When things turned dystopian in March 2020, I was in the middle of a big life change which ultimately led me to create a business coaching families to grow their own chemical-free food. After a decade of international development consulting scouring the African continent to make Africans’ lives more connected to the global economy, and incidentally also more precarious, I had already been slowly seeking an escape route from the abstract world inhabited by the professional managerial class. Covid didn’t create my rupture with this world. It confirmed it.
At the origin of my class betrayal was an intellectual epiphany. In the years leading to 2020, I had spent considerable time immersed in Christopher Lasch’s critique of progressivism. He explained that Narcissus, obsessed by his psychic comfort, is an individual who rejects any genuine notion of limits, of rootedness, of responsibility to particular places and people, in favor of a utopian frictionless world. Alternating between a Promethean impulse to replace all natural processes with technological ones and a feminine desire for fusion with the natural world, Narcissus lives in a world filled with images designed to produce phantasies. He constantly oscillates between a grandiose sentiment of omnipotence and powerlessness. He is rapacious and destitute at the same time.
One of the central influences in Lasch’s work was American farmer, poet, novelist, and essayist Wendell Berry. In his 1977 manifesto The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture, Berry wrote perhaps the most clinical description of what is Narcissus’ daily interior life and the most ruthless indictment of industrialism:
“The fact is…that this is probably the most unhappy average citizen in the history of the world. He has not the power to provide himself with anything but money, and his money is inflating like a balloon and drifting away, subject to historical circumstances and the power of other people. From morning to night, he does not touch anything that he has produced himself, in which he can take pride. For all his leisure and recreation, he feels bad, he looks bad, he is overweight, his health is poor. His air, water, and food are all known to contain poisons. There is a fair chance that he will die of suffocation. He suspects that his love life is not as fulfilling as other people’s. He wishes that he had been born sooner, or later. He does not know why his children are the way they are. He does not understand what they say. He does not care much and does not know why he does not care. He does not know what his wife wants or what he wants. Certain advertisements and pictures in magazines make him suspect that he is basically unattractive. He feels that all his possessions are under threat or pillage. He does not know what he would do if he lost his job, if the economy failed, if the utility company failed, if the police went on strike, if the truckers went on strike, if his wife left him, if his children went away, if he should be found to be incurably ill. And for those anxieties, of course, he consults certified experts, who in turn consult certified experts about their anxieties.”
And Berry had one simple explanation for that: this is what happens to groups of people who have abdicated their duty to nurture the land for a desire to exploit it. In other words, through Lasch, I found Berry. And through Berry I found the earth.
This intellectual revelation was also accompanied by another, drawn from the work of Matthew Crawford and Simone Weil. Crawford’s eulogy to manual work gave me a framework for understanding what I was losing in my white-collar life. And it was a framework he had built, in large part, on Weil’s focus on attention, which she called the “only faculty of the soul that grants access to God.”
What Crawford took from her is that attention is the central faculty that modern work systematically destroys, explaining why we live in an economic system characterized by a hierarchy of status between intellectual and manual labor. A hierarchy that Simone Weil loathed as one of the vilest traits of our godless world. The reason is that manual work, argues Crawford, is often more intellectually engaging than its white-collar equivalent precisely because it forces you to reckon with a world that exists “beyond your own head.”
The repairman, the farmer, the craftsman, the tradesman are not people who have settled for less. They are people who have chosen to be accountable to something that exists outside of them and precedes them. They have an active engagement with the world. And that is a virtue that an economic system built upon abstract creation of value, impersonal processes, limitlessness, and creative destruction cannot tolerate.
It is at the end of that intellectual process that I got admitted in late 2019 to a local beginning regenerative farmers program offered by a local non-profit. When Covid hit, I had just completed the theoretical portion, and my cohort of beginning farmers was about to begin eight months of actual farm work.
The Empty Field
Since I was not particularly frightened by Covid, I wound up, for a couple of months, being essentially the only student in the cohort who was not only not terrified but needed to leave my home to preserve my sanity. What followed was an accidental gift: individual training with two exceptional men.
One was a Jewish jack-of-all-trades who had grown up on a kibbutz, a wealth of knowledge and humanity who could build anything with his hands and could literally transform the most compacted soil of a former apartment building complex into a productive natural haven. The other was a Ghanaian immigrant who probably clocked eighty hours a week across several jobs and still brought total dedication to the mission of the farm with exceptional joviality and resourcefulness.
