The Machine Stops, The Eloi Dance, And Why Both Visions Are Dead Wrong

The Machine Stops, the Eloi Dance,

and Why Both Visions Are Dead Wrong

Daily Debate, fome.org.uk

 By Dr Jeremy Mellins

I was listening to an audiobook of E.M. Forster’s The Machine Stops, while sitting in hideous traffic this morning, and it occurred to me that sitting in traffic might just be one of the most instructive experiences available to modern humanity.

Consider it. Really look at it. Thousands of human beings, each sealed inside a climate-controlled, leather-seated pod, burning irreplaceable hours of their finite lives in an act of collective futility that not one of them wants. The material and environmental profligacy is staggering: tonnes of fuel, tonnes of emissions, fortunes in lost productivity, all to move slowly through a queue that exists only because we built a world that requires it.

The vast majority of people in those cars are wishing they were in their beds, or with their loved ones, or on a beach, or walking the dog with the sun on their backs. Yet, here we all are, wasting our lives fighting through a journey we did not desire to make, to go somewhere we do not want to go, to do something we do not want to do, in order to make money that doesn’t exist in order to survive. Here we all are in our comfortable, cosseting, climate-controlled bubbles, hating every fetid moment of it.

Somewhere in the middle of that absurd procession, Forster’s voice in my ears, I thought of his characters, the pale, etiolated creatures, sealed in their individual cells, communicating through screens, too comfortable to move, too dependent to think. Look at us. Perhaps he was right.

Then I thought about it properly. He was not right. He was brilliant, prescient about technology, yet profoundly, demonstrably wrong about people.

Let me be clear about what I am rejecting here, because it matters. Forster’s 1909 vision imagines a humanity so cosseted by technological abundance that people become atomised, physically enfeebled, emotionally disengaged, incapable of genuine connection. They live in individual cells. They communicate through screens. They have everything they need and, as a result, have lost everything that makes them human. It is a story about comfort as corrosion.

H.G. Wells gives us the same anxiety in different clothes. His Eloi are the children of abundance: beautiful, empty, helpless, their capacity for thought and action bred out of them by millennia without struggle. The Morlocks, who do the actual work, have become something monstrous. The message is unmistakable. Without the discipline of labour, without the purifying struggle against scarcity, humanity degenerates. Work redeems. Comfort corrupts.

I reject both visions. Not politely, not with caveats, not with the usual academic hedge of “it’s more complicated than that.” I reject them because the accumulated weight of evidence from psychology, neuroscience, behavioural economics, evolutionary anthropology, and real-world policy experiments demonstrates that they are wrong about what human beings actually are, what we actually want, and what we actually do when material need is removed.

And I am, if I am honest, a little angry about it. Because these visions, elegant and literary as they are, have calcified into assumptions that now shape how we think about the future. They feed a deep, unexamined conviction that abundance is dangerous, that people cannot be trusted with freedom from want, that the struggle itself is the point. This is not just wrong. It is the single most obstructive idea standing between humanity and a future worth building.

We are wired for connection, not despite comfort, regardless of it

Forster’s central fear is that material sufficiency leads to social disintegration. Give people everything they need and they will retreat into isolation. This is psychologically illiterate.

Ryan and Deci’s Self-Determination Theory, one of the most extensively validated frameworks in motivational psychology, identifies three innate human needs: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Not contingent needs. Not needs that emerge from scarcity. Innate needs, as fundamental to psychological health as vitamins are to physical health (Ryan & Deci, 2000, American Psychologist, 55(1), 68-78). The need for relatedness, for genuine human connection, does not arise because we need each other to survive. It exists because we are built for it.

Michael Tomasello’s experimental work at the Max Planck Institute makes this even harder to argue with. His studies show that children as young as fourteen months display spontaneous helping behaviour: picking up dropped objects for strangers, opening doors for people whose hands are full. No reward. No training. No transactional motive. Tomasello’s comparison with great apes is telling: chimpanzees can cooperate, they possess the cognitive equipment, yet they largely choose not to. Human children cooperate reflexively, before they have any understanding of material need or social obligation (Tomasello, 2009, Why We Cooperate, MIT Press).

This is not a minor finding. It demolishes the Forster thesis at its foundations. If cooperation were merely instrumental, a response to material necessity, then removing the necessity should indeed extinguish the impulse. The evidence says the opposite. The impulse is there before the necessity is even understood. Forster’s etiolated, disconnected creatures are a projection of Edwardian anxiety onto a future that the evidence simply does not support.

Robin Dunbar’s social brain hypothesis provides the evolutionary scaffolding. Our brains did not grow large to solve engineering problems and then develop sociality as a pleasant afterthought. The quantitative relationship between neocortex size and social group size in primates tells a different story: we evolved big brains because we are social (Dunbar, 1998, Evolutionary Anthropology, 6(5), 178-190). The hardware for connection is not optional equipment. It is the chassis. You cannot comfort it away any more than you can comfort away the need to breathe.

