Math Be Damned

Chosen Reduction v. Imposed Reduction

May 31, 2026

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This week, on Ben Thompson’s Stratechery, the ad-tech analyst Eric Seufert was defending advertising. His case, briefly: AI is about to flood the world with supply, so the scarce thing becomes matching, finding the person who wants this particular thing, and advertising is the matching machine. It works, he argued, because human wants are endlessly individual. Every person wants something a little different. Thompson named the failure mode of the opposite belief with an image: the gray Soviet apartment block.

It is what you build if you think demand is a lump you can satisfy by stamping out identical units. Identical paint, identical lives. The block is the future a few people produce when they cannot imagine anyone wanting something they have not already approved, and are handed the power to decide what everyone gets. Seufert drew a dagger of a statement. The people who would draw that block are brilliant, he said; the communist theorists always were. Underneath the brilliance is a contempt for the ordinary person and a failure to imagine he might want differently. The block is what you build when difference looks like a problem and sameness looks like a solution.

I have been turning the image over since, the way the tongue keeps returning to a chipped tooth. It sticks because no one in current political life will admit they want it. The de-growth conference attendee in Brussels does not want gray apartment blocks. The post-liberal Catholic intellectual in South Bend does not want them either. The Loudoun County resident voting against the next data center campus does not want them. The MAHA mom who pulled her kids off the vaccine schedule does not want them. The trad-wife with nine million TikTok followers, cooking marinara from scratch in a prairie dress, filmed on a phone that took a continent of rare earths and a thousand engineers to put in her hand, does not want them. None of them, asked directly, would say this is what I am for.

And yet the apartment block is what each of their prescriptions delivers when you follow the forecast to its end. The forecast is the policy. They get what they prognosticate. The mechanism that produces the block is the same mechanism in every case: the removal of human agency in favor of planned reduction, and the corresponding shrinkage of the cone of futures a society can build. The aesthetics differ. A canvas tote bag here, a barbell and raw eggs there, a chapel veil somewhere else. Underneath the aesthetics, one posture.

I want to draw a distinction that has been missing from this argument. Chosen reduction is a feature of abundance. Imposed reduction is its enemy. The kibbutz at dawn is chosen reduction. The Benedictine monastery is chosen reduction. The homestead with the garden and the woodstove and the chickens, when chosen against a backdrop where you do not have to homestead, is chosen reduction. None of these are gray apartment blocks. They are the freedom of an abundant civilization to opt out of a particular slice of itself, embedded inside an economy that funds and protects the choice. The kibbutz works because the country that contains it has Intel fabs.

Imposed reduction is the other thing. It is the urbanite blocking the data center or new rowhouse. It is the Vice President’s intellectual mentor proposing that the state should restrain consumer appetite for the citizens’ own moral formation. It is the Health Secretary pulling federal investment out of the platform that produced the COVID vaccines and adapting nothing to replace it. It is the legislature trying to make my neighbor’s wife unable to have a job she wants. The chosen reduction asks: what slice of this can I opt out of? The imposed reduction asks: what slice of this can I make unavailable to everyone?

Those are different questions. The civilization that runs the first one as a feature is the only kind of civilization that produces the surplus the second one tries to spend. Take the second posture as policy and within a generation you are also the civilization that has lost the surplus and the room for creativity and flourishing.

Borrowing the same poet

The first thing to notice about the people now arguing for imposed reduction is that the two largest schools of it, which understand themselves as enemies, are heirs to the same agrarian predecessor.

Jason Hickel is the LSE economic anthropologist whose Less Is More (2020) is the closest thing the contemporary de-growth movement has to a manifesto. Hickel wants a planned, democratic reduction in throughput in rich economies. Shorter working week, GDP cap, end planned obsolescence, scale down ecologically destructive sectors (SUVs, beef, fast fashion, arms, advertising), expand public provisioning. The kind of agrarian wholeness Hickel reaches for to ground the politics is the same one Wendell Berry spent a career defending, though Hickel arrives at it through planetary boundaries rather than through Berry himself.

