Every civilisation lives inside a story about how the world works. For two centuries, the industrialised world has told itself the story of the machine. Society, the economy and even the human being have been imagined as interlocking parts, to be designed, measured and controlled from above. That story brought extraordinary material gains. It has now reached its limits, and in many places it is feeding the crises it was meant to solve.

This essay argues that a new world needs a different story: a shift from mechanistic thinking to relational growth. The point is not nostalgia, nor a rejection of modernity's achievements. It is that the tools which built the modern world are poorly suited to sustaining it, and that our times call for thinking grounded in relationship, sufficiency and shared power.[1]

The machine mind and its legacy

The industrial revolutions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries transformed imagination as well as production. Society came to be seen as a vast machine, and the vocabulary of engineering entered social thought. We still talk of building communities, constructing policy, wiring institutions and engineering outcomes, as if human life were a matter of assembling components.[2]

The machine mind prized efficiency, standardisation and centralised decision-making. In public services, charities and corporations alike, control moved upwards, away from frontline staff and from the people services exist to serve. The individual became a unit in a statistical series: a case number, a member of a target group, a data point on a pathway.[3]

The consequences are familiar. Public life feels cold and transactional, and human contact is thinned out by procedure. People feel powerless before systems that act on them rather than with them, and increasingly cut off from their own communities. A worldview that treats people as parts struggles to see them as agents of change.

Beyond scarcity: the economics of enough

Beneath the machine mind lies an economic psychology. Conventional economics defines its subject as human behaviour in relation to ends and scarce means. The unspoken message is that there is never enough: wants are unlimited, resources finite, and life a competition for shares.[4]

This scarcity mindset drives the relentless pursuit of growth. Output must rise every year, whatever the cost to the living world or to social cohesion. Environmental damage and widening inequality are treated as side effects to be dealt with later, not as signs that the underlying logic is wrong.[5]

Relational growth offers a way out. Its starting point is that the opposite of scarcity is not abundance but sufficiency: there can be enough. When value is measured by the quality of relationships, the health of ecosystems and the flourishing of communities, growth no longer means simply more. It means deeper, richer and better balanced.[6]

From power over to power with

At the heart of the transition lies a different understanding of power. Mechanistic systems run on power over: a fixed quantity, held by some and denied to others, exercised through hierarchy, competition and coercion. One side's gain is the other's loss. Such power can achieve a great deal in the short term, but it is unstable. It breeds resentment and must be constantly defended.[7]

Relational growth rests on power with. Here power is not a fixed stock but a resource that expands when shared. People acting together as equals can achieve what no individual or chain of command could manage alone. This is the power of the community organiser, the cooperative and the social movement.

The shift also reunites what the machine mind keeps apart: love and power. Power without love becomes reckless and abusive; love without power becomes sentimental and ineffective. Held together, they allow policy to be guided by humanity rather than cold calculation, and institutions to be judged by whether they strengthen people's capacity to shape their own lives.[8]

The unravelling and the garden mind

We are living through a historic unravelling. Institutions that once promised stability, from governments and markets to welfare systems, are faltering under overlapping pressures: climate breakdown, pandemics, economic shocks and a toxic polarisation that corrodes trust. These crises are interconnected, and they respond poorly to interventions designed for a simpler, more predictable world.[9]

Top-down, mechanistic responses often backfire. The Cobra Effect takes its name from a reputed colonial bounty on dead cobras, which led people to breed snakes for the reward. Well-meaning programmes provoke responses that defeat their own purpose, because complex human systems do not behave like machines responding to levers.[10]

The alternative is a garden mind. A gardener does not manufacture plants; she creates the conditions in which life can flourish, working with soil, weather and season and attending patiently to what grows. Applied to society, the garden mind treats communities as ecosystems to be nurtured through trust, reciprocity and participation, not mechanisms to be programmed and controlled.[11]

Interdependence as the ground of a new world

Relational growth is more than a pragmatic response to failing systems. It reflects a truer picture of reality. The machine mind assumed a world of separate objects acting on one another from outside. Modern physics tells a different story, describing a universe less like a set of isolated building blocks than a web of relations, in which things exist through their connections.[12]

Indigenous knowledge systems have long understood this. Many traditions regard land, water and community not as resources to extract but as living presences, bound to people by kinship and calling for stewardship. What industrial modernity dismissed as superstition increasingly looks like ecological wisdom.[13]

To embrace a relational consciousness is to wake from what has been called the trance of separation: the illusion that we stand apart from one another and from the Earth. In its place comes a planetary ethic of belonging, in which our wellbeing is bound up with that of others, human and non-human alike.[14]

Conclusion: the clock and the forest

The difference between the two paradigms can be captured in a single image: a clock and a forest. A clock is a mechanism. Every gear is precisely engineered and set in place by a designer who stands outside it. It works only while each part does exactly what it is told, and when one part fails, the whole stops.

