SIMPLICITY: THE MOST SUBVERSIVE THING IN THE WORLD

There is a story told about Diogenes of Sinope that goes something like this: Diogenes was one day eating a meagre repast of dry bread and lentils for supper when he caught the eye of Aristippus, a philosopher who lived comfortably due to his flattery of the king, something which found him favour in the king’s eyes. Aristippus, feeling bold seeing Diogenes eating such a poor meal, said to him, “If only you would learn to be subservient to the king you would not have to eat such lowly meals.” Whereupon Diogenes, hearing the remark, replied, “It is because I have learned to live on lentils that I do not have to be subservient to the king.”

Then there is the following quotation from the Tao Te Ching:

“Manifest plainness,

Embrace simplicity,

Reduce selfishness,

Have few desires.”

This is offered as general advice on how to go about the practice of one’s life and so is in much the same vein as Diogenes’ acerbic riposte to Aristippus. 

Meanwhile, if we should take the time to read Henry David Thoreau’s memoir of spending over two years living alone in the woods by Walden lake in his book Walden; or, Life in the Woods, we find him espousing thoughts such as

“Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Turn the old; return to them. Things do not change; we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts. God will see that you do not want society.”

“It is desirable that a man live in all respects so simply and preparedly that if an enemy take the town... he can walk out the gate empty-handed and without anxiety.”

“Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal simplicity, and I may say innocence, with Nature herself.”

“Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify.”

And last but not least

“Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumbnail. In the midst of this chopping sea of civilized life, such are the clouds and storms and quicksands and thousand-and-one items to be allowed for, that a man has to live.”

This essay is to be about simplicity, something that, it seems to me, has become something very subversive in all those parts of the world touched by wealth, civilisation, technology, acquisitiveness, banks, hoarding, capitalism, popularity [for what is more popular than “Look what I’ve got!”?], keeping up with the Joneses and taking pride in things you claim to own. I regard ALL of these things as vain and unnecessary but then I am also one who reads books that contain rural, agrarian, Daoist idylls and who looks on approvingly, seeing in such simplicity the pattern of a near perfect life. It is something Thoreau would have recognised since it is what he enjoyed for over two years in the woods by Walden lake. Alone. It is also very similar to Diogenes' solitary wandering around Athens and, later, Corinth. Diogenes, of course, had no home and so he found shelter and food, life’s basic necessities, where he could. He seems to have been unashamed to beg as well. We do not find him worrying about where the next meal comes from or where he will spend the night. We do not find him concerned for his long term future as we do many in today’s supposedly ever progressive world of property, stocks and shares, bank accounts, pensions and the like. Indeed, in a claim that cuts straight to the heart of such matters, Diogenes claims to be looking for a human being, something the civilised denizens of the cities of his acquaintance seem not to be in his eyes, and so, we must assume, he must be claiming, in some sense, to be modelling this in his own, simple hobo existence. Traditional Cynic garb was just a cloak. Possessions may have amounted to a simple bag and a staff. That’s it.

By now most of any readers this particular essay has garnered will imagine me to be nuts as this essay seems to be suggesting we ditch modern civilisation and embrace the unforgiving harshness of pre-industrial times. Just think: no cars, no trains, no planes; no TV, no Internet, no computers; no health care [that’s a big one!], no supermarkets, no public utilities. I’m not just nuts, I’m criminally dangerous, right? If I am its only because now, you having all these things, you can no longer imagine life without them. Yet have you ever asked after the cost of having these things in place [I’m not talking about money] in both relevant senses? Contemporary people are taught to expect these things as rights whilst simultaneously not being taught to question where they come from in terms of work, in terms of resources or in terms of the ongoing cost to the environment of having them [and the million other things I could have added to this list]. Even these nine things did not just drop out of the consequenceless sky as things which leave no footprint and have no effects themselves. It is not as if, having these things, they do not make us certain kinds of people, the kinds of people who think, above all else, that life is impossible without them. 

