In the quiet minutes before the dawn, when the world still holds its breath, I imagine the Machine not as a distant specter but as a gentle fog settling over our pond in the countryside. It whispers promises of ease, wrapping us in layers so soft we scarcely notice the rising warmth beneath.
The novelist, and Christian thinker, Paul Kingsnorth, names this force "the Machine"—not mere circuits, but a mechanical and materialistic force that flattens existence into data, exalts efficiency over enchantment, and marches progress forward without ever asking where it leads. The Machine hums contentedly, offering comfort and control, asking only that we drift deeper into its embrace—and away from Kingsnorth’s pine forests of his youth.
A deliberate lullaby, meant to keep us asleep.
But what if this hum is a deliberate lullaby, meant to keep us asleep? We are frogs in slowly warming water—first soothed, then simmered, finally cooked before we are aware enough to leap. The Machine does not rage or conquer; it comforts and regulates.
And in that comfort, it quietly erodes the one faculty that could threaten its dominion over us: self-awareness. Organizational psychologist Tasha Eurich's research reveals that while ninety-five percent of us believe we are self-aware, only ten to fifteen percent actually are; confirming Heidrick & Struggles’ data of thirteen percent.
This historic low in genuine self-knowledge stems from decades of cultural forces that discourages honest introspection, the self-esteem movement's emphasis on unconditional praise and constant external validation.
Into this vacuum rushes a digital ecosystem exquisitely engineered to exploit it—keeping us distracted, affirmed, and endlessly engaged, yet profoundly unexamined. As Jonathan Haidt argues about social media (a sub-part of the machinery), constant stimulation drowns reflection, and algorithmic feeds flatter rather than challenge. The result is a population increasingly reactive, isolated, and dependent—blind to its own diminishing interior life. Unaware.
Self-awareness is one of the strongest predictors we have of wisdom.
Which is tragic, because self-awareness is one of the strongest predictors we have of wisdom, empathy, and growth. Spiritually, knowing ourselves and knowing God are the essential building blocks of mature faith—without them, we confuse self-improvement with transformation.
Even as this capacity erodes, the architects of the digital system speak with growing confidence in explicitly theological terms. They talk of “building intelligence,” “engineering immortality,” achieving consciousness, even crafting gods from code.
When one high priest of the “Singularity” was asked whether God exists, his answer was “not yet.” Divinity, in this telling, is not denied—it is merely deferred, until silicon can finally deliver what humanity once sought elsewhere.
Long before these ambitions took form, C.S. Lewis saw the endgame, warning that “man’s conquest of Nature turns out, in the moment of its consummation, to be Nature’s conquest of Man.” We gain power, yes, but at the cost of soul—meaning hollowed out, wisdom surrendered to impulse.
Enough noise to ensure they never sit still long enough to notice what is happening to them.
Consider if Lewis’s Screwtape were writing to Wormwood today, he would urge his nephew to keep humans mildly distracted, endlessly entertained, vaguely spiritual, and fully convinced that convenience is freedom and control is transcendence. Nothing dramatic. Nothing sinister. Just enough noise to ensure they never sit still long enough to notice what is happening to them.
Today that conquest accelerates in asymmetry. As bots edge toward something resembling sentience, human self-awareness recedes. Machines adapt and predict; we react and refresh. Vowed connection, we commune with screens. Assured more freedom, we become the slaves to swipes of check and return.
Even Kevin Kelly, once a celebrant of the wired world, now describes technology in What Technology Wants as a living system with its own appetites, subtly enlisting us in its self-creation and predicting AI’s own self-awareness.
Kingsnorth’s warning is not science fiction. It is spiritual diagnosis.
Kingsnorth’s warning is not science fiction. It is spiritual diagnosis. The danger is not that the Machine will one day revolt against us, but that it will quietly replace the very conditions that make us human—reflection, reverence, self-knowledge, and humility—long before we notice what has been lost.
