You Say You Want a Revolution

August 19, 2024

Owning nothing isn't happiness. Owning control of one's life and purpose is happiness.

In The Super-Wealthy Have a Problem, I discussed how systemic unfairness can reach a pressure point in which regime change is the only option left to reverse a system rigged to benefit the few at the expense of the many.

(My definition of the super-wealthy: entities and families that lobby the government for favors as a standard business practice.)

But political regime change doesn't exhaust the possibilities for revolutionary transformation, which can take social, cultural and spiritual forms. Correspondent Charles C.W. recently asked for my views on these non-political, non-financial wellsprings of transformative change:

"Thank you very much for your comments about the The Great Unwinding. Your comments are focused on the financial side of this unwinding. Also important are the cultural, social, spiritual, and interpersonal aspects of this unwinding. For example, we will learn that many of our government institutions are utterly corrupt and untrustworthy, if we don't know that already. We will learn that the government is not going to save us, and that they are utterly incompetent when it comes to disaster relief, if we don't know that already. We will learn self-reliance and neighbor-trust instead of expecting a handout from the government, if we don't know that already. If you have comments about the cultural, social, spiritual and interpersonal aspects of this process, that would make for a most interesting post."

Let's start with a mass movement of opting out of the status quo hamster wheel. I have discussed opting out as a solution many times, often in the context of historical examples, for example, tenant farmers escaped onerous taxes in the final stages of the Western Roman Empire by abandoning their land and joining the workforces of an elite's vast estate or a monastery. Or they simply vanished into the countryside.

In the pre-collapse phase of the Soviet Union, opting out often took the form of taking the lowest level job available that offered opportunities to catch up on reading and other interests while at work, and joining Party activities that offered opportunities for socializing, visiting museums, field trips, etc.--in effect, milking the system by doing the minimum to display the requisite compliance with the status quo.

I've recently covered the current version of this doing-the-minimum form of opting out: The Anti-Consumers.

Living Well on Less Than $30,000 a Year--One American Family's Story.

In today's America, opting out often takes the form of homesteading, a phrase that encompasses a wide range of personal decisions and lifestyle options. A recent article on the remarkable level of interest in homesteading profiles one homesteader who's assembled an impressive 1 million followers on YouTube:

Off the Grid, Extremely Online: In corners of the internet-- and in wooded, undeveloped parts of the country --young men are documenting their efforts to live off the land.

"Mr. Petroski's property, known as NarroWay Homestead, is one of the most sophisticated and most-watched operations in a burgeoning niche of online creators who document their off-grid or sustainable living projects across the country, often promoting a way of life that seems diametrically opposed to the mediums they use to share it.

'Almost everything I own is a hybrid of ancient knowledge and modern technology,' Mr. Petroski said.

'If you're going to homestead, find a place where people are living the way you want to be living,' Mr. Petroski said. 'I live among people who accept this lifestyle.'

Modern homesteading is not a monolithic, doctrinal pursuit. The scope of what could be considered 'homesteading' is a spectrum.

'The modern homesteading movement's big idea is that, rather than trying to change the world collectively and publicly, people are trying to reshape their private sphere -- their worlds, their homes, their own tiny network,; said Jordan Travis Radke, a sociologist who has studied the movement. 'They're changing their lives, but they want other people to see it, because they want others to follow suit.'

Dr. Radke said that adherents of the homesteading movement come from a variety of backgrounds and political positions, but are often united by a shared sense that though 'the societal systems and structures in which they were embedded could not be changed anymore,' their individual lifestyles could be.

Like many full-time content creators, Mr. Petroski has multiple sources of income: He runs a line of coffee blends, beard care products and other merchandise on top of his sponsored partnerships with brands and the share of ad revenue he receives from YouTube and TikTok. He said it all added up to an annual salary in the six figures.

On the wheel well of a small trailer at Mr. Uhlhorn's campsite is a silver plaque, sent to him by YouTube when he reached 100,000 subscribers on the service. (He now has 732,000.) Mr. Uhlhorn said he used it as a mirror to shave."

Granted, much of the homesteading viewership might be indulging in fantasy, but clearly, there is widespread interest in jumping off the hamster wheel of debt-serfdom / rent-serfdom. Neofeudalism has distinct benefits for the rentier class and a host of servitudes for the rest of us. Life is much more demanding for those opting out, but there's always tradeoffs in life: at the end of each day, the homesteader owns whatever progress was made, while the debt-serf still owns nothing and owes much. And despite the PR of the rentier class, this isn't a recipe for human happiness. (You'll own nothing and be happy. And so the few who own the most will be wallowing in misery?)

As the article explains, if it's impossible to change the economy-society at large, then change your own life. This is the core idea of Self-Reliance, an American ideal espoused by Ralph Waldo Emerson in the 1840s.

The consumerist lifestyle is all about presenting a fake, phony avatar to the world. Change-your-own-life is based on reciprocity, friendships, sharing knowledge and real-world accomplishments. The consumerist lifestyle--the epitome of inauthenticity--is intimately connected to debt-serfdom / rent-serfdom, which is the epitome of an inauthentic economy based on cons, exploitation and addiction. In becoming an anti-consumer, one becomes pro-control-of-one's-life, what we call agency.

These cultural shifts in values manifest in many ways. One is walking away from the hamster wheel. Another is downsizing to a much simpler, lower cost, debt-free, more authentic life grounded in relationships rather than in soulless transactions. In this cultural awakening, impoverishment isn't measured in money, it's measured in a poverty of meaning, purpose and authentic relationships.

To say that a spiritual transformation is even possible in America seems risible. Given the central role of getting and monetizing our attention in reaping vast profits, every video clip, sound bite and headline is screaming for attention in the most destructive ways possible, all with a single purpose: to collect data on our restless consumption of content and monetize it by selling our derangement to the highest bidder.

The Great Awakening--historians count four in U.S. history--may offer a model for the way in which a non-political, non-financial awareness takes hold of the populace, an awareness that is non-denominational and open to the non-religious who sense the emptiness at the center of consumerism and the financial mania that drives it.

As I explained in my book Resistance, Revolution, Liberation, these social-cultural shifts have political consequences, but these are second-order effects of a transformation in values. If the problem isn't political or financial, then tinkering with politics and finance won't fix what's broken.

Owning nothing isn't happiness. Owning control of one's life and purpose is happiness. Equating finance with happiness is a path to a dark place, a place where the magic of technology is offered up as a false god for us to worship. One can own all the tech gadgets in the world and have millions stashed away and have the emptiest life on the planet.

You say you want a revolution. It starts with changing our own lives. Authenticity is infectious. Maybe it will spread and change things in ways few can imagine.



Author's endnote: we built a micro-home with hand tools--no power--in 1978, long before micro-homes became fashionable. I get it. Nothing worthy is easy. As Emerson counseled, "Do the thing and you shall have the power."

New podcast: The Great Unwinding. (33 min)