Good afternoon, beloved -
It was always going to sit oddly, this first Fourth of July as a British citizen. What I didn’t expect was that it would be so painful.
I suppose there’s a part of me that has to regard the implosion of American power as a net plus for humanity, along with the cratering of the conditions of possibility for anything resembling a Pax Americana. But that seems like a mighty bloodless and abstract calculus just now, given what we know this inward collapse is going to cost in immediate human terms. There was a vote yesterday in the House of Representatives, approving a bill with a typically buffoonish name and sending it to the White House for passage into law, and while the absolute gurning moronism of that name — the One Big Beautiful Bill Act — is the distinct signature of American government in this epoch, its effects could not possibly be more serious.
You’ve probably heard, for example, that the bill funds ICE, the administration’s unaccountable enforcement arm, at levels higher than the militaries of most nations, furnishing it with the resource it needs to elaborate the full panoply of oppression – the personnel, the camps, the technical infrastructure, and all the transport and logistical systems required by a security state of quite literal Gulag Archipelago proportions. It contains provisions that do not merely withdraw subsidy for but actively punish firms investing in the development of clean, renewable energy. Its gutting of Medicaid will increase the number of people who are sick because they are poor and the number who are poor because they are sick — increase massively, by the tens of millions. (One out of every three people in West Virginia, for example, depends on Medicaid. That’s 500,000 right there, in just one of fifty states.)
To be sure, you’d be right to suspect that large swathes of the ICE budget will disappear straight into the pockets of cronies, and that some portion of the security architecture ostensibly being developed at public expense will inevitably turn out to be outright Potemkin-grade shams upon the credulous. That’s kleptocracy, after all. Why would it be any different in the States than it is in the oligarch Russia that appears to be its more or less direct inspiration? But really that’s just one of the modes of damage this bill inflicts. There’s enough self-harm in it, of enough variety, that it would stress a much healthier society to the breaking point, let alone the one that actually exists. I have little doubt its passage will, in decades to come, be seen and understood as the final inflection point in the American drama, and its implementation as law, policy and practice truly the point of no return.
Big language, much flailing of arms. You and I both know that words like these are a kind of ritual, and a peculiarly impotent one at that. I say them to get them out, or because, for people whose minds work in the way mine seems to, there’s a special kind of awfulness in not naming the moment. There’s no expectation that doing so will change anything, mind you — certainly not on my part, anyway. Given the conjuncture in which we find ourselves, in fact, I’m not sure there’s any way for anyone to enact meaningful material change at this point. There’s nothing for it but to watch helplessly as the process runs to completion, and to do our level best to help those in harm’s way as it does. But at least there is the cold, cold comfort of not pretending there are any other valid interpretations of this state of affairs than the one that’s manifest and plain before us.
§ It may never amount to anything more than self-entertainment, confessedly, but I do think there’s some residual value in developing a genealogy of this moment.
Like any monstrous chimera, of course, this one has a great many parents. I’ve seen some interesting work lately suggesting that misogyny is kind of a master pathology, underlying any number of social ills, including those which at first blush are not immediately related to it. There is almost certainly a deep human propensity toward xenophobia that flares up under conditions of scarcity — whether those conditions are real or perceived, naturally-arising or induced — and which manifests itself, variously, as the racism and class hatred and demand for protection from a dominant-father figure which lie at the core of the MAGA project. I don’t think it’s out of order to suggest the way in which we now consume media is pretty close to the center of the story, partially in ways that have been well understood and effectively weaponized by first movers, and partially in ways none of us yet fully comprehend. I wouldn’t even be shocked if it turned out that the bioaccumulation of microplastics in our brains had some contributory role to play in all this (though frankly, that feels a lot like letting us off the hook for the things we truly remain morally culpable for).
I want to explore one of the moment’s less-obvious tributary streams, though. And if you’ll indulge me, I’d like to do so as is my wont, in a somewhat roundabout way.
Last week I gave a talk at the Glastonbury Festival, as part of a long-running feature of that festival called the Speakers Forum (and yes, that missing apostrophe digs at me). Over coffee on the morning of my talk, I got into a conversation with a guy who told me, as casually as you can imagine, that he “didn’t believe in germ theory.” I was somewhat nonplussed by this, as at the time he was running the kitchen tent from which I was about to receive the coffee, but where it really stopped me in my tracks was on the epistemic level. It had literally never occurred to me that I might meet someone who was to all appearances a peer, outwardly sensible, but who outright rejected one of the foundational tenets of the knowledge modernity was for better or worse built upon.
