The freedom of affluence opposes and contradicts the freedom of community life.
Interpretation
Wealth can undermine the sense of belonging and community.
Wendell Berry's quote suggests that while affluence provides individuals with many personal freedoms, it can simultaneously create a divide that weakens communal bonds. The pursuit of personal wealth may lead to isolation and diminish the shared experiences and relationships that are essential for a thriving community life. In essence, true freedom may lie more in our connections with each other than in material wealth.
In practice
During a community gathering, discussing how wealth can sometimes isolate individuals.
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.
In a well-functioning democracy, the state constitution is considered more important than God's holy book, whichever holy book that may be, and God matters only in your private life.
That the Jews are connected with God in a special way and that God does not allow that bond to fail is entirely obvious. We wait for the instant in which Israel will say yes to Christ, but we know that it has a special mission in history now ... which is significant for the world.
Sometimes I suspect that we build our traps ourselves, then we back into them, pretending amazement the while.
And through the spaces of the dark Midnight shakes the memory As a madman shakes a dead geranium.
The only use for an atomic bomb is to keep somebody else from using one. It can give us no protection - only the doubtful satisfaction of retaliation...
I tend to identify with my roles to such an extent that I appear to be totally convinced about certain statements that, in real life, I would never believe in.
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