Gelassenheit is the load-bearing word in Amish life and it has no clean English equivalent — yieldedness, submission, letting-be. It runs downward through everything: the individual yields to the family, the family to the district, the district to the discipline it agreed on. Almost every rule outsiders find baffling is legible once you read it as a brake on self-assertion rather than a rejection of technology. The Amish are not against electricity; they are against the wire from the public grid, because the wire makes the household dependent on the world and independent of the district. Batteries, diesel generators, pneumatic tools and hired drivers are all common. The test applied is not whether a thing is modern but whether it will pull people apart or hold them together.