When I asked him what he thought would be responsible for the resulting infection if he should, say, cut his hand with the knife he was using, his answer was “terrain theory.” In his account, this evidently had something to do with organisms being outside of their “proper niche.” We each of us have a proper, transhistorical, “natural” place in the grand machinery of things, in other words — our terroir, our “terrain”-writ-large — and to wander too far from that place is to court illness and madness and death.
Now, the reactionary-nativist, blood-and-soil resonances of any such construction are immediately obvious, right? Or so I would have thought. But this isn’t the first time we’ve seen what starts as a concern for ecological order becoming frankly reactionary in its application to human affairs, even when articulated by vaguely left-coded figures: the Edward Abbey, Dave Foreman, Paul Kingsnorth current comes to mind. And in the end, this guy didn’t even characterize his own claimed position accurately. (I looked it up on the train home from Glastonbury: there was indeed a long-discredited, pseudoscientific “terrain theory,” but it didn’t argue anything like what he seemed to think it did.)
Let’s be charitable, and think of the implications of this one individual’s stated belief system as “unexamined.” When you sift out everything else, what my startlement was really about wasn’t simply that here I’d met someone professing to believe in something other than microbes as the causative agent of...well, microbial disease. What was shocking was encountering this idea in a milieu I’d believed to have been founded on mostly shared priors, convictions and commitments. That was my own unexamined assumption.
What I’d somehow failed to come to terms with is that there isn’t really any such thing as an epistemic center anymore — if indeed there ever was, among anything but the self-propagating cohort that might have been called “the Establishment,” once upon a time. There is no consensus on what constitutes truth, nor any shared procedures for the determination of same. On some level, this is distressing. Of course it is: it’s how you wind up with people unabashedly spouting fascist-adjacent woo in the midst of your pleasant leftoid confab. To the original point, it’s also how there comes to be a constituency that believes Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a more trustworthy source of health-critical information than Anthony Fauci, or that there’s a sex-slave dungeon under a DC pizza joint, or that Donald Trump gives so much as one solitary desiccated shit about anyone or -thing but Donald Trump. But it’s also, at least in part, the sideways fruit of a purposive effort.
§ How did this explosive diversification of truth-detection apparatuses come to be? Why might thoughtful folks have considered it a worthwhile goal or, at least, a necessary consequence of some other, justifying end they believed was worth pursuing?
I think we can begin to sketch in some answers by considering the lifework of the self-exiled Austrian priest and philosopher Ivan Illich. There's been a remarkable resurgence of interest in Illich over the past decade and a half or so — which, to be clear, is something I gladly participated in, and like to think I in my own way contributed to — and what I don’t reckon is often appreciated by people discovering him now is the way in which his efforts laid some of the groundwork for the conditions we now contend with, as those conditions manifest both in the form of our terrain-theory fan and as the much darker and still more dangerous reality of the enabling legislation that passed yesterday.
Illich wrote out of a horror at the post-WWII growth of an institutional-managerial society he regarded as mechanized and crassly economistic, ultimately something that desacralized as much as it depersonalized. In a series of blistering books written between 1971 and 1975 – Deschooling Society, Tools for Conviviality and Medical Nemesis – he mounted a sustained assault on the institutionalization of the human mind, and a defense of the processes of inquiry, experimentation, toolmaking and collaborative knowledge production that he felt were central to the meaning of being human. Among other things, these books held that mandatory state education was little better than a process of indoctrination, designed to produce cowed subject-consumers; that medicine as practiced in the industrial world existed solely to reproduce demand for its products and services, which it achieved both by denying the validity of folk knowledge and by undercutting the body’s organic capacity for self-regulation; and that modern tools, transportation technologies and communication media operated in ways that prevented ordinary people from understanding their function, undermined attempts to repair or modify them, and generally imposed upon their users regimes of speed, scale or intensity that were inimical to human flourishing. If some of these arguments have a vaguely Foucauldian flavor for you, if rather more humanist where Foucault was anything but, I don’t think that’s unreasonable. It’s not too bad a stretch to regard Illich’s work as a consideration of what Foucault called “power/knowledge” from another angle, in this case a profoundly Catholic perspective on the inalienable dignity of the individual and the I/Thou possibilities of the face-to-face encounter.
Catholic, humanist or otherwise, these arguments were hugely influential to a line of thought that emerged across the 1970s that expressed libertarianism, previously more or less synonymous with anarchism, not so much as a political ethos but as a fundamental resistance to large-scale systems of all sorts. And I want to be clear here that whatever came of that libertarianism, the reason I think so many of us rediscovered Illich, and moved to retrieve his thought from the Whole Earthy stratum it was seemingly interred in, was because this resistance continues to be necessary. The institutionalization of domain knowledge does, I believe, meaningfully continue to deny us the opportunity to develop the full range of our capacities. It very often does constrain our freedom of action, compel us to undertake pointless, humiliating rituals of acquiescence, entrain lifeways that are useful solely to its own propagation, undercut the development of our own ability to determine the contours of our existence, etc. etc. Illich was not wrong about any of this, and he was not-wrong in an era when concerns about the untoward implications of scale and speed were far from obvious.
