Part III of ‘The Machine Stops’ explores disengagement from reality through idolatry. Part I showed Vashti blocking her view of Greece, symbolic of the tradition of Western philosophy: ‘No ideas here’. Part II showed how, in an emasculating technocracy, the ‘strong will suffer euthanasia’. Kuno longs for a wife and family but isn’t allowed to reproduce because the Machine fears his type — his ‘atavism’. And now Forster explains how the idolaters try to get ‘beyond facts’.
Two great developments occur: respirators are abolished, and religion is reintroduced. And Forster portrays totalitarianism as ultimately directed by people’s desires because these developments ‘did but express tendencies that were latent already’. The Machine just gives people what they want — good and hard.