Patrick Deneen is the Notre Dame political theorist whose Why Liberalism Failed (2018) and Regime Change (2023) made him the intellectual lodestar of a postliberal Catholic right that now reaches all the way to the Vice President. (Vance has publicly cited Deneen as formative; they shared a panel in 2023; Deneen treats the current administration as initiating a regime change he supports.) Deneen wants something he calls aristopopulism. A virtuous elite responsive to ordinary people’s longing for thicker social forms. Liberal anticulture rests on three pillars, he writes, first, the wholesale conquest of nature; second, a new experience of time as a pastless present; and third, an order that renders place fungible and bereft of definitional meaning. The agrarian wholeness Deneen reaches for to ground the politics is also Berry’s, and unlike Hickel, Deneen names and credits him outright.

One cites the poet, the other reinvents him. They are afraid of opposite things and prescribing the same answer.

This is structural fact, not rhetorical maneuver. The de-growth left and the postliberal Catholic right both inherit the relational ontology Wendell Berry spent a career articulating (health is membership, place as substrate, the integration of household and community and land and economy as one system) and convert it into prescription against an industrial civilization that has, in their account, severed the connections. They prescribe in opposite registers. Hickel prescribes from the EU Parliament, where in May 2023 Ursula von der Leyen opened a Beyond Growth conference attended by sixty partner organizations. Deneen prescribes through the Postliberal Order substack and the rotating bench of academics at First Things and Compact. Their shared substrate is a posture: less, want less, return.

Adrian Vermeule is the Harvard Law version of the same posture. In his 2020 Atlantic essay he wrote that subjects will come to thank the ruler whose legal strictures, possibly experienced at first as coercive, encourage subjects to form more authentic desires for the individual and common goods, better habits, and beliefs that better track and promote communal well-being. The state as tutor. The citizens as subjects whose desires need correcting toward authenticity. That sentence is the philosophy of imposed reduction in its most candid form, and it comes from a tenured Harvard Law professor whose framework is being absorbed by the same intellectual ecosystem that produced the Vice President.

I want to mark how unusual the symmetry is. On the left I can produce the lecture-circuit anthropologist and the Brussels conference; on the right I can produce the Notre Dame professor and the Harvard Law theorist. Both sides have credentialed bench. Both sides have institutional anchoring. Both sides have major-party adjacency. And both sides arrive at the same direction of travel and the same agrarian conclusion, in different vocabularies: Deneen by naming Berry, Hickel by reinventing him.

The veto eats its own surplus

Thirty years ago Ashburn was farmland, its high school mocked by rivals as “Cornfield High.” Then America Online and the early internet exchanges came for the cheap land and the fiber, and the dairy farms became Data Center Alley. Today roughly seventy percent of the world’s internet traffic routes through Loudoun County, and Loudoun is the highest-income county in the United States. The two facts are related. Data centers now throw off about thirty-eight percent of the county’s general fund and close to half of its property tax, which has let Loudoun cut the residential rate every year for a decade, down to the lowest in Northern Virginia. The servers pay roughly twenty-six dollars in local tax for every dollar of public service they consume. The good schools, the parks, the low tax bill: that pleasant county is what the data centers bought.

In March of 2025 the Loudoun Board of Supervisors voted to make more of it harder to build, ending by-right data center development so every new project runs a gauntlet of neighborhood comment and hearings. Up the road in Prince William, the courts killed the Digital Gateway, which would have been the largest data center campus in the world. Nationally, local opposition has now stalled something like sixty-four billion dollars of announced construction.

The lead organizer in Prince William is a group called the Coalition to Protect Prince William County, and its executive director, Elena Schlossberg, is the most-quoted opposition voice in the regional press. The framing she reached for to describe what is being prevented: Who’s going to want to live in this dystopian hellscape with these behemoth buildings, and the constant noise, and then breathing in the diesel fumes?