But, of course, life is not impossible without them. Its just a different kind of life. Its a life that doesn’t rely on financial gambling, being in debt or relying on some vast commercial enterprise to supply you with everything that comes into your tiny mind that has been taught to want this, that and every other thing that is advertised on TV and in your social media feeds. You want something, so why shouldn’t you have it, you think to yourself, not imagining for a second the global consequences of billions of people all wanting things at the same time in a never ending stream of wants. But it has to be this way, doesn’t it? Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon, would certainly like you to think so. He makes over $8.9 million per HOUR, so I read, from making sure as many of your wants as possible can be satisfied within hours. Apparently, his company's carbon footprint is worthy of disgrace, what with all it takes to create such vast supply and delivery chains. But he is doing what must be done to fulfill a very modern mantra: consume, desire, want more! 

Yet it is impossible to discuss simplicity without questioning this mantra. We are each of us born with relatively simple needs. My Cynic and Daoist examples in this project knew this very well for, in text but also sometimes in historical practice, they eulogise them and take them up. Its a fair bet that if many of us alive today were sent back to their time we would find even living like their kings and emperors an intolerable situation, what with their lack of things we take for granted, things like electricity, powered transport, and ability to message people instantly. Yet, to my examples, the civilised way these kings and emperors live is something to be despised and avoided - certainly for the Cynics. For Daoists it is merely wise and virtuous to avoid it. But what does this then say about us who, even in the regular versions of a civilised human being, have things past kings and emperors could never have dreamed of? Yet the important thing here, from the point of view of simplicity, is not who has what or what it is worth: It is what kind of person you are and what you have and how you live your life shapes what and who you are. This, in fact, has been my whole argument all along in relation to anarchy and anarchism. This is why, even earlier in this book, I have made the claim that civilisation, anarchy and anarchism are not compatible. They tend in different directions.

One way they are different, I think, is in their focus. Civilisation tends to focus on the community picture. It wants to establish a pattern and have people as a group conform to its ways. If we all want the same things and hold the same values, civilised values, than half of civilisation’s job is already done. And, don’t forget, this net of civilisation needs to be spread as wide as possible. The problem here, however, is that civilisation, as well as things which create it, such as money and an economic system, is a social fiction. Civilisation doesn’t really exist but it is a name we give to large groups of people sharing similar ways of life or the metropolitan places where such “civilised” people live. It survives by educating those it gives birth to into its ways so that they come to accept them as normal and natural with their mother’s milk. Civilisation, of course, is neither of these things. Its only as normal as any other way of life you could imagine going on on a continuing basis and its only as natural as learning to do things and make them so is natural. In this respect, what we call natural is entangled in human cultural “advancement” - if you imagine it is an advancement. In this respect, for example, the human built environment becomes natural as human cultures learn how to build in different ways but what is now natural to us would not have been to those of the past who could never have imagined to build such things as we can. This is essentially the conundrum of asking if anything a human being can do and achieve is natural because we are still essentially clever animals. Civilisation tells us that anything human culture can achieve is good, desirable and progressive. It tells us that wanting to not progress is a moral failing. It tells us we can change nature and make it our own. It tells us human culture can control where our environment goes and can be used to make our lives better, longer and more enjoyable, something uniquely in civilisation’s gift.