Wells’s Calvinist fallacy: work is not the point

The Eloi/Morlock division embeds an assumption so deep that most readers never notice it. It is essentially a secular Calvinist thesis: that work is redemptive, and its absence is corrupting. Without the discipline of toil, the comfortable class will inevitably slide into bovine passivity. This is not science. It is Protestant theology dressed up as evolutionary prediction.

Csikszentmihalyi’s four decades of research on flow states shows that humans do not require external compulsion to engage in demanding, challenging activity. When people enter flow, a state of total absorption in a task that stretches their skills, they describe it as the most rewarding experience available to them. They pursue it voluntarily, sometimes at great personal cost, and the activity becomes its own reward (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, Harper & Row). Flow is autotelic. It generates its own motivation.

Self-Determination Theory deepens this further. The entire architecture of SDT demonstrates that autonomous motivation, the kind that operates precisely when external pressures are removed, produces better performance, greater persistence, and more creativity than controlled motivation. Remove the whip and you do not get laziness. You get conditions more conducive to human flourishing.

Wells is simply wrong. The Eloi are not what happens when work disappears. The Eloi are what happens when meaning disappears. Those are very different things, and conflating them is the error that has poisoned our thinking about abundance for over a century.

Scarcity is the villain, not abundance

Here is the inversion that both Forster and Wells miss entirely, the one that makes me genuinely angry, because the evidence has been staring us in the face.

Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir’s research on scarcity demonstrates that it is not abundance that degrades human capacity. It is scarcity itself. Their work, and the landmark 2013 paper by Mani, Mullainathan, Shafir, and Zhao published in Science, shows that the mere cognitive burden of poverty, just thinking about financial problems, reduces performance on intelligence tests by the equivalent of losing an entire night’s sleep: around 13 to 14 IQ points. Not because poor people lack ability. Because scarcity itself taxes the cognitive bandwidth needed for everything else: planning, creativity, self-control, long-term thinking (Mani, Mullainathan, Shafir & Zhao, 2013, Science, 341(6149), 976-980).

Read that again. Scarcity does not build character. It does not forge resilience. It eats the mind alive. The same farmer in Tamil Nadu performs significantly worse on cognitive tests before harvest, when money is tight, than after harvest, when it is not. Same person. Same brain. Different level of scarcity.

Both Forster and Wells assume abundance is the threat and scarcity the natural, character-building condition of humanity. The empirical evidence inverts this completely. Abundance does not dull the mind. Scarcity does. Every day that we tolerate unnecessary scarcity in a world increasingly capable of eliminating it, we are not building character. We are burning cognitive potential.

What people actually do when freed: the UBI evidence

If Forster and Wells were right, giving people unconditional income should produce passivity and social withdrawal. We no longer have to speculate about this. We have data.

Finland’s basic income experiment (2017-18) found that recipients were more likely to be employed than control group members, not less. They reported better health, greater life satisfaction, reduced mental strain, and stronger feelings of autonomy and confidence. Some participants used the security to undertake voluntary work and informal care for family and neighbours, describing these activities as meaningful work that the guaranteed income had legitimised (Kela, 2020).

Germany’s Grundeinkommen study (results published 2025) found that recipients continued working identical hours to the control group: 40 hours a week, no reduction. The only measured attitude change was increased altruism. The researchers noted that the positive effect on mental health was comparable to therapy. The “social hammock” hypothesis, the Forster/Wells assumption that comfort breeds passivity, was directly and empirically falsified (DIW Berlin / Mein Grundeinkommen, 2025).

GiveDirectly’s ongoing study in Kenya, the largest UBI experiment in the world, found no evidence of recipients becoming idle. Long-term basic income recipients invested more, became more entrepreneurial, and earned more. The common fear of “laziness” simply never materialised.

People freed from material anxiety do not become Forster’s pale, isolated machine-dwellers. They do not become Wells’s helpless Eloi. They volunteer. They care for their families. They start businesses. They feel more autonomous, more altruistic, and more connected. Every single time.

What this means for the future we are building

I have spent thirty years thinking about what happens when humanity crosses the threshold from scarcity to abundance. It is the central question of our time, because technology is dragging us across that threshold whether we have prepared for it or not.

The pessimists, and Forster and Wells are their patron saints, tell us that abundance will destroy what makes us human. That without struggle, we are nothing. That comfort is a cage.

The evidence tells a different story. It tells us that relatedness is an innate human need that does not evaporate with material security. That cooperation is wired into us before we can walk. That our brains evolved specifically for social complexity. That people seek challenge and mastery intrinsically, without coercion. That scarcity degrades human capacity while abundance restores it. That when you give people unconditional security, they do not collapse into hedonistic torpor; they connect, create, and contribute.

Forster and Wells were brilliant writers working with the intellectual furniture of their era. They did not have Self-Determination Theory. They did not have Tomasello’s infant cooperation studies. They did not have the social brain hypothesis. They did not have Mullainathan and Shafir’s bandwidth research. They did not have controlled UBI experiments across three continents.

We do.

If we allow century-old literary anxieties to shape our response to the greatest transition in human history, we will deserve the impoverished future we get. Not because abundance made us weak. Because fear of abundance made us stupid.