How to be Free

By Tim Hodgkinson

… it is important to read decent stuff. Put quality materials into your mind, quality ingredients. A diet of good writing, without crappy newspapers and magazine, which just make the anxiety worse, will produce quality thoughts and a self-sufficient, resourceful person. Feed your mind.

Sometimes I think that life is becoming no more than staring at a screen. We stare at a screen all day at work. They we get home and stare at our computer screen before staring at the TV screen. For entertainment, we stare at cinema screens. Screens make us into passive receivers. Smash the screen and find a pencil and a piece of paper instead.

Put simply, if you avoid consuming the products of the system, then you will not have to pay for those products. This way, you will save not only the money that you used to spend on umpteen services, you will also save on the time and mental hassle spent dealing with all those bills. The oppression will gradually depart from your doorstep. And you won’t have to work so hard. Life will become cheaper and easier.

‘There isn’t a job good enough for me. There isn’t a job good enough for anyone.’ – S.L. Lowndes, letter to the Sunday Times, 1982.

… we tend to try to become very good at one small thing to the exclusion of all others. This is called professionalism but could more accurately be labelled ‘being useless’.

‘Learn a craft’ is what I suggest to young writers who contact the Idler: carpentry or blacksmithing or gardening or upholstery; such pursuits sit alongside the life of the mind very well. It is wise to reject utterly as a piece of bourgeois propaganda the oppressive aphorism ‘jack of all trades and master of none’. No: you can do lots of things. You can chop wood and carry water and write poems. You can combine small-holding with software design. One Idler reader is a classical tuba player who is also a trained plasterer. He loves both and both earn him an income. Why limit yourself to one small field?

From the medieval age and right up to 1500 and beyond, lending money at interest, or usury, was strictly off the agenda for anyone who was serious about his or her salvation. It was a sin, it was proscribed, it was evil.

The reason for the outlawing of usury was that time was a gift from God and therefore it could not be bought or sold. Christ, in St Luke’s Gospel, says, ‘Lend, hoping for nothing again’.

Think of the other meaning of ‘consumption’, a deadly disease of romantic poets, which consumed the body until it expired, have been sapped, drained, used up, emptied out. To be a consumer is to drain the world, to eat it, to stuff it into our faces, to whither it, to dry up its resources, to mine it of all its bounty; in short, to kill it. But being a creator or a producer, that is the very opposite.

The best thing is to possess pleasures without being their slave’ not to be devoid of pleasures. Aristippus, 435-356 BC.

Our built-in stupidity is what makes us fearful, We can’t do enough for ourselves and therefore rely on others to do things, and that makes us scared. We have also been told since the days of the Protestant revolution that we are more or less alone in this world, that we should trust nobody and suffer alone and in silence. How different from the old ‘brotherhood of man’ of pre-1500 days, where we were all in this together.

But. Insists Neitzsche, “To ask it again: to what extent can suffering balance debts or guilt?” What difference does it make? My suffering makes no difference to anyone else. It is a negative; it is completely pointless; it has no practical benefit to anyone.

It is better to do things for ourselves. D.H. Lawrence, in his essay ‘Education of the People’, makes a powerful argument against the employment of cleaners and the like for those who wish to be free from servitude.

So the only answer, therefore, and this is difficult one to pull off, is to learn to love the washing-up. In the words of Lawrence:

‘‘The actual doing of things is in itself a joy. If I wash the dishes, I learn a quick, light touch of china and earthenware, the feel of it, the weight and the roll and the poise of it, the peculiar hotness, the quickness of slowness of its surface. I am at the middle of an infinite complexity of motions and adjustments and quick, apprehensive contacts. Nimble faculties hover and play along my nerves, the primal consciousness is alert in me. Apart from all the moral or practical satisfaction derived from a thing well done, I have the mindless motor activity and reaction in primal consciousness, which is a pure satisfaction. If I am to be well satisfied, as a human being, a large part of my life must pass in mindless motion, quick, busy activity in which I am neither bought nor sold, but acting alone and free from the centre of my own active isolation. Not self-consciously, however. Not watching my own reactions. If I wash dishes, I wash them to get them clean. Nothing else.’

In a world where you are constantly asked to be ‘committed’, it is liberating to give yourself the license to be a dilettante. Commit to nothing. Try everything.

When I walk down the Uxbridge Road in London, I see Somalians, Indians and West Indians simply hanging out and talking in groups. They are outside their shops, they are at their stalls in the market. But most of the white middle classes hurry through this scene alone, rushing back to the security of their burglar-alarmed terraced houses. We have lost that easy camaraderie of life, and we’re lucky that people from other cultures have moved to our cities and are demonstrating a more humane and enjoyable way of living right under our noses.

It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have lightened the day’s toil of any human being … [machines] have enabled a greater population to live the same life of drudgery and imprisonment, and an increased number of manufacturers and others to make fortunes. – John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy, 1848

Machines have become as much like people as people have become like machines. They pulsate with life, while man becomes a robot. – E.F. Schumacher, Good Work (a letter written by a British worker)

As the gloomy Robert Burton writes:

‘In adversity I wish for prosperity, and in prosperity fear adversity … what condition of life is free? Wisdom hath labour annexed to it, glory envy, riches and cares, children and incumbrances, pleasure and diseases, rest and beggary, go together, as if man were therefore born to be punished in this life for some precedent sins.’

This is not to deny the pleasures of the log fire; indeed, the pleasures of the log fire are all the more intense when you have just been out in the snow to chop up the logs for it.

Humanity knows nothing at all. There is no intrinsic value in anything, and every action is a futile, meaningless effort. – Masanobu Fukuoka, The One-Straw Revolution, 1978

The rise of the pension as a sort of earthly reward for having suffered forty years or more in a job you didn’t like – this is something new. Likewise, pension as a kind of national entitlement. A pension has become something that you work for rather than something that you get after working. In other words, it is an expression of reward by the authorities for good work, the ‘secular afterlife’, in the words of my friend Matthew de Abaitu. Suffer now: enter paradise later.

We must learn to respect each other’s privacy, and not to impose our moral standards on each other. The Puritan imagines that his moral standard is the moral standard; he does not realise that other ages and other countries, and ever other groups in his own country, have moral standards different to his, to which they have as good a right as he has to his. Unfortunately, the love of power which is the natural outcome of Puritan self-denial makes the Puritan more executive than other people, and makes it difficult for other people to resist him.

- Bertland Russell, The Recrudescence of Puritanism