On joining the Mad Farmer Liberation Front

A new series: thoughts on Wendell Berry's poem as a (timely) sacred text

Hello, friends. Welcome to a special midwinter series of For the Noticers. I’m so glad you’re here. Read on for some thoughts about a beloved poem…

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Several months back, after the election, I attended a live recording of the Pantsuit Politics podcast in downtown Boston. The hosts discussed the concept of a sacred text: one that is generative, inspiring, thought-provoking, sometimes uncomfortable. Sacred texts are open and generous: you don’t have to believe a certain way to engage with them.

When Beth and Sarah asked, “What is your sacred text for this moment?,” I didn’t have an answer. But several days later, I found mine: Wendell Berry’s poem, “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front.”

Poetry is supposed to move us, to startle us; it looks at the world through a slightly different prism, a sideways lens. As my dear Emily D. (and my real-life friend Stephanie Duncan Smith) would say, it tells the truth, but “tells it slant”—and in the slantwise telling, its insights catch the light, glittering like jewels.

This winter, as we move (however slowly) toward spring, I’d like to examine the five stanzas of “The Mad Farmer Liberation Front” here, with you. I think it has some lessons for us in this (fraught, wild) societal moment. We are also, as it happens, in the Christian season of Epiphany, which comes between Christmas and Lent, and calls us to look for the presence of the divine in the world.

As we look for the light in these politically (and, still, physically) dark days, I want to see where Berry’s poem can offer us some light, and some hope.

Let’s begin, then, with the first stanza:

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.

And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.

When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.

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Berry’s poem begins with an unusual imperative—though it’s one that will ring familiar to many, if not most, Americans.

We live in a society that worships quick profit, and I admit to hoping for—and rejoicing in—annual raises, vacation with pay, and all the other trappings of a “stable” middle-class life. I have, at times, felt that security mattered more than other forms of fulfillment. Who among us hasn’t taken a job because we needed to, at least for a while?

On the flip side, I’ve been laid off several times during my career; that purported “security” doesn’t always last. (As the Indigo Girls have it: I sailed my ship of safety till I sank it, or—in my case—till the pursuit of it nearly sank me.)

As a society, for the last hundred years (at least), we’ve demanded more and more of everything made for us, from clothing to meals to entertainment. We pay high prices for cheaply made things, prizing convenience above quality. And we are afraid—so many of us—to know our neighbors, to open up to the people with whom we share land and streets, sometimes even walls. We are wary and isolated, afraid to truly know one another, and we are also afraid to die: terrified of what, if anything, lies on the other side of this life.

The effects of these attitudes, Berry says, is simple: “you will have a window in your head.”

The folks who control the system, he says, will be able to see exactly what you’re thinking, predict how you’ll react. “Not even your future will be a mystery any more,” he says, because the pundits and the tech execs and the influencers will be able to read it. They will control your actions with the lift of a finger; they will pull the puppet strings to tell you when you should buy, sell, live, even die. Everything, in this world, is for profit; everything has a cost, and a price.

This first stanza reads like a condemnation of everything that is wrong with modern life: our self-absorption, our isolation, our willingness to trade craftsmanship and insight for profit and convenience. But it also reads as a warning of what these actions bring: they make us into a people who are far too easily controlled, who are dependent on the money-makers to tell us how to live.

Acting this way diminishes us, leads us away from our best selves. And it makes us far too predictable to those who rarely, if ever, have our best interests at heart.

Berry published this poem in the 1970s, but it feels startlingly timely now, in the age of social media and sponsored content and ever-further-reaching AI. (It feels especially prescient in light of Trump’s second inauguration, at which tech and business leaders claimed front-row seats, and the flurry of executive orders he’s passed since then.)

This is a bleak place to end, but I’m going to stop here, for now. Don’t worry, friends: I promise it gets better, or at least cheekier and more hopeful.

I’ll see you back here next week for our close reading of stanza 2. Meanwhile, I’d love to hear your thoughts and feedback in the comments.