But rather like Steve Jobs, a little bit later on, Ivan Illich also died of a grievously painful tumor that might very well not have killed him – or at least, might not have occasioned so very much unnecessary agony on his part – had he been willing to make some minor concession to institutionalized medicine. You don’t need to find this disqualifying of his entire life project to think it’s a sadly and perversely inflexible position to take, in a way that doesn’t speak highly of Illich’s ability to modify his perspectives as experience presents him with new information. More broadly, though, what my encounter at Glastonbury reminded me is that we now live in Illich’s world. He was never buried. He won, and we live amid the consequences.
Consider this: “Do your own research” is a recognizably Illichian concept. So too the utter refusal to make any concession to expertise or credential, when those things are defined or validated by incumbent institutions. “Deschooling” was taken up and realized, and at scale too – but largely by the evangelical right, rather than the Freirian/hookisan left, with implications that extend to the composition of the Federal judiciary. And nowhere in contemporary society is the imprint of Illich’s thought quite so evident as in the health-and-wellness space, where individual influencers appear to have utterly supplanted institutional knowledge for a statistically significant part of the population, among whom an increasingly explicit cluster of ideological commitments have taken root. I would argue that so much of what underlies MAHA, even conspirituality itself, is in large part, the unlooked-for culmination of the Illichian project. If the twentieth century taught us that society organized as a total institution can readily enough be induced to swallow the Big Lie, the twenty-first teaches us that we’re foolish to rely upon the decentralization of knowledge as a defense against it.
None of this is to blame Ivan Illich, of all people, for the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. That would be absurd. Nor is to to suggest that the mutilating ensmallening of the human prospect that Illich warned us about does not remain a pressing issue: we know it does. But it is to suggest a vital need for salvage of the Illichian project. I hold that freedom of the mind is a good both morally and practically, i.e. not merely that it is a human right, but also that it is of unparalleled importance in affording the unimpeded exploration of possibility spaces under the kind of pressure which is now normal for us. But we also need a backstop: some way to disavow the disavowal when it takes us to the point of renouncing germ theory, insisting the Moon landing was a hoax, or otherwise rejecting the overwhelming accumulation of empirical knowledge.
I can’t pretend this is an easy thing to do, while still upholding the decentralization of inquiry I continue to affirm as one of my own core values. I think it’s still necessary to resist the imposition of centralized, top-down curricula, of testing to standard, of smashing square pegs into whatever round holes are convenient to the operation of the machine. But “the machine” itself is so much more supple than it was in Illich’s time — more fluid, more Deleuzian, more adept in capturing energy from nonconformity — and resisting the way it operates now means there needs to be a parallel revolution in neo-Illichian thought.
As well, though, no one thinker can or should ever be canonized, not even one as useful as Ivan Illich, because ultimately you do them no favors by acceding to the attempt. The principle that “if you meet the Buddha on the road, kill the Buddha” remains sound. Our era asks us to honor Illich, then, not by setting his thought on a pedestal, but by ripping it open like an old tube radio – figuring out how it works, seeing what we can safely discard, and putting it back together in a way that suits our current needs. I can’t guarantee that success in the endeavor would protect us against the kind of things we’re now in for, and will be contending with for the rest of our natural lives. But maybe it wouldn’t feel like the very ground that’s supposed to support our practice of conviviality — which, after all, means “to live together” — isn’t giving way beneath our very feet.
§ I’m super-excited to share the news that I got the very first Lifepod in the can yesterday, featuring my conversation with Valeria Graziano and Tom Medak of Pirate Care, and will launch the podcast as soon as I’ve built up a stack of four or five more episodes. Right now I’m reading this Sabu Kohso screed on Japan’s Long ‘68, the ever-so-slightly cryptic Where Does A Body Begin: Biology's Function in Contemporary Capitalism and a tasty little volume called Albion’s Eco-Eerie; listening to what I can of the new Panopticon; and watching trailers for 28 Years Later, wondering if I should go see it in a theater or just wait for my next long-haul flight.
That's it for now. As always, I hope that you are well, that you have your feet planted solidly on the good Earth, and that you are taking care of those who need you, taking care of yourself, and letting others take care of you. You have
all my faith,
ag
ldn
This is Dispatch from London No. 146 of Friday, 4 July 2025, offered to you under the terms of a Peer Production License. You are free to reuse this content, but must acknowledge Adam Greenfield as its author. ◊