 
To: Bill Eichman 
Cc: +dist+/afs/andrew/usr/js9b/Public/camc.dl@ANDREW.CMU.EDU,
        Thomas_Price@KANGA.FAC.CS.CMU.EDU
Subject: Re: Hard Head 
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Fri, 11 Sep 92 00:19:26 EDT."
             <4u6wqB2w165w@hogbbs.scol.pa.us> 
Date: Fri, 11 Sep 92 10:17:14 -0400
Message-Id: <8892.716221034@KANGA.FAC.CS.CMU.EDU>
From: Thomas_Price@KANGA.FAC.CS.CMU.EDU

>What I want to talk about are methods for acheiving greater degrees of
>freedom and independence from the 'dominant society', the megacorp/
>megagov rigid and centralized society. Practical plans that will give us
>the power to live a high quality life with as much of the benefits of
>modern civilization as possible, but with enormously greater freedom in
>lifestyle. I want to be out of the rat race, yet have the tools and
>information I want for my studies, artwork, and creative needs.

Me too! Here's a method: make economics as irrelevant to your life as possible.
Live as close to the bone as you can. (Who here has read _Walden_? Good!
Absolutely indispensable to any American who wants to think about society.)
If you can live on $5000 per year, you win. What incredible freedom!

Check out this budget:

Income: $14,000 per annum

Outgo: 	$4,000	taxes
	$5,000  savings
	$2,800  housing/utilities
	 $ 600  food	
	$1,600  misc

This is quite workable; I'm living on it now. In ten years at this rate
that's $50,000 saved; presuming that it can be invested at a %10 return 
rate, it provides an investment income sufficient to satisfy my needs for
housing, food, utilities, and miscellaneous (books, motorcycle insurance,
etc.). In ten years I could retire abroad; in fifteen years, I could
retire to a rural area of this country, either to live peacefully, more
or less by myself, or to cooperate with others in a group situation.

And, supposing that the world banking system collapses, or something goes
wrong -- I can still survive on between five and nine thousand dollars 
per year, easily obtained through part-time employment.

The financial aspects of this lifestyle are not the interesting ones. The
really interesting aspects of this lifestyle are the ones of internal
discipline. To live like this requires a certain amount of focus, a topic
to which I hope to return later.

>Start small-- think in hundreds and small thousands. Don't touch
>anything that costs more than 2500 to start, and don't start it with
>money that you _Must_ have to pay bills or keep obligations-- never
>trust the business gamble. Try small scale, 

I just had to quote this part of Bill's post. Try smaller even! Quoting 
Thoreau from memory, about the local farmers: "They solve the problem of 
getting their living by a process more complicated than is necessary;
to get their shoelaces they speculate in herds of cattle." He identified
what he needed, and it was a smaller list than that of the Midnight Engineering
dude (phone, mail, etc.): Food, Shelter, Heat. He got it by working steadily
for six weeks of half-days in the summer, and a few odd jobs and fishing 
during the rest of the year. That was it!

And, of course, he had Homer on his desk, and other library books, and
his own writing to do. As well his real work: attitude. Thoreau was an 
attitude researcher and a writer and that's why he hit on the scheme of
maximizing time and freedom above all else.

I'm reminded of some comments he made about how much of a mistake it was
to domesticate animals -- he wasn't so sure that the oxen didn't get the
better part of the deal; in return for their labors the farmer and his
helpers had to spend six weeks of the year in harvesting and preparing hay
for the winter, and that's a lot of hard work over and above everything else
they had to do, maintaining the barn, etc. Whereas our boy Henry, by attending
to only his own needs, was able to hoe everything himself.

This offers some insight to Nathaniel Hawthorne shoveling shit at Brook
Farm: the different components of Brook Farm were not self-sufficient.
There was the school and the publishing and then the Farm itself, and
the financial drain of the building projects. Whenever losses were felt
and the budget wasn't met the failure bled from one part of the outfit to
the next: the Farm was called upon to show a profit to compensate, for 
instance. This, then, impacted the lifestyles of the members of the venture.
The Brook Farmers made what I would call here a misconceptualization: they 
visualized a structure and tried to get _it_ running, and towards the end
people were getting burnt out because they had to sacrifice their lifestyles
to the structure. Thoreau decided that his attitude, his spirit, and the 
quality of his existence were the most important things and he subjected
everything to them -- his lifestyle was the whole _point_. No burnout was
possible.

One last thing I'm thinking of. Two names come up again and again in
my reading: Bill Mollison, the Australian "Permaculture" theorist, and 
some Japanese guy who wrote a book called "One Straw Gardening" which is 
a system of farming that requires you do do as little as possible. Essentially,
once you've got it going, all you do is go and gather the food you need when
it's ripe. So imagine this: a bunch of people living together as vegans,
all of whom know what they are interested in -- mainly matters of the spirit
and intellect, so there's focus and discipline and a lack of interest in
extraneous activities which dissipate resources -- and they're living 
communally, which means they've bought a home and land in a semi-rural area
such that they're all paying, on the mortgage, no more than they'd been paying
for rent before (see budget above) with the important difference that that
money isn't going anywhere but is an _investment_, holy cow, which they will
get back eventually, and they have a big vegetable garden which provides
a lot of their needs.  And they have _serious_ free time. And, there's no
need to be entirely self-sufficient! Some of these people -- PhD's! -- work
part-time in a *hardware store in town*, for crying out loud, because that
privides them with the highest income/hassle ratio!

Oops, I'm getting ahead of myself. I'll get back to this little dream of
a rural ashram; right now I'll just summarize with the observation that
on one level the message of Walden can be summarized as: think of everything
you achieve in your life as part of a gain/hassle ratio; don't neglect 
to take into account what you have to spend on it, and remember that thinking
is the most precious thing you can spend. Life is short and your neurons can
only fire a finite number of times. Make them count.

>It is The American Dream to be self-employed, to be a successful
>entrepreneur. It is The American Reality that most people spend their
>lives in jobs they either actively hate or grimly acept, held in bond
>servitude by the weight of their debt, which keeps them chained in place
>just as effectively (for most) as a gun in the back.

"He who does not eat need not work." -- Henry David Thoreau

>"Our type" of people can counteract this 'Reality' by trying, as hard as
>possible, to master the hard craft of entrepreneurialism from as early
>an age as possible. 

Complementarily, we can start working on our attitudes such that we contain
complete culture within ourselves and are therefore need not consume 
the stimulation of society with its attendant ills, but rather can thrive
in a very open-ended situation of large to complete freedom.

This message is very lengthy -- let me send it and start another.

Tom

******************************************************************************
         Tom Price  |  tp0x@cs.cmu.edu  |  Simplicity, simplicity
******************************************************************************
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