For several months, while most of the country sat indoors binging on pornified newsfeed about mortality and Netflix slop, I was outside fraternizing with these two men, hands in the earth. Despite the dystopian atmosphere all around and the deep sense that something very ominous was at play, I must admit that I will always look back on those months rather fondly.
The Pandemic Garden Rush and Its Casualties
While I was receiving this unexpected and free intensive education, something interesting was happening in the neighborhoods around me. The lockdowns had triggered a widespread, apparently spontaneous impulse to grow food. Seed companies reported historic demand. Nurseries sold out. Social media filled with proud photographs of seedlings on windowsills. But from my now more informed vantage point, I could also observe the many ways this enthusiasm was going wrong.
When they were not buying plants equivalent to drug addicts in big-box stores, people were installing inadequate and flimsy raised beds insufficiently filled with bad soil on the only shaded corner of their yard, at the worst possible spot. They were planting at the wrong time, in the wrong soil, with no understanding of what their plants needed. The gap between the desire to grow food and the knowledge required to do it well was enormous, and it was producing a lot of discouragement.
This struck me as both a problem and an opportunity. Everything I was learning on the farm, about soil health, sunlight, companion planting, pruning, harvesting, insects, fungi, composting, water, and the rhythms of a growing season, was directly applicable to what these eager but overwhelmed neighbors were attempting.
All these aspiring gardeners didn’t need a farming formal education. They needed basic rudiments of knowledge and common sense to help them get on the first rung of the ladder: to make a few good decisions at the start that would produce enough early success to keep them going. The thought of a coaching business began to take shape. But the garden also taught me something the books had only suggested: that the damage the Machine inflicts is legible. You can literally observe it in how people relate to a patch of soil.
What the Machine Extracts from Us
The MAHA movement has rightly identified something that mainstream medicine and public health have been slow to name: that the chronic disease epidemic devastating American bodies is inseparable from the way we work, eat, move, and attend to the world. But I think the full picture requires a more radical diagnosis.
In his masterpiece Against the Machine: On the Unmasking of Humanity, Paul Kingsnorth, himself an avid reader of Wendell Berry, calls the relentless march toward a “left brain paradise” that characterizes late-modernity the Machine. He defines it as “the triumph of the mechanical over the natural, the planned over the organic, the centralized over the local, the system over the individual and the community.” In this sense, the Machine is not a conspiracy brewed in a secret world. It is an operating system. One that runs through industrial food production, through the architecture of office work and, more importantly, one that dominates our inner lives.
Crucially, the Machine operates by numbing human senses. It transfers our consciousness to an external and unforgiving judge: a dashboard, a feed, a metric; and in doing so, it quietly and methodically extracts from us the very faculties we need to be well. The invaluable intellectual contribution of authors like Kingsnorth, Crawford, Berry, and Weil to this analysis is to show how this numbing is not accidental but structural: an economy organized around abstraction, limitlessness, and electronic signals systematically devalues the embodied, attentive engagement with the world that is the precondition of human flourishing.
Simone Weil understood this very acutely because she experienced it with her own body when exposed to the most servile line of manual labor, which is a negation of the kind of manual work Matthew Crawford refers to. Working on assembly lines in the Renault factory in Billancourt in the 1930s, she observed that, unlike genuine craft, industrial labor demanded, as a matter of survival, not more attention but less: a dissociation from the body and from the materials being worked. What neither she nor Crawford could fully anticipate was how far this dissociation would travel — from factory floors to offices, and from offices into the domestic lives of people who had never set foot in a factory.
Reducing the world to Excel spreadsheets, data entry and mining, content moderation, social media management, algorithmic medicine, content creation geared at a public completely embedded in the Machine, pretty much all white-collar work fits a narrative of proletarianization of attention. Worse, survival in the Machine economy demands that you actively participate in the same dispossession — actively colluding in the numbing of your own senses in order to remain legible to the Machine.
In this situation, where could we turn to truly pay attention to the world outside ourselves? Look below your feet, and you might find an answer. That’s where Wendell Berry reenters our story.
The Agrarian Alternative
Berry is not a nostalgist. He is a diagnostician. His argument is that industrial food production and industrial work share the same pathology: they both treat living systems (soils, bodies, communities) as inputs to be optimized rather than as complex, self-organizing realities to be tended.
