We're all complicit in the things we may be trying to oppose. I'm complicit in the things that I'm trying to oppose.
Interpretation
We often participate in the very issues we criticize, highlighting our own contradictions.
Wendell Berry's quote reflects the idea that individuals are often part of the systems and practices they seek to challenge. It acknowledges the complexity of social and environmental issues, asserting that even as we strive for change, we may unknowingly support the very structures we wish to dismantle. This self-awareness is crucial for meaningful action and recognizing our roles in societal situations.
In practice
During a lecture on environmental responsibility, this quote can provoke thought among students about their daily habits.
We weren't allowing our hopes to become expectations. Expectations are tempting, pleasant, maybe necessary. They are scary too, once you have had some experience. They are not necessarily and not always a bucket of smoke, but they can be and are even likely to be.
The uplands of my home country in north central Kentucky are sloping and easily eroded, dependent for safekeeping upon year-round cover of perennial plants.
A corporation, essentially, is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance.
WE ARE DESTROYING OUR COUNTRY - I mean our country itself, our land. This is a terrible thing to know, but it is not a reason for despair unless we decide to continue the destruction. If we decide to continue the destruction, that will not be because we have no other choice. This destruction is not necessary. It is not inevitable, except that by our submissiveness we make it so.
Much of our waste problem is to be accounted for by the intentional flimsiness and unrepairability of the labor-savers and gadgets that we have become addicted to.
We had entered an era of limitlessness, or the illusion thereof, and this in itself is a sort of wonder. My grandfather lived a life of limits, both suffered and strictly observed, in a world of limits. I learned much of that world from him and others, and then I changed; I entered the world of labor-saving machines and of limitless cheap fossil fuel. It would take me years of reading, thought, and experience to learn again that in this world limits are not only inescapable but indispensable.
So, is there an afterlife, and if so, what will it be like? I don't have a clue. But I am confident that the one who has buoyed us up in life will also buoy us up through death. We die into God. What more that means, I do not know. But that is all I need to know.
What is prudence in the conduct of every private family can scarce be folly in that of a great kingdom.
Two loves have made two different cities: self-love hath made a terrestrial city, which rises in contempt of God; and Divine Love hath made a celestial one, which rises in contempt of self. The former glories in itself - the latter in God.
Each individual Christian and every community is called to be an instrument of God for the liberation and promotion of the poor.
I believe I never knew what the word round meant until I saw Earth from space.
All badness is spoiled goodness. A bad apple is a good apple that became rotten. Because evil has no capital of its own, it is a parasite that feeds on goodness.
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