Kingsnorth, and I’m sorry for that Paul. But it’s the best I can do right now with what I have and I’m trying my damndest - like you are - to find a third door in the moor, so to speak.
So what do we do about all this?
How do we move forward, as best we can, creating happy lives, healthy bodies, and close-knit families and communities?
At the personal level, the best definition of mental health I’ve yet heard comes from Phil Stutz. It’s something to the effect of - can you live productively in reality?
Not the world as you wish it was - the world as it actually is. Can you be honest with yourself? Can you accurately assess your situation in the world (mortal, flawed, stuck, addicted, etc.) and move forward productively in spite of those things? What could be more practical and powerful than that sense of Mastery that comes when we combine our natural inclinations, with our God given abilities?
It starts with us. Here. Today. We decide to create the work we’re meant to create, to nourish ourselves as best we can with the best food we have available, to maximize the incredibly healthy (and free) supply of sunlight and fresh air, and to create the relationships that lead to healthy families and productive, happy communities. We like to think that the system itself should change first, on our behalf, but it won’t. It never will. It’s impossible. The incentives of the Machine are simply too strong and the winners too dominant.
We’re all in this boat together, there is no getting off it, and we need to figure it out. There is no true safety anywhere, there is no ultimate human authority, and every day that we step out of our front doors is an act of risk and faith.
But a really wonderful one.
—
All we need is a point of view, a set of tools, and a lot of time.
See you on the road.
This was one of the most interesting podcasts I’ve watched in a long time. It’s fascinating to see podcasts become mini-documentaries of a sort - and it’s why I believe the podcast medium is still in the first inning. I can’t wait to see what comes next.
One of my favourite recent clips was of Dara Khosrowshhahi saying that young people should stop making 5 year plans. Or 10 year plans. Or any multi-year plans of any kind, and that actually does feel like very good advice when you think it through. Your job as a young is to find what you’re passionate about, combine that with your natural abilities, get as much experience as you possibly can, find mentors along the way, and work incredible hard. Anything else is fools gold.
By happenstance, Arnade made it known to me in a Substack dialogue that Kingsnorth and himself share the same editor! Funny how the world works isn’t it? There are likely few things as important to scenius as a good editor.
With fear of sounding like a tired male archetype - Taylor Sheridan is the best writer on streaming right now.
Ironically, we’ve also never wanted more stuff, so net-net we are no better off than when we started this whole deal.
The pod link should start on YouTube at 29:50 - if it doesn’t, scroll forward to that timestamp.