Schlossberg is describing something, though less than the words carry. Stand at the fence line of a hyperscale campus and you get a continuous fan hum, on the order of living beside a highway that never goes quiet, and a hundred-acre box where a view used to be. That is a real cost, and it is the nearest neighbors who pay it. The diesel is mostly rhetoric: the backup generators run a handful of hours a year for testing, and data-center diesel is under four percent of Northern Virginia’s nitrogen-oxide emissions. The honest objection is narrow and local. The “dystopian hellscape” is doing more work than the decibel meter will support.

The trouble is what is being vetoed and what funds the veto. The Schlossberg sentence describes a place the speaker calls home in part because the previous generation of that infrastructure paid for the schools and the roads and the parks the current opposition uses.

Schlossberg as a person is beside the point. The structural fact sits at the center of every locally-imposed reduction. The veto consumes the surplus the previous expansion produced, and the people doing the vetoing live inside the surplus. The Loudoun resident who blocks the data center is opposing the next round of the economy that funded her standing to oppose it. That is the trouble with imposed reduction at the local scale. At the civilizational scale it is the same posture and the same trouble, just slower to notice.

Nobody checks the almonds

The other thing the data-center opposition runs on is a numeracy failure, and the failure is one of the cleanest examples of legible-cost-beats-illegible-gain I know of in current discourse.

The claim, recited in op-eds and timelines for two straight years now, is that a single ChatGPT query uses around 500 milliliters of water. Roughly a water bottle. Repeat the claim enough times and it does the work the citer wants it to do. The AI is consuming the planet to write a wedding toast. The number traces back to a 2023 paper by Shaolei Ren and colleagues at UC Riverside called Making AI Less Thirsty, which is a serious piece of work. Ren did not measure 500 milliliters per query. He measured roughly 500 milliliters per page-length response (a hundred-word email, in the Washington Post restatement), including both on-site cooling and off-site electricity-generation water, on a GPT-3 era model that predates the substantial efficiency gains in GPT-4o and beyond. The Sean Goedecke analysis of the original paper translates Ren’s actual measurement, corrected for both error and model efficiency, to roughly 5 milliliters per conversation. Closer to a teaspoon. The viral number is wrong by approximately 100 times, or 10,000%.

Set the corrected number against the rest of the water ledger. All U.S. datacenters combined consume about 17 billion gallons per year of direct on-site cooling water, per the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab’s 2024 datacenter energy and water report. Americans drink about 30 billion gallons of water per year. The entire on-site water footprint of every datacenter in the country is roughly half what we drink ourselves. California’s almond crop, by contrast, uses about 1.5 trillion gallons per year. Nearly 100 times more than every datacenter in the country combined. The California almond industry alone uses fifty times more water than every American drinks in a year.

I am not opposed to almonds. The point is the asymmetry, and it sharpens when you follow the water. The almond’s share is consumptive and then exported: transpired by the tree, embedded in the nut, and shipped abroad in the two-thirds of the crop that leaves the country. It is gone from the watershed for good. The datacenter’s consumptive water mostly evaporates from cooling towers and rejoins the hydrological cycle, and the cooling tower is the old design. The facilities now being proposed increasingly run closed-loop liquid cooling, which circulates the same water in sealed pipes and gives most of it back. A campus that would have evaporated five million gallons a day under the old design can run on the order of twenty thousand. The proposals getting vetoed are frequently the most water-efficient computing infrastructure ever built, killed by residents citing a per-query figure that is wrong by two orders of magnitude and an intuition about scale that is off by several more. The infrastructure carrying seventy percent of global internet traffic gets stopped under environmental framing while the infrastructure producing trail-mix gets a pass. McGilchrist’s hemispheric account illuminates here. The cost is legible: a measurable building, a measurable cooling tower, a number you can cite. The gain is illegible: the combinatorial value of meeting one more granular human need, which never arrives as a single number on a single page. The hemisphere that sees only the legible defaults, predictably, to reduction.

