…according to our dominant legend, the route of success or career advancement or the realization of one’s “potential as an individual” has led away from one’s origins in family and community and into the “public sphere.” By now the rural community, the small town, even the small city, are conventionally thought to be “backward” and drastically limiting of the powers, ambitions, dreams, and salaries of the “college educated” who, according to the same legend, are a sort of the new class predestined to “success.”
The public or the public sphere, centered in and ruled from the larger cities, is perceived as the sphere of self-realization and success. It is perceived also as the sphere of freedom, where one shakes off the burdens and constraints of local loyalties and the traditional or conventional forbiddings of religion and responsibility. This is surely exciting, and one can imagine how it quickens the breath of the careerist in a corporation or a university or a government.
But the public is not, except in the most remote and theoretical sense, a membership. It is nobody’s home, and its gatekeepers are not filled with the spirit of welcome and hospitality. The freedom it offers is in fact the freedom of the richest and most powerful to reign and the freedom of the less rich and powerful to succeed as “human resources,” perhaps highly paid, perhaps not–and, like all “resources” under industrial rule, to be used, used up, and discarded.
The public sphere at present is the realm of extremely powerful, wealthy, childish, and badly spoiled adult humans typified by Mr. Trump, his allies, and his rivals. These people conceive our country (most of it downgraded as “rural America”) not as a republic, a land and people under God and the Constitution, but rather as an open range, a wide-open space, unclaimed territory, where “anything goes” and the fittest survive….
Wendell Berry, The Need to be Whole: Patriotism and the History of Prejudice, 135-136.
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