A forest works differently. It has no central controller. It thrives through a dense, horizontal network of roots and mycelium, through which nutrients and signals pass between trees, fungi and countless other organisms. Each supports the growth of others. When one tree falls, the forest adapts and renews itself.[15]

For two centuries we have tried to manage the world like a clock, and the crises of our time suggest that approach has run its course. Our survival, and our chance of a world worth living in, now depend on learning to tend it like a forest: patiently, collectively, and with deep respect for the relationships that sustain us all.

The ideas in this essay are explored in greater depth in A New World is Rising: Power, Consciousness, and the Renewal of the Human Story (Palgrave Macmillan, 2026), which is available open access.

[1] These arguments are developed in full in Barry Knight (2026). A New World is Rising: Power, Consciousness, and the Renewal of the Human Story. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Open access: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-032-25581-5.

[2] Goss, S. (2020). Garden Mind. London: Compass. See Knight, A New World is Rising, ch. 8, p. 122.

[3] Knight, A New World is Rising, p. 122. On people treated as data for statistical series, see Thompson, E.P. (1963). The Making of the English Working Class. New York: Vintage Books, discussed in Knight, A New World is Rising, ch. 6, pp. 91–92.

[4] Robbins, L. (1932). An Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science. London: Macmillan, p. 16. See Knight, A New World is Rising, ch. 10, p. 160 and ch. 16, p. 239.

[5] Jackson, T. (2009). Prosperity Without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet. London: Earthscan. See Knight, A New World is Rising, ch. 16, p. 240.

[6] The phrase is Brené Brown’s, quoted in Flintoff, J.P. (2013). ‘Brené Brown: People are sick of being afraid all the time’. The Guardian, 27 July. See Knight, A New World is Rising, ch. 10, p. 162, and on sufficiency, ch. 16, pp. 240–241.

[7] Follett, M.P. (2013). Dynamic Administration: The Collected Papers of Mary Parker Follett. Mansfield Centre, CT: Martino Publishing, p. 101. See Knight, A New World is Rising, ch. 2, p. 20.

[8] King, M.L. (1967). Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? Boston: Beacon Press, pp. 37–38. See Knight, A New World is Rising, ch. 2, p. 20.

[9] On ‘the great unravelling’, see Macy, J. and Johnstone, C. (2022). Active Hope (revised edn). Novato, CA: New World Library. See Knight, A New World is Rising, ch. 2, p. 25, and ch. 7, ‘Facing the Unravelling’, pp. 111–120.

[10] Reedy, J.F. (2015). ‘Ecosystem philanthropy’. TEDx Talk; Moffitt, R.A. (1992). ‘Incentive effects of the U.S. welfare system: A review’. Journal of Economic Literature, 30(1), pp. 1–61. See Knight, A New World is Rising, ch. 6, p. 97.

[11] Goss (2020), op. cit. See Knight, A New World is Rising, ch. 8, ‘Cultivating the Garden’, p. 123.

[12] Capra, F. (1983). The Turning Point: Science, Society, and the Rising Culture. London: Fontana, p. 40; Heisenberg, W. (1962). Physics and Philosophy. New York: Harper and Row. See Knight, A New World is Rising, ch. 8, p. 132.

[13] Simpson, L.B. (2017). As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press; Cajete, G. (1994). Look to the Mountain: An Ecology of Indigenous Education. Kivaki Press. See Knight, A New World is Rising, ch. 13, p. 193.

[14] Hay, D. and Nye, R. (1998). The Spirit of the Child. London: Fount; Brach, T. (2011). ‘Awakening from the trance of unworthiness’. tarabrach.com. See Knight, A New World is Rising, ch. 10, p. 159, and ch. 13, pp. 190 and 201.

[15] The image of change spreading laterally, ‘like roots or mycelium’, is from Jenny Hodgson’s Foreword to Knight, A New World is Rising, p. x.