This is the discourse Hickel and Raworth feed and the discourse Schlossberg lives inside. None of them check the almonds. None of them check the joules. None of them check the flourishing we’ve all begun to take for granted, whereby software aids our lives, gives us back time, the only resource we cannot make more of.

The vote is not the decree

A fair objection is forming. The Loudoun veto was a democratic act. Residents organized, a zoning board elected by those residents deliberated, courts reviewed the result, and the whole thing can be reversed at the next election. Vermeule’s tutorial state and a federal rollback of the vaccine schedule are not that. They bind people who got no vote, at a scale no town meeting can reach, and they are far harder to undo. The cases are not equivalent in legitimacy, and I am not going to pretend they are.

The through-line is not the mechanism. It is the direction of the choice. Chosen reduction binds the chooser: I will live with less of this. Imposed reduction binds everyone else: you will live with less of this, because I have decided what you should want. A zoning veto, a tutorial statute, and a defunded vaccine platform sit at wildly different points on the legitimacy scale and run the identical move at the level of appetite. The appetite to make a slice of the available future unavailable to people who did not ask you to. That appetite wears a ballot in one place, a statute in another, and a theory of the state in a third. The legitimacy varies. The posture does not.

What Berry actually said

I want to honor what Berry actually said before I argue with the people who have taken him.

The exploiter-versus-nurturer passage in The Unsettling of America arrives in the opening chapter, after Berry has walked the reader through the deeper history of the conquest mentality. I conceive a strip-miner to be a model exploiter, Berry writes, and as a model nurturer I take the old-fashioned idea or ideal of a farmer. The exploiter is a specialist, an expert; the nurturer is not. This is not a sociology of farmers and miners. It is a typology of orientation toward the world, available to anyone in any profession, including (this is the part the appropriators always skip) people who write code for a living and people who sell ads.

The substrate underneath the typology is what Berry called health is membership. The body and the household and the community and the land and the economy are not five separate categories addressed by five separate specialists. They are one system. A sick person discharged into a sick community living on sick land cannot be made well by a specialist who examines only the stomach. Berry traced health to the same Old English root that gave us heal, whole, and holy. The diagnosis follows: modern urban-industrial society is organized around radical disconnections between body and soul, husband and wife, marriage and community, community and the earth.

I read this and I feel what the post-liberal Catholics feel and what the de-growth left feels. The disconnection is real. The thinness of placeless prosperity is real. The way our prosperity has been organized around dissolving rather than thickening membership is real. I think every honest reader of Berry comes away with the suspicion that consumption is being substituted for meaning and that something necessary is being lost in the substitution.

What Berry did not do is conclude that membership was the prescription. He did not say that everyone should farm. He said that agrarian thinking — limits, care, the understanding that you live in a place and are answerable to it — was a necessary counterweight to industrial thinking. Counterweight, not replacement. The disposition Berry was defending was the disposition of the chosen kibbutz, the chosen monastery, the chosen homestead, the chosen practice of bringing the body and the household and the work back into one system because the doing of that work is good for the soul.

The freedom to live by Berry is the abundance Berry as policy would foreclose.

This is the move both poles miss. Hickel arrives at Berry’s disposition by another road and produces a planetary policy for reducing what we are allowed to want. Deneen reads Berry outright and produces a theology in which the state’s job is to constrain the appetite of the citizenry until the citizenry forms more authentic desires, authentic by his standards. Both prescriptions take the disposition Berry defended and convert it into something it was never meant to be: a universal mandate. Take Berry as policy and within a generation we are not weighing the soul-cost of placeless prosperity from the comfortable position of weighing it. We are having six children so the farm has labor, and we are burying three of them before they reach reproductive age, and we have lost the surplus that funds the chapel and the library and the hospital where the surviving three would otherwise read Berry. The agrarian whose work I, someone named after the patron saint of farmers, am reading from a heated room in Colorado existed inside, and was funded by, the very modernity he was diagnosing. I am making this case from that same heated room, having done exactly none of the homesteading I am so generously permitting everyone else to choose. The diagnosis is the gift abundance produces.

