(Decentralist thinking) gets its punch from the machine age and the era of mass producing. It is revolt against life on the assembly line. The decentralist is an individualist, fiercely democratic in his economic incentives, but critical of unrestrained combinations, trusts and monopolies. He wants to be boss ·of his own domain. He remempers that the American colonies were settled by men who asked nothing but freedom and the right to work the land. The things that made them content came from the good earth. To appreciate this he fondly reflects on the emotions of the first Thanksgiving. Land was then the foundation of civilized existence. To the decentralist it still is.
The decentralist complaint against modernity is that freedom and happiness
have been given synthetic substances, kicked out by compressors, and treated with. quick-drying varnish. Pleasure has come to mean little more than Saturday afternoons off and pay for overtime.
The genuine decentralist is a bedrock, self-producing realist. Not only preferring to grow his own grain, he chooses to grind it and bake it as well. He takes his beauty from nature and makes his pleasure with his own devices. All he asks is a congenial environment and freedom
for his creative instincts. Though it is still a little lost and lonely in the immensity of industrialism, time and events are increasing the tribe. Today thousands are decentralists in their tastes and yearnings without being much aware of it. Franklin, Tom Paine, and Thoreau were
decentralists at heart. So, too, Walt Whitman, even Thomas Edison, in spite of the fillips his genius took.
Strictly speaking, the decentralist in the philosophic sense is not an industrial man. The trend to dispersal of industry. commonly called decentralization, is a different motivation. It is based on efficiency and cost, not on affinity for the land. Nor is that other decentralist, the advocate of home rule, necessarily of the land persuasion. He is a states-rights man, thinking in terms of politics , not grass-roots economics.
In a sentence, decentralism as a way of living means reliance on the land, not on the machine.