Welcome To Paradise
This is the ruinous contradiction underlying present-day American “conservatism.” For the present economy to thrive or even survive, it is necessary for the great majority of the people to have exorbitant or inordinate wants, to expect to get what they want, and to feel that they have a “right” to get it. But to the bewilderment of “conservatives,” this remorseless wanting cannot be confined to the “marketplace”; it is a general disorder, not anarchic but chaotic.
……the economy “grows” upon the destruction of marriages, families, and households—the physical pursuit of sexual fantasy being one of the recognized driving forces of the market–which our “conservatives” have the luxury of both abetting and lamenting. Where, then, is the new Paradise to be made by the triumph of industrial technology?
It does not exist.
—Wendell Berry excerpt from Poetry and Place essay; Standing by Words, pub. 1983