A civilization can build the kibbutz. It cannot mandate the kibbutz. The mandate is the apartment block.

Neither pole will count the joules

The deepest fact about the present de-growth argument, on left and right, is that neither side will sit down and do Vaclav Smil’s arithmetic.

Smil is the energy-and-materials historian whose How the World Really Works is the closest thing modern civilization has to a parts manifest and flow chart. Modern life rests on four material pillars: ammonia, plastics, steel, and cement. We make all four by combusting fossil carbon at scale. The synthetic ammonia produced by the Haber-Bosch process is the foundation of modern nitrogen fertilizer, and roughly half the nitrogen in your body was wrung from the air in a Haber-Bosch plant before it became your blood. Smil’s specific number is that in 2020 about four billion people would not have been alive without it. Not better off. Not richer. Alive. Modern food production is materially a process by which a kilogram of bread is also approximately two hundred fifty milliliters of diesel-fuel-equivalent embedded along the supply chain. The four pillars do not have near-term substitutes at scale. Energy transitions take generations. This is the geophysics underneath every conversation about reduction.

Hickel’s strongest hand is the decoupling math, and it is a real one: in Vogel and Hickel’s 2023 Lancet Planetary Health paper, eleven high-income countries need more than two hundred and twenty years to reach a 95 percent emissions reduction at current decoupling rates, against the ten to twenty-five years Paris compliance requires. Grant it in full. Then watch what he does with it. Less Is More discusses agriculture in terms of agroecology and reduced beef. He does not engage Smil. He does not name Haber-Bosch. He does not address the nitrogen-fixation arithmetic that says half the population of his planet is downstream of synthetic ammonia. Raworth’s Doughnut Economics cites planetary boundaries, including the nitrogen cycle, as ceilings to stay under. She treats them as ceilings, not as the inputs the survival of the people currently alive runs through. Both ducked the question.

Deneen and Vermeule and Ahmari duck it too. Their critique is moral and anthropological. Their limits are theological-natural-law limits on appetite, not biophysical limits on throughput. They tell you appetite is insatiable; they do not tell you a kilowatt-hour costs X joules of primary energy and that the cement and steel and ammonia and plastic of the small-batch artisanal household economy they want to restore cannot be produced at the scale that household economy requires without exactly the industrial substrate they are diagnosing. The reduction is prescribed as virtue. The arithmetic of what it would actually take to live the reduced life at three hundred thirty million people is not performed.

You can dispute Smil’s policy preferences without disputing his accounting. The accounting is what neither pole will sit down with. Both poles share the posture of reduction and refuse the question that would decide it. Bring Smil to a Beyond Growth conference and Bring Smil to a Postliberal Order panel and watch the same thing happen at both events: a polite acknowledgment, a quick pivot, a return to the moral grandstanding that does not need to count.

Math be damned.

This is the structural feature of imposed reduction as a policy posture. It has to refuse the accounting, because the accounting is what tells you what the reduction costs. The chosen reduction inside an abundant civilization does not need to do the accounting, because the abundance is already doing it. The kibbutz at dawn does not need to defend its agronomy at planetary scale; it can be a kibbutz because the surrounding country can be Israel. The Benedictine monastery does not need to defend its libraries on a thermodynamic budget; it can be a monastery because the surrounding civilization can be Europe. The homestead does not need to demonstrate that home-canned tomatoes are a national food strategy; it can be a homestead because Loudoun County can also host the datacenters that route the homesteader’s grocery delivery when the canning fails.

Imposed reduction at the civilizational scale is the posture that wants the monastery without the surrounding Europe.

You cannot plan the bottom either

James C. Scott is instrumental here. Premodern states, in a phrase Scott borrows from Charles Lindblom, were all thumbs and no fingers. They could crush but they could not finely manipulate, because they could not see their own terrain in detail. The modern state grew fingers by making the terrain legible. The land registry, the grid, the cadastral map, the standardized commodity, the scheduled vaccination. These are the things the planner can plan with. What the state cannot see, Scott called mētis: the practical, embodied, local knowledge that lives in the people doing the actual work and that no central planner ever fully holds. The grid is necessary for the state to act. The grid also destroys what the grid cannot see.

