Requires too much drone work, too many hassles 

Posted by Steve Welzer on 02/24/06

It’s all too hyper out there . . . too high maintenance!

All the work, all the stress, all the hurry . . . wherever do we think we’re going?!

------------------------------------------

The Chinese have an expression that adults in their prime “hold up the sky.”

In modern civilization, suffering from overdevelopment, the sky has become too heavy. The scales and complexities that characterize the way we live, the standards of consumption, the hypertrophied technologies, the artificial “needs,” the web of bureaucratic institutions . . . are enervating, frustrating, and exhausting to support and maintain.

Mechanization and further development has not liberated us and never will. Liberation lies in the direction of simplification.

Slow it all down! Scale it all down! Get back to basics.

Below are a series of commentaries showing that this has been recognized for centuries.

---------------------------------------------

Commentary from the 18th century:

When an Indian child has been brought up among us, taught our language and habituated to our customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and makes one Indian Ramble with them, there is no persuading him ever to return . . . [But] when white persons have been taken prisoners young by the Indians, and lived awhile among them, though [later] ransomed by their friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet within a short time they become disgusted with our manner of life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the first good opportunity of escaping again into the Woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them.”
- Benjamin Franklin, Letter to Peter Collinson, 1753

Above cited in Forgotten Founders by Bruce E. Johansen. Below taken from that work:

Franklin followed with an example. He had heard of a person who had been “reclaimed” from the Indians and returned to a sizable estate. Tired of the care needed to maintain such a style of life, he had turned it over to his younger brother and, taking only a rifle and a matchcoat, “took his way again to the Wilderness.” Franklin used this story to illustrate his point that “No European who has tasted [Indian life] can afterwards bear to live in our societies.”

Indian societies, wrote Franklin, provided their members with greater opportunities for happiness than European cultures: “The care and labour of providing for artificial and fashionable wants, the sight of so many rich wallowing in superfluous plenty, whereby so many are kept poor and distress’d for want . . . all contrive to disgust them [the Indians] with what we call civil society.”

“Benjamin Franklin could not help but admire the proud, simple life of America’s native inhabitants,” wrote Paul W. Conner in Poor Richard’s Politicks (1965).

“Happiness,” Franklin wrote, “is more generally and equally diffused among [the Indians] than in our civilized societies . . . Having few artificial wants, they have abundance of leisure for improvement by conversation. Our laborious manner of life they see as slavish and base.”

---------------------------------------------

Commentary from the 19th century:

I have travelled a good deal in Concord; and everywhere, in shops, and offices, and fields, the inhabitants have appeared to me to be doing penance in a thousand remarkable ways ... The twelve labors of Hercules were trifling in comparison with those which my neighbors have undertaken; for they were only twelve, and had an end; but I could never see that [my neighbors] slew or captured any monster or finished any labor. They have no friend Iolaus to burn with a hot iron the root of the hydra’s head, but as soon as one head is crushed, two spring up.

I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these are more easily acquired than got rid of . . . By a seeming fate, commonly called necessity, they are employed, as it says in an old book, laying up treasures which moth and rust will corrupt and thieves break through and steal.

Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them. Their fingers, from excessive toil, are too clumsy and tremble too much for that. Actually, the laboring man has not leisure for a true integrity day by day . . . He has no time to be anything but a machine.

We [should] consider what is the chief end of man, and what are the true necessaries and means of life . . . Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind. With respect to luxuries and comforts, the wisest have ever lived a simple life.

- Henry David Thoreau, Walden, 1854

---------------------------------------------

Commentary from the 20th century:

We have all been inculcated in the Official History. Its name is Progress, and the Dream of Progress continues to fuel global civilization’s expansion everywhere, converting human beings into mechanized puppets, nature into dead statuary.

Primal society has been called “the original affluent society,” affluent because its needs are few . . . No explanation can fully encompass the series of events that burst original community and generated class society and the state. But the result is relatively clear: the institutionalization of hierarchic elites and the drudgery of the dispossessed to support them; monoculture to feed their armed gangs; the organization of society into work battalions; hoarding, taxation, and economic relations; the reduction of the organic community to lifeless resources to be mined and manipulated by the archon and his institutions.

The “chief features” of this new state society, writes Lewis Mumford in The Myth of the Machine, “constant in varying proportions throughout history, are the concentration of political power, the separation of classes, the lifetime division of labor, the mechanization of production, the magnification of military power, the economic exploitation of the weak, and the universal introduction of forced labor for both industrial and military purposes.” In other words, a megamachine made up of two major arms, a labor machine and a military machine.

This mechanization of human beings, he writes, “had long preceded the mechanization of their working instruments ... But once conceived, this new mechanism spread rapidly, not just by being imitated in self-defense, but by being forcefully imposed ...”

- David Watson, “Empire and Ecological Destruction: Civilization in Bulk”
(Fifth Estate - Spring 1991 issue)

---------------------------------------------

21st century commentary:

A just and sustainable world order can only be achieved through a transition to a Simpler Way; i.e., to a society based on less affluent living standards, highly self-sufficient and cooperative communities, and more equitable economic relationships.

Some of the other crucial elements in an ecologically sustainable society would be: permaculture design principles, local production of most food and basic staples, decentralization, humanly scaled technologies, local employment, community credit unions (replacing for-profit banks), local currencies, shorter working hours. The role of nation-states should decline as the locus of most economic and political activity shifts to self-governing localities. We can only solve the big global problems facing us if, in rich and poor countries alike, we move toward settlements, lifestyles, and economic relations which enable sustainable praxis.

The transition required is vast, yet, not only do we now have a considerable literature on the form that a sustainable society must take, in the last two decades we have seen increasing numbers of people begin to adopt sustainable lifeways. There is a movement for “voluntary simplicity,” whereby people are realizing that by reducing their dependency upon the consumer society and the work-intensive treadmill economy, they can improve their quality of life.

- Ted Trainer, “The Significance of the Global Ecovillage Movement”

Comments