The Greening of America

a synonym for quasi-governmental power, far different from the property of an individual.

Absence of community. America is one vast, terrifying anti-community. The great organizations to which most people give their working day and the apartments and suburban homes to which they return at night are equally places of loneliness and alienation.

private power

and the anti-intellectual and sometimes childish tendency of Americans not to think at all allowed them to rest easy

This metaphor — the American people as the patient — can’t be carried too far. The American people must accept responsibility if the system malfunctions. Not that we created the malfunctions. But to change the system, we must accept the responsibility of seeing our world correctly. This isn’t easy. What most people are sure that they “see” can be i

But it is schizophrenia, not hypocrisy.

And it represents a higher, transcendent form of reason.

become projectiles, ready to be set in motion by outside energies.

wouldn’t have been a step toward collectivization, but an effort to preserve democracy in a society that had already been collectivized.