That state is the apartment block, the decreed preferences from on high. Mētis is the streets of London, the leaning buildings of the Black Forest, the meandering paths between rice paddies in Vietnam.

Friedrich Hayek had said the same thing forty years earlier in a different register. Dispersed knowledge cannot be centralized. The planner does not know enough to plan production, because the relevant knowledge (what this customer needs today, what this craftsman can build this week, what this farmer’s south field can grow this year) is distributed across millions of minds and cannot be made legible to any one of them at the center.

I made the production half of this argument in The Seduction of Control: dispersed knowledge defeats the planner who wants to optimize output. What is less often noticed is that the same argument runs in reverse. You cannot plan the bottom either. The planner who wants to engineer a reduction is using the same legibility-grid as the planner who wanted to engineer the optimal output, and the grid sees the same things: the measurable cost of the datacenter, the measurable carbon of the SUV, the measurable transgression of the vaccination schedule, the measurable disconnection of the household from the soil. What the grid does not see is the combinatorial value the next datacenter would have unlocked. The grandmother whose mRNA cancer vaccine kept her alive long enough to read a story to her grandchild. The marriage that worked because both spouses had careers or lifestyles they chose. The thirty million people whose nitrogen was fixed by Haber-Bosch into the protein on their plates this week.

The de-growth planner and the postliberal-restoration planner are running the same epistemic operation as the central-production planner. They have all decided what the citizens really need (or are allowed to want, or should be made to want) on the basis of what the grid can see. The mētis they are destroying is the distributed knowledge of three hundred thirty million people working out, for themselves, in the granular volatility of daily life, what slice of an abundant civilization they want to live inside. That distributed working-out is the engine. Flatten the signal and you lose the gain.

This is the difference between the kibbutz at dawn and the Brussels conference. The kibbutz is one expression of the mētis. The conference is the legibility-grid arriving to teach the mētis what it should have wanted. Karl Popper’s historicism applied.

There is a way of thinking about civilizational growth that I keep returning to. David Deutsch’s principle, developed across The Beginning of Infinity, is that pessimism is parochial and optimism is empirical. The empirical record of the last two hundred years is a hockey stick of human flourishing. Child mortality down by an order of magnitude. Literacy up across every continent. The chance of a violent death down by every available measure. The absolute number of people in extreme poverty falling for the first time in human history during a period when the population quadrupled. Hans Rosling spent three decades demonstrating that the educated default is to be wrong toward the dark. We expect the world to be worse than it is, in a one-directional way, and we expect it to be getting worse when it is mostly getting better. Rosling’s word for what is left after you have refused both the optimistic and the pessimistic consolation is possibilist. The work is to hold the level (still bad) and the direction (mostly better) together without flinching toward either.

The mechanism behind the hockey stick has a name. Hayek called it catallaxy: the spontaneous order that arises when countless people trade and specialize with no one directing the whole. What Matt Ridley calls ideas having sex: old concepts meeting and breeding new ones. What Steven Johnson calls the adjacent possible: the next step that becomes reachable only once the last one has been built. People trade. They specialize. They recombine. The recombination is combinatorial. The granular need meeting the granular product is the granular discovery. None of the individual recombinations are visible to a planner before they happen. Most of them are small. A few of them are an mRNA platform built over a decade of cancer-vaccine research, then adapted from the published SARS-CoV-2 sequence to a working vaccine inside a single year. The recombination requires the volatility, because the volatility is the search. You cannot smooth out the peaks and valleys and keep the gain. The peaks and the valleys are the gain.

