Braving the Wilderness: The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone

In Chapter 3, Brown introduces Bill Monroe’s high lonesome holler—a sound originating in the bluegrass music tradition that captures a “shared experience” of despair that lets us “immediately know we’re not the only ones in pain” (44). While this music has the potential to liberate us from pain, without “connection or collective engagement,” it remains a song of “sorrow and despair” (45). What we find today, Brown argues, is a “high lonesome and heartbroken” world inhabited by people who have self-sorted into factions based on “politics and ideology” (45). Consequently, Brown views the populace as protecting their beliefs from the sidelines, thus, paradoxically, leaving individuals more “disconnected, afraid, and lonely” (46).

Brown notes that, at best, this sorting is “unintentional and reflexive”; however, when taken to extremes, the separation can lead to “stereotyping that dehumanizes” (48). At the same time, sorting into like-minded groups has not led to a deeper feeling of connection to our neighbors; rather, it has resulted in a heightened sense of loneliness. Citing Bill Bishop’s book The Big Sort, Brown notes that less than 25% of US counties were won in a presidential landslide in 1976, whereas by 2016, 80% of US counties were won in landslide elections.