Contrast with all this simplicity. This usually takes place at the personal level and this makes it suspect from a civilised perspective from the off. The person who wants to live a simple life stands out from the crowd and has done so for over 2,000 years already. The person wanting to live a simple life likely rejects the notion of civilised progress and looks beneath the shiny things it produces to fascinate easily distracted minds to ask what values such civilised life is built on. Simplicity is not about social fictions such as civilisation or money. It sees them merely as means to rather dubious ends and with a host of deleterious effects. Simplicity is an approach to life which asks what life is for, how one should go about it and what is best in what it has to offer. Simplicity asks what the consequences of living life in certain ways are and regards them as important considerations in living life a certain way at all. Simplicity is not about fanning the flames of desire as civilisation is. It does not tell you to want more and more. In fact, it tells you to want as little as possible. It does not tell you to expect or demand. It does not say you have rights, things which can then be turned into desires civilisation can provide for. It tells you to be joyful at having enough, to be happy with the satisfaction of your most basic needs which are the only needs you really have at all. Simplicity tells you that so much of modern life, as indeed of civilised life since it began becoming civilised, is burden and complexity which will rob you of a connection to your animal and biological roots in nature and will turn you into a being which thinks itself above the world in which such life is set. Simplicity is about living life as you are, as the human being you were born as, whereas civilisation encourages you out of that and into a way of living it has created of itself by means of an ever-growing list of social fictions which make life ever more complicated and subject to non-empirical human inventions. Simplicity is the peaceful satisfaction of life’s basic needs in harmony, as far as possible, with the world around you without any pretension or illusion where civilisation is the active disruption of the world in order to remake it in a created image.

Simplicity, then, is about the kind of person you are, what values you have, what you want from the life you have been cast into by your birth. Civilisation is about that too but it isn’t nearly so interested, it seems to me, in focusing on that. Instead, it would rather, by osmosis and subterfuge, mold you into the sort of person who accepts what it accepts, values what it values and wants what it wants. And what civilisation wants, not least of all, is to make people who want to reject its values and live simply seem odd and strange. Civilisation, and its products, the civilised, don’t like to be challenged. They don’t want to hear that there might be other ways to live and other values to hold. Civilised languages have even developed in such a way that “uncivilised” comes to mean base and backward, lacking in the appropriate qualities and etiquette for living the kind of life “we” should expect to live as “the civilised”. Civilisation does not want to be told that human progress, which is as Diogenes saw it, is in seeing what you can do without. Civilisation is not interested in being told, as simplicity is, that life is about the development of individual human character. Civilisation does not want to know that a machine life governed by machines will inevitably breed machine hearts and machine minds that satisfy only machine impulses. Civilisation breaks the simple human link with nature because it dreams of being in charge of it. Civilisation wants to remake and replace the world - something which has the added benefit of justifying its own unnecessary existence - whereas simplicity wishes only to live in peaceful communion with it. Civilisation is hubris where simplicity is an appropriate humility, a recognition of that which is beyond human beings and of which they are merely a part.

Simplicity is in realising that the less wants you have, the simpler - and more sustainable - things become. Why, in Daoist idylls, did “the people of old” live peaceful, agrarian lives? Because these are simple and so sustainable. Why is the Daoist mentality that of “actionless action”, a letting things be as they will be, a flexibility to all circumstances? Why is its observation that the things which bend will not break and so, consequently, that those things which set up artificial wants and needs, which harbour desires and intentions, will inevitably court conflict, distress and trouble? Daoists and Zen Buddhists, it seems to me, both seek a peaceful enlightenment as the basis of their philosophies. The Cynics, at least those in a Diogenean mold, thought that living according to nature made you more human where being what you actually are is the thing to be. For none of these people did this involve anything very much beyond the self and the satisfaction of the basic needs which keep each one of us alive. Simplicity was at the heart of their creeds and daily routines. Their example was that in each personal example of simplicity the peace in each human life was increased and the human family as a whole lived more peacefully with the environment that supported both it and all the other things on the earth - including other people. It is, I think, primarily because of civilisation and its need to push itself forward as the only right thinking way to live that we now think such ideas quaint, naive and utopian. But there was a time, not so long ago, when most people lived like that. They didn’t know any better, you will say, and they were better off for it, I will reply.

