Independence Is Just Loneliness You Can Afford
The suburb was built by people fleeing the village. They did everything the plan asked of them and the plan delivered. They are also lonely, and nobody treats that as the invoice.
Let me get the obvious objection out of the way first, because if I do not, nothing after it will be readable.
I am not about to romanticise poverty. Poverty is not picturesque. A child dying of something treatable because the clinic is forty miles away is not a spiritual lesson. A family going hungry because the rains failed is not authenticity. A girl kept out of school because the money does not exist is not living closer to the earth. Poverty constrains, diminishes and kills, and anyone who says otherwise has either never been near it or was near it long enough ago to have forgotten the taste.
Hold that. Now hold this next to it, because both are true and the discomfort is the point.
Material poverty does not reliably produce spiritual poverty. Material wealth does not reliably produce spiritual wealth. If anything the relationship runs the other way, and the wealthy world has organised itself so thoroughly around not noticing this that it has started appointing government ministers to deal with the consequences.