Berry’s practical prescriptions are deliberately humble. Learn what is involved in industrial food production, he suggests. Learn, by contrast, what is involved in the best kinds of farming and gardening, and enrich that learning through direct experience of the food you eat. Produce what you can. Source what you cannot from someone you know. Only when you attempt to follow this deceptively simple advice, he warns, do you realize that it would require a quasi-heroic determination to extricate yourself from what has become a trap.
But the trap is not inescapable. As Berry writes, anybody can grow something, even in a porch box, even in a pot on a sunny windowsill. In that act, you begin to recover a sense of “the beautiful energy cycle that revolves from soil to fruit to food to offal to decay, and around again.” You become accountable to something that is not Machine metric. You reappropriate your own senses from the Machine.
This is also, in the deepest sense, a wellness practice, though it bears little resemblance to what the wellness industry typically sells. There is no optimization here, no biohack. There is only the discipline of showing up, paying attention, and accepting that living systems operate on their own schedule.
The Amish As a Case Study
One of Berry’s most instructive case studies is one that the professional managerial class finds easy to dismiss: the Amish. With much lower rates of chronic diseases, of depression and anxiety, the Amish’s health outcomes are anomalous enough to have attracted genuine scientific interest. Researchers have tended to attribute this to diet, to outdoor physical labor, to the absence of ultra-processed food. All of this is true. But Berry goes deeper.
The reason is that, unlike virtually every other community in America and in the West, the Amish have remained, in Berry’s phrase, “coherent, economically and culturally” because they are the only Christian denomination who have understood Jesus Christ’s second Commandment of neighborly love as an economic imperative.
Neighbors, he insists, are to love one another by work as well as by kindness, which means that if you take seriously your obligation to your neighbor, you simply cannot replace your neighbor’s help with a machine or a chemical. The Amish limits on farm scale, determined by the speed and endurance of horses rather than by the capacity of diesel engines, is not a sentimental attachment to the past. It is a structural guarantee that economic life remains at a human scale, and rooted in actual relationships. In other words, the Amish live according to prudential rules preventing the invasion of their existence by the relentless logic of the Machine.
The health implications of this are enormous and underappreciated. What the Amish have that most Americans do not is what is often referred to as ecological embeddedness: a daily life structured by physical work, seasonal rhythms, genuine interdependence, and sensory contact with a particular piece of land. These are precisely the conditions under which the human nervous system evolved to thrive. It is their absence, more than the presence of any single toxin or pathogen, which is the deeper substrate of the chronic disease crisis.
Repossessing Your Senses
My own transition has been partial, unglamorous, and ongoing. I have worked as a farmhand for regenerative farmers. I have transformed my yard into a productive potager and a haven for pollinators. And a couple of years after those Covid-era months on the farm, I established a small food-growing coaching business, now in its third full year of operation, named after the WWII Victory Gardens, which at their peak accounted for close to 50 percent of all fruits and vegetables grown in the United States. That precedent matters. It demonstrates that the capacity for society to feed itself from human-scale food production is not a fantasy. It was done before, under pressure, by the generation of my grandparents. It can be done again, this time not under the duress of war, although this looms on the horizon, but in the service of health.
What MAHA Gets Right—and What It Still Needs
The MAHA movement is right to focus on seed oils, ultra-processed food, pharmaceutical overreach, the extreme toxicity of herbicides and pesticides, and the corruption of regulatory agencies. These are real and urgent problems. But they are symptoms of a deeper configuration, one that Crawford, Lasch, Weil, Berry, and Kingsnorth have spent their life exposing.
The deepest problem is not that our food supply is toxic, though it undeniably is. It is that we have organized economic life in a way that systematically severs people from the kind of grounded, sensory contact with the world that makes us human. Until we take that seriously, we will continue to treat the symptoms while the underlying condition worsens, no matter how many wins a movement like MAHA can score on the policy side or in the judicial arena.
The good news is that the remedy can be experienced by everybody. It is, in Berry’s phrase, the recovery of the “beautiful energy cycle” that connects soil to food to body to community and back again. It is the repossession of our senses from a Machine that has numbed them. It is the decision, however partial, however modest, to grow or build something. Something of this world…and not a technological stairway to heaven.
Something as small as a pot on a sunny windowsill.
That decision, I can testify, changes everything.
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