My first post on this topic received a few comments, so I will elaborate a bit here. We live in a consumer society, where the idea of simplicity is just another commodity that can be used to sell products or ideologies. There is a simplicity industry, for example, that sells books about simplicity. The book business is what it is, and there is more money to be made publishing long complicated books about simplicity, than short simple books.
The idea of simplicity seems to have been co-opted by the Greens. In the second half of The Circle of Simplicity, for example, the author lays out a Green political agenda, complete with meetings to attend and rules for running the meetings. I am not making this up. Wouldn't Voluntary Simplicity be more voluntary, and simpler, without the rules and the ideology? Well, yes, but it wouldn't sell as many books. There's not much of a market for applying the idea of simplicity to simplicity itself.
And so sometimes we see people doing complicated things in the name of simplicity. This is just consumer craziness, a symptom of successful marketing rather than a logical paradox.
Thoreau went to live in the woods because he wanted to live deliberately. Not simply, not sustainably, not self-sufficiently, but deliberately. He does have a lot to say about simplicity, but I see deliberateness as Thoreau's premise, and simplicity as his conclusion. Your mileage may vary.
4 comments:
Thoreau did live simply in the woods of Walden: His Mom brought him sandwiches every day.*
How does life get simpler than that?
*Warning: Uncomfirmed scurrilous rumor. USRs are much simpler to write than confirmed scurrilous assertions (CSAs).
Note from Japan: here brand names are very much in vogue - Louis Jourdan, Coach, Ferragamo, Dior, etc. Walking through one of the major department stores takes you through a maze of different kiosks each featuring a brand name product. So someone thought of making a no-brand department store named "Muji" (short for Mujirushi Ryōhin = No Brand Quality Goods, see Wikipedia). In Muji the items have no labels, but they are distinctive looking and the shopping bag that one carries out is purple with a Muji label on it. Not only is this another example of simplicity being a marketing device, but the irony is that "Muji," the non-brand has become a brand.
Herr Ellsworth: You have reminded me of a hotel with no name at which I stayed in Herat, Afghanistan lo these many years ago. That was it's name, on a signboard over the gate: "The Hotel With No Name". It was a well known place for the...um...pro simplicity crowd.
If one wanted hash: simple. The owner had a hash production facility in back. If one wanted to cook up something more potent: simple. Do so, wrap a piece of surgical tube around your arm, stick a needle in the appropriate conduit, inject, nod off without removing the needle. Come to think of it, maybe the Hotel With No Name was in Kandahar. Or maybe Kabul. It was, after all, Afghanistan during the '70s, and some of the people I shared a dorm room with were well stocked.
When I was growing up in the 50's it was considered a faux pas of the grandest order to allow a label to be seen. Only the nouveau riche flaunted their purchases. We used a lot of French labels in those days, verbal, not stiched.
I am not sure when it changed. I suppose it would be easy enough to find out, just ask all the people without labels how old they are and then ask those who are labeled how old they are, and then there came the ultimate in labels, the ubiquitous tattoo!
Cet 11-3-2007
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