Voluntary Simplexity 2
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.