Civilisation, in this respect, goes hand in hand with the mentality that knowing more and being able to do more is “better”. But, I ask you in all seriousness, by what measure? Human beings only have basic needs and they still have the same needs now as they had before civilisation came. Before civilisation came, believe it or not, those exact same needs were also satisfied. A modern, technological civilisation was not required to satisfy them but civilisation will never tell you that. Civilisation will never tell you, as anti-civilisationist Daoist texts do, that in the past people were quite happy living out their mundane lives of peace and quiet never going beyond the boundaries of their village. Civilisation will tell of all the places you should be going to to be accounted a civilised human being and a participant in civilised society. It might not tell you the cost though and there is always a cost. Could uncivilised Man have ever threatened the planet with nuclear devastation or ecological collapse? No. A civilised human race has managed to place its ecosystem on the brink of destruction in only a couple of millennia. Even if you thought civilisation desirable no one can now argue it is without consequence. My argument is that simplicity is not only personally more fulfilling; it is infinitely better for the whole. 

Here I must point out that it is specifically civilisation that is the problem and not something like capitalism or consumerism. These latter two are parasitic upon civilisation and rely on its centralising tendency, something they can both exploit. Capitalist and consumerist societies are ones which are highly centralised and integrated, all the better to control a lot with a little. If there were no civilisation, there would not be either capitalism or consumerism, so necessary is the centralising which civilisation makes real by drawing people in to share access to common resources. Think about it; if a rural and agrarian population was made up of those who each lived scattered about where they may, in tiny, self-supporting groups, how could either capitalism or consumerism exist? To live in that way also massively affects what you want or need to propagate such a form of life. Much of the impetus and desire to want, to consume, to acquire, disappears when your daily needs are met in much simpler and more self-supporting ways. You realise that what you are told you want now in modern civilisation from every conceivable angle is a lie, an illusion, a bad dream. It is civilisation itself, the aggregation of people into ever larger groups with ever more centralised means of utilising and supplying these groups, which lays the groundwork for even greater evils to grow in its fabricated soil. Decentralise the people, however, simplify their lives, disperse their needs - uncivilise them - and capitalism and consumerism disappear like a mirage in the desert.

This book is latterly being written under the spectre of the Covid-19 virus pandemic that has spread around the globe from late 2019 into 2020. It has, in a great many ways, shone a light on the way civilisation works and highlighted many dark corners of human society. It has shown that human needs are simple - food, clothing, shelter, networks of human support and mutual aid - as well as the acquisitiveness involved in making these basic needs, which every human being has, something that is only available for the social fiction of money which serves an equally fictitious economic system which designates rich and poor. This system, in turn, says what you can and can’t do in human society judged by such measures. Yet, at the same time, this same situation has shown up how vast the inequalities are within this system, something which the system itself seems designed to create and facilitate. There cannot be a rich person unless there be many more poor ones. There cannot be a have without thousands of have nots. It cannot be that, in this system, the very means of human survival comes with a price tag attached, retailed by people who claim the right to own things and so sell them, unless the mass of the population at large are coerced to buy into the games and practices of civilisation itself. It is not only The Matrix that has chosen to see such a human civilisation as itself the actual virus. What Covid-19 is revealing in a million acts of mutual aid and human kindness, however, is that things can, even now, always be a lot simpler than the unnecessary and often discriminatory and unequal practices of an unnecessary civilisation. And, indeed, one must ask at such a time:

“If the way things are [civilisation] works against the best interests of millions of people, then isn’t it high time to change the way things are?”

This, however, is to attack civilisation on its own “macro” turf whereas simplicity exists in the tiny “micro” details. Simplicity is being concerned with yourself, your own life, the simple satisfaction of simple needs which, when multiplied, becomes the peaceful, authentic life of all. It is, I believe, at the heart of, and the basis of, the anarchism of those who, in the 19th century, created something which is today known as the political form of anarchism. But such simplicity as I here refer to never has a state of anarchism in mind. It is never simplicity’s intention. It is not politicised as the motivations of the 19th century anarchists were. It is rather what simplicity creates if left simple, naive, innocent. Simplicity is not knowing but, sadly, knowingness can infect even things which start out from the best of motives. A knowing anarchism or a socialist civilisation are not simplicity for simplicity, much as the Dao in Daoism, has no intentions. It is not concerned with how things will turn out in the long run as a result of human action. It is whole and complete within itself like the Zen attitude which says that after meditation you should chop wood and carry water. The point there is to just go about your own peaceful business neither having excessive desires nor seeking to interfere into other things. Just live your life in whatever simple, peaceful harmony is possible and things will go about their way, preserving and prolonging life, in the way they always have done. Nature itself is simplicity in exactly this sense.

