The logic of "the only way"

It was page 38 in The Grapes of Wrath before I snapped to attention. Here's what's happening right before this scene: the bank is telling Oklahoma tenant farmers that it's taking their land away, land they've lived and worked on sometimes for generations. The man hired by the bank drives up on a tractor and begins to plow. On his lunch break, the farmer recognizes him:

75 years later, I could feel the anger, desperation, and personal, divergent logic of both men's calculations: three dollars, fifteen or twenty families, five thousand acres. With the words "got to think of my own kids," I thought about how, as old as our country's sense of public duty is, the ideology of "my family first" is not brand new, either. And there are reasons for this that can go beyond the solipsism created by a consumer-focused society, as this passage reminded me: economics and fear continue to drive people to focus on the needs of their immediate families instead of the larger world or even their neighbors. And the face of the powerful institution is often still a worker trying to get by where their ability to do so is dependent on an inability to be moved to act by another person's math.