Quotes from Arlie Russell Hochschild

The basic feeling around town was that one shouldn't get too hung up on the environment, feel too nostalgic for cleaner times, or be too retro; that wasn't what residents were 'supposed to feel.' That's because a fracking boom was on, and many new industries were on their way to Lake Charles to process the natural gas it freed from the cracked earth.

An empathy wall is an obstacle to deep understanding of another person, one that can make us feel indifferent or even hostile to those who hold different beliefs or whose childhood is rooted in different circumstances. In a period of political tumult, we grasp for quick certainties. We

think they overregulate the bottom because it's harder to regulate the top.

The Arenos felt that their silent bayou, their buried kin, their dead trees were forgotten, like the female half of the Nuer. Coming

If the power elite want to forget about pollution, and if they impose structural amnesia on a community, you need an omnipotent mind to remember how things once were. You needed, the Arenos felt, God.

the more that people confine themselves to likeminded company, the more extreme their views become.

A lot of people think the environment is a soft, feminine issue," the General mused. "We need Mikes." Don't be a Cowboy in enduring pollution, he seemed to say. Be a Cowboy fighting it.

Oil's been pretty darned good to us," she said. "I don't want a smaller house. I don't want to drive a smaller car.

At play are "feeling rules," left ones and right ones. The right seeks release from liberal notions of what they should feel—happy for the gay newlywed, sad at the plight of the Syrian refugee, unresentful about paying taxes. The left sees prejudice.

But how, I wondered, did that work—putting care for the environment together with the Tea Party call to defund—if not abolish—the EPA, along with other agencies of government? Mike's answer was the free market. "Follow the money," he said. "Make it in the financial interest of everyone to do the right thing.

At the core, to be a man you had to be willing to lose your life in battle, willing to use your strength to protect the weak. Who today was remembering all that?

Companies made money and were beholden to stockholders; it was understandable if they tried to "cover their ass," people told me. But the government was paid to protect people, so one could expect much more of them.

Confederates tried to get out from under the control of the federal government—to secede. But you can't secede from oil. And you can't secede from a mentality. You have to think your way into and out of that mentality. But they should get me in a different costume to talk about that.

Culturally speaking, the entire North had "cut in" and seemed to move the South to the back of the line, even as—and this was forgotten—federal dollars had steadily moved from North to South.

Collective effervescence," as the French sociologist Emile Durkheim called it in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, is a state of emotional excitation felt by those who join with others they take to be fellow members of a moral or biological tribe. They gather to affirm their unity and, united, they feel secure and respected.

Seen through Durkheim's eyes, the real function of the excited gathering around Donald Trump is to unify all the white, evangelical enthusiasts who fear that those "cutting ahead in line" are about to become a terrible, strange, new America. The source of the awe and excitement isn't simply Trump himself; it is the unity of the great crowd of strangers gathered around him. If the rally itself could speak, it would say, "We are a majority!

Having once experienced the elation—the "high"—of being part of a powerful, like-minded majority, released from politically correct rules of feeling, many wanted to hold on to that elation. To do this, they fended off challenge. They sought affirmation.

601If love is a precious resource, it is not one simply extracted from the Third World and implanted in the First; rather, it owes its very existence to a particular cultural alchemy that occurs in the land to which it is imported.

Louisianians are sacrificial lambs to the entire American industrial system.

The English language doesn't give us many words to describe the feeling of reaching out to someone from another world, and of hav- ing that interest welcomed. Something of its own kind, mutual, is created. What a gift.

I'm giving you my Bible answers. I'm not well educated.

We're on this earth for a limited amount of time," he says, leaning on the edge of the window. "But if we get our souls saved, we got to Heaven, and Heaven is for eternity. We'll never have to worry about the environment from then on. That's the most important thing. I'm thinking *long-term*.

I was backing into the picture I wanted to see by noticing what wasn't in it. It was like trying to understand a photography by studying the negative. I found myself focusing not on what people remembered, focused on, and said, but on what they forgot, disregarded, and did not say. I was backing into the deep story, as I am calling it, and noticing what, in human consciousness, it crowded out.

Sincerity" is detrimental to one's job, until the rules of salesmanship and business become a "genuine" aspect of oneself. —C. Wright Mills