This is the posture I want to call for. Possibilism leaning towards optimism, embrace the volatility. Not blind, nor cynical. The posture is closer to Rosling’s possibilism crossed with Deutsch’s principle that all evils are caused by insufficient knowledge. Sit with the data. Hold the level and the direction. Refuse the cheap pessimism that thinks the bottom is moral. Refuse the cheap optimism that thinks everything will work out. Pay attention to what the recombination is actually producing. Better humans. Healthier ones. More of them. More thoughts than anyone could file. Consciousness, piling up in adundance. Notice that none of it was planned and none of it could have been.

The chosen reduction can be a feature of this. The opt-in monastery, the opt-in farm, the opt-in week without a phone, the opt-in life closer to the kind of work Berry wanted to defend. Each of these is a way to take the abundance and choose what to do with it, including choosing less of part of it. We need the freedom to choose Berry. We need other people to choose differently. The mētis is the differing.

I started with the Soviet apartment block because of who is unwilling to claim it. Hickel does not want the block. Deneen does not want the block. Schlossberg does not want the block. The Health Secretary does not want the block. The trad-wife with nine million followers does not want the block. They each want some particular slice of a less-this future. A regulated SUV. A restored household. A vetoed datacenter. A vaccine schedule shortened. None of these is the apartment block. The apartment block is what they each produce when their prescriptions reach scale.

The forecast is the policy. They get what they prognosticate. The mechanism is the same in every case: an authority who has decided what the citizens really need uses the legibility-grid to remove what does not fit the picture. The grid removes the apartment buildings the city should have built, because they spoil the rural character of a place that is funded by the data infrastructure of every city. The grid removes the mRNA platform that produces the next pandemic vaccine, because the platform is novel and the limits of human appetite are ancient. The grid removes the wife’s career, because the household is the foundation. The grid removes the data center, because the diesel fumes are visible and the seventy percent of global internet traffic is not. Each removal is a sliver. Stack the slivers and you have something more Soviet.

Chosen reduction is a feature of abundance. Imposed reduction is its enemy.

I want one more thing to land. The Berry critique is real. The post-liberal critique is partly real. The de-growth empirical hand on decoupling is partly real. The Loudoun resident’s love of place is entirely real. None of this implies the prescription that follows. That is the move the entire argument hinges on. You can take the diagnosis seriously and refuse the policy. You can hold what Berry saw without believing what Hickel proposes or what Deneen wants the state to enforce. The diagnosis is downstream of an abundant civilization examining its own discontents. The prescription, if it becomes policy, kills the civilization in which the diagnosis was possible.

What we should be defending is the volatile, distributed, peaks-and-valleys regime that produces the recombination. The mētis, the catallaxy, the adjacent possible, the idea sex, the next datacenter and the next vaccine and the next mode of household and the next way of being a wife and the next way of being a man. The freedom to opt out of any particular slice of it into the kibbutz or the monastery or the homestead while leaving the surrounding country intact for the people who are still choosing differently. The civilization that runs this regime is the one that produced Wendell Berry. It is also the only kind of civilization that could read him, or would be allowed to!

The bottom that the prescriptionists forecast is the bottom their prescriptions build. Erich Fromm named the deeper pull eighty years ago: freedom is a burden, and the reduction promises relief from the burden of choosing. They do not have to want the block. They want the relief, and the block is what relief costs at scale. They will deliver it if we let them.

I would rather pay the cost of staying inside the volatility. I keep returning to the reframe of Icarus I borrowed in Our Recession of Progress: the lesson is not to fly lower, but to build better wings. The peaks hurt sometimes. The valleys hurt more. The civilization that holds them together is also the one that fixes nitrogen for four billion people, keeps Schlossberg’s neighborhood lit, runs the mRNA platform the Health Secretary just defunded, and leaves room for someone who wants to be a monk to go be a monk and someone who wants to keep eight children and a sourdough starter to be a homesteader and someone who wants to write essays from a heated room in Colorado to do that too. The peaks and valleys are the price of the surplus, and the surplus is the price of all the differing.

We get to keep the kibbutz at dawn. We do not get to mandate it. The Soviet block at the end of the prescription is what the mandate builds.