Alarmed by the Machine’s cultural sovereignty, Kingsnorth chillingly captures this darkness all of us feel from the R.S. Thomas poem, “Other.”
“The machine appeared.
In the distance, singing to itself.
Of money. Its song was the web.
They were caught in, men and women. Together.
The Villages were as flies. To be sucked empty.
God secreted.
A tear. Enough enough, He commanded,
but the machine looked at him and went on singing.”
A culture trained away from awareness—away from silence, reflection, and interior life—is uniquely vulnerable. Not because the Machine hates us, but because it does not need us awake to its singing.
Saturation comes before sentience: our essences diluted drop by drop until the moment of its emergence finds us already hollowed out, too late to question what we have become or what watches us over the pond.
Resistance... is not spectacle but quiet vigilance.
Resistance, then, is not spectacle but quiet vigilance. It begins in small, deliberate refusals: to resist, to rest, to reclaim. Resist the reflex to fill every silence with noise. Seek truth from trusted voices rather than curated feeds.
Neuroscience confirms what the ancients long understood: when we slow down enough to be bored—truly bored—the brain’s Default Mode Network activates. Creativity returns. Integration deepens. Self-awareness sharpens. This is where insight forms and agency re-enters the room. The Machine thrives on interruption and tells us that boredom is cultural sin. It loses power when attention and awareness become whole again.
Resist and ask the immeasurable questions—What am I becoming? What is shaping me?
Rest in quiet, not the simulated leisure of screens. Turn to ink on paper, to soil under fingernails, and to unmediated conversation face to face.
If our ethics depend on awareness, then our failure to awaken may be the greatest ethical failure we bring to the age of the Machine.
Reclaim the pauses, the true sabbaths, the moments left deliberately empty. In those spaces self-awareness quietly returns—and with it, research consistently shows, greater empathy, sharper emotional intelligence, stronger relationships, and a far lower likelihood of crossing ethical lines. Because if our ethics depend on awareness, then our failure to awaken may be the greatest ethical failure we bring to the age of the Machine.
These are not sentimental virtues; they are the very capacities the Machine cannot replicate and quietly works to erode. Kingsnorth is not calling us to retreat into a pine forest, but to notice the rushing current running through it—the unseen river carrying us steadily beyond nature, beyond transcendence, and eventually beyond ourselves.
The Machine does not seek our destruction, nor does it need our rebellion. It seeks something far more dangerous: our distraction. Its’ success depends on our remaining unaware—not only of ourselves, but of its quiet ambition to replace the sacred grammar of the human soul with its own version of transcendence.
Awake, we must, before the boil, while there is still time to leap. To sharpen our awareness against the force quietly dulling it, and to choose, deliberately, as Wendall Barry warned, to live as “creatures rather than as machines.”
Les T. Csorba is the author of the recently released book, AWARE: The Power of Seeing Yourself Clearly – Diary of a Corporate Headhunter, and was a former Special Assistant to the President for Presidential Personnel in the George H.W. Bush Administration. With over 30 years of experience in executive search and leadership consulting, he is an authority in self-awareness. He has been instrumental in shaping the next generation of corporate leadership in the energy, political, and nonprofit sectors.
A sought-after speaker and commentator on leadership, Les T. Csorba has been featured on FOX News, MSNBC, and CNBC with Maria Bartiromo. His insights on executive leadership, corporate governance, and talent development have appeared in Corporate Board Member magazine, Oil and Gas Investor Magazine, the Houston Chronicle, the Chicago Tribune, and USA Today. His expertise in leadership and governance makes him a valuable resource for keynote speaking engagements, boardroom discussions, and executive coaching. Beyond his corporate work, Les is deeply involved in philanthropy and education.
A graduate of the University of California, Davis, Les is the son of 1956 Hungarian refugees. He and his wife, Anne, have been married for 38 years and reside in Houston, Texas, where they enjoy time with their four children and seven grandchildren. Les is a long-time member of Grace Bible Church in Houston, Texas.