So simplicity is keeping in mind John Cage’s oft-repeated statement regarding human action: “you can only make things worse”; and acting accordingly.

Go on the Internet and enter into some conversation about politics and then casually drop into the conversation that capitalism sucks and that what’s actually needed to replace it is “the economy of the gift”. You will be met by silence and imagined blank stares as I just have been when you read that previous sentence. For a start, almost no one has any fucking clue what an “economy of the gift” is. So unused to the idea are we that it has become a strange and exotic term. Even worse, for those one or two who pull the thread of you having dropped this unknown term into their conversation, once you explain to them what it is, they will retort by telling you of all the things such an economy will make impossible. This is because, in their minds, replacing capital demanded in exchange by a market for something else with “gifts” or perhaps even nothing at all - effectively doing something for free - is madness of the highest order. Or, as one Internet respondee in one of these random conversations put it:

Even if they [i.e. economies of the gift] work:

1. What standard of living (longevity, healthcare, food) do they afford?

2. How do they deal with those who do not collaborate?

3. How many people are in a gift economy before it breaks down?

These three questions, which are not bad questions in themselves, reveal a lot about the mindset of the person putting them, as questions often do. Questions are far more basic than answers, being, as they are, things which spring straight out of our guiding values. I diagnose that the person sending the above response was concerned about his standard of living [and not just living or the success or failure of a group or community of others], the need to use power and have authority to force others to live as you want them to, and the fact that such an economy might not work . . . whilst being totally blind to when, or if, or for whom, a capitalist economy works. Because, ladies and gentlefolk, I have to tell you that a capitalist economy does not work equally for all and neither is everyone benefited by its existence. It is not the best way for just anyone to live. It might not be the best way for anyone to live. And, of course, like any way to live, it is never a consequenceless way to live.

And here is the rub. Capitalism is only made possible by being built four square on the foundation on two examples of the gift economy in action. [But… what is a gift economy? You haven’t told us yet!] A gift economy, in case you are wondering [and I think the term “gift culture” is even better because then it speaks to something grown up in that becomes part of your existence] is a mode of interaction with others were things are not traded or sold but given without explicit agreement or implication of any future rewards. A gift economy is best described as a refusal to calculate. If you want current examples of this then Wikipedia is an Internet example. It is a freely shared online encyclopedia which requires many hours work by many people to maintain but, although they may ask for funds to maintain it, they neither expect nor demand anything from any given user in order to make use of it [as hundreds of millions do]. Another cultural example in our modern world, again made possible by the Internet, is couchsurfing. Couchsurfing is a gift economy in which travellers make use of the couches of those who live in the area they are travelling to stay for the night. Hosts hooking up with travellers via the official Couchsurfing website are not allowed to charge guests for their stay. It is a helping each other along without making demands. Yet there is an even bigger example of one who promoted a gift economy, one known to people worldwide. He is regularly known as Jesus and he came from Nazareth. He’s the guy who said, “Give to everyone who begs from you; and if anyone takes away your goods, do not ask for them again. Do to others as you would have them do to you.” In another book he says, “If you [plural] have money, do not lend it at interest, rather, give it to someone from whom you won’t get it back.” He also told people to literally give all of their money away to join him in an itinerant, ethical lifestyle. Jesus was not a capitalist regardless of how many of his modern day followers are. He was the key figure in a gifting community.

