Book review - How to Be Free by Tom Hodgkinson

How to be Free is an enjoyable and insightful diatribe against the hectic, modern age.

I knew what I was in for with this book when, a few pages in, Tom states that in today's word it is easier to rob the poor, and cites the evil supermarket Tesco as a chief culprit. In the argument for self-sufficiency and independence, comparative advantage (the whole reason why trade takes place), is wholly overlooked, which is a shame. However, I guess this book, while very well researched, is all about opinion and Tom's opinion is put forward very well, even if he does massively overstate the case (my opinion).

While I can see gaping holes in Tom's prescription, I can also appreciate much of what he has to say.

****

Some quotes from the book:

… it is important to read decent stuff. Put quality materials into your mind, quality ingredients. A diet of god 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.

… 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’.

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.

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.

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.