Regruntled.com

I keep getting into this recurring argument about software projects: there will be some kind of problem, and someone will say “we can fix this by adding another table to the database and adding a few more buttons to the user interface.”  I will say, “no, no, we can’t fix this by making the system more complicated, we have to fix it by making the system simpler!”  I typically lose the argument.  The system becomes more complicated, which leads to additional problems, which are addressed by adding even more complexity.  And so it goes.

Mouse’s piece on Practical Demonology got me to thinking about this in relation to religion, which, after all, is cultural software.  Monotheism is very simple, which I like.  Nice, minimalist design.  And yet, complexity creeps back into Catholicism:

• The hierarchy of angels: Raphael, the archangel in charge of healing.
• Demonology: Leonard or “Master Leonard” is a demon or spirit in the Dictionnaire Infernal, Grand-master of the nocturnal orgies of demons.
• Patron saints: St. Gertrude of Nivelles, invoked against fever, rats, and mice, particularly field-mice.

While I’m at it, let me mention the proliferation of superheros with obscure powers, as opposed to the simple, all-purpose Superman.

In a comment to my post on Payday Loans, CET eloquently argues that “it is more expensive to be poor”. This got me to thinking, because one of the premises of Voluntary Simplicity is that it is LESS expensive to live simply.

The difference between Voluntary Simplicity and Involuntary Simplicity (otherwise known as poverty) is that the Voluntary Simpleton can make choices. He can make choices because he has accumulated capital. He can buy a six-month supply of spaghetti sauce when it is on sale, because he has the money to take advantage of the sale. Not only does he have the capital, he has the values that led him to accumulate the capital.

Voluntary Simplicity, while rejecting consumerism, is still very much a middle-class, Protestant-ethic way of looking at things. Sometimes this is very explicit, as when the authors of Your Money or Your Life urge their readers to save money, buy Treasury bonds and live off the interest. In other cases it is implicit, as when Thoreau, a Harvard graduate whose family owned a pencil factory, decided to camp out on land owned by his friend Emerson.

As I have argued elsewhere, the essence of Voluntary Simplicity is not simplicity, but deliberateness, and deliberateness is the antithesis of the consumerist, immediate-gratification mindset that puts people into situations where a payday loan is even a plausible solution. In a Voluntarily Simple world, the payday loan shops would all go out of business.