But back to the two foundations of capitalism, without which it would not be possible, which come from a gifting culture. Can you guess what they are? They are nature and child rearing. Think about it. You eat food, perhaps you even grow food to then eat it. It was free. The earth naturally grows food of many kinds that supports untold thousands of species, supplies abundant water, and keeps us alive. It requires no complication or authoritarian economic system [that is literally policed] to make that so. Provided you are happy to eat and drink whatever you come across, all such needs are freely provided for. Capitalism didn’t make this. But it does exploit and abuse it and try to drive your appetite so that it wants something it supplies. Capitalism is coercion writ large. The gift is not. And where did the capitalists get all that wealth from? From their workers, of course, or from putting other people to work [if not, often, making it so that they have to work as people co-opted into their system]. Capitalism exists to exploit and exploitation is written into its DNA. It is a system of selfishness that seeks to extract profit from a situation but never a profit just anyone can share as nature does. Capitalism is, thus, also a protectionism, a division, an authoritarianism. But this is not what every human adult does who brings up a child. In that relationship the child is given time and resources without thought of return and at no cost whatsoever to them. Just to give them a chance at life as well. Such childhood is a pure gift and there is no thought of making the child earn their upbringing. Interestingly, that believer in the gift economy, Jesus, said many times that “the kingdom of God” belonged to such as children and the economically destitute. He didn’t see that as a problem but as exactly the opportunity.

But today if your life is about watching TV, or driving a car, or going to far away places in only a few hours, or having everything ready to hand, you do not want to be told that the way of life which makes that possible has consequences; that it is destructive and exploitative and that just because you can’t immediately see the damage being done that doesn’t mean there isn't any. You more than likely want to continue in your trance believing that everything is fine and that this is the way things have to be and that any other way of living is worse [not least because more inconvenient]. Well, if you hold to the values of capitalism, then of course all other ways of living and forms of life will be worse - because holding to such values the game is rigged so that only one way of living can satisfy the capitalist urges. But what about if you change your values, what then? What about if you change to values which don’t try to distance you from the consequences of your choices by hiding them away in some remote part of the world that you will never think once about, let alone twice? What about if, when considering how you live, you take all of the consequences of that living into account?

To get to that from here will not be easy. There are many people committed to capitalism and its values and to the destruction and exploitation it requires. They will pay off dissenters or their retainers with table scraps to keep them in line or utilise their wealth in other ways to maintain a capitalist stranglehold over as many people and as many resources as they can. They have all the advantages because the way human societies have been shaped in a modern, technological world are ripe for those who are most exploitative to take advantage of. They often own the means of information dissemination or can use their wealth to fund huge ideological disinformation campaigns by means of them. So if fire cannot be fought with fire because those with the most fire will win then other ways of changing the world for the better must be employed. These are ways which rise up from below and overwhelm those things above them like flood waters which rise in an unstoppable way to quench the fire above. They are, by themselves, necessarily small things. Things so small, in fact, that no one will even see them as a threat until all the small things eventually mount up, come together, and create a vast network of mutuality and simplicity. These are our ways forward. If we have few needs, and if we can satisfy them amongst ourselves, capitalism finds itself selling things no one wants anymore and it dies, eventually, because it only ever existed to coerce people into wanting what it supplied and making us wedded to, and dependent upon, that supply. But no one really needs what it supplies. They never did. We must banish that Wizard of Oz which tells us that we do. It is only an illusion.

The future I seek is an attitude to life, a mentality, a way of living. It is a simplicity of free interaction without thought of calculation, a mutual aid that has few needs that each, if necessary, can help their neighbour to supply. It is a being a part of nature and not its willing destroyer or exploiter. It is a life without expectation and so which disables disappointment. It is a freedom from the social fictions of money, cost, price, payment and debt. It is a life in which people together, consensually and mutually without coercion, can decide on their own needs and bring them to fruition through working together voluntarily. It is the abandonment of as much artificial social fiction of human invention as we can manage in the furtherance of such aims. It is the making of a new bond with nature where no such bond is needed because we are nature - and so it is the final nail in the coffin of the idea that humans are over and above nature and not simply part of it and an example of it. It is a refound humility. The humility of simplicity. It is this very simplicity which stands as the offence to all those who would insist, often for selfish or exploitative reasons, that things need to be complicated. 

Look around you. Nature says otherwise. For free.