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Could Thoreau's idea of a simplistic life work in today's society?

Results so far:

Yes		68%	164 votes	Total: 241 votes
No		32%	77 votes	Total: 241 votes

Yes

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Thoreau's concept of a simple life could be a goal for ecological economic policy. Herman Daley should win a Nobel Prize for economics if anyone should I would get. Perhaps a Thoreau Prize should be offered in America for simple green living. Its not too hard to imagine synthetic suburban recovery plans for ecological synthesis of home exteriors with zero net loss of biota and interlot green spaces perhaps with not rectilinear lots so all the borders don't touch between lots. Homes should all have zoning requiring gardening and energy production incidentally creating jobs for commercial gardening contractors. Some places like Houston and New Orleans might have canals for growing fish for mariculture along with high-green tech homes with zero net loss of biota. The complex part of life should be in thinking inside the home about cosmology or something interesting rather than in how to get to work, or not be homeless, or pay a gas bill or get a tooth extracted etc.

Americans must 'get off the grid'. Thoreau could walk away from comparatively simple society without electricity-modern Americans can't. Globalism in its corporate networking has its fingers on everyone's wallet with 'the invisible hand' redistributing cash from individuals to corporate networks. Thoreau would have advocated home power production and electrical cars if he was conservative, and even more advanced technology if a liberal concerned with quiting purchases of expensive capital goods from corporations such as are automobiles. He might have invented a flying magic carpet with the Meisner effect motion over a super-conductor power line. Yes Americans can get of the grid and insulate themselves from corporate banks and networks that drain them like vampire bats attacking a herd of cattle.

Until as recently as the 1950s Americans could live without very many networks electronically connected and global corporate stores saturating main street and exist without transferring wealth several times a day to networks of globalists. Something like gambling houses (game bling) where the house always wins the majority of the night's take, global corporate networks have infiltrated and insinuated their way physically in to a majority of American lives draining the savings, life-blood and intelligence of the populace such that they have little real individualism economically. Instead Americans have position and status in a collective network vampire colony in which they are part cattle for the bats and bats for-themselves preying upon their fellow Americans. They all tend to lose as the best vampires are the globalist networkers that have run amok in making it difficult for the people to live 'off the grid' as they should inalienably do without being marginalized. Rectification of networkless living consistent with ecological economic policy should be long range goals of the U.S. Government-itself something of a vampire and a redistributor of wealth simultaneously...whe n the government adds national debt it is a vampire incompetently spending the future of Americans to supply globalists with power over the people. Thoreau would have found such invasive, omnipresent networking quite offensive I would think...so we shall consider what can be done to get off the grid a little.

Bertrand Russell believed Thoreau to be a romanticist; Russell divided up much of modern society in to two political camps with one being romanticism and the other rationalism. Romanticism might seem appealing on the face of it, yet if one considers romanticism as a rage against the machine through rejection of civilization, then one can discover other aspects-darker aspects, of romanticism that have less desirable features.

When Thoreau ventured out into the wilderness- yet remaining on the periphery of New England society, in some ways he was a little like Nietzsche's Zarathustra observing society from a hill with disdain. The culmination of romantic movements of an irrational constitution is a mild anarchic development and eventual selection of the most bad in the valley to lead. Hitler's S.A. and fascist party or a Governor Terminator might be more modern examples-when one rejects society altogether not much is left besides the selection of a dictator as the worst of the worst anarchist-nihilists seeking for a way to express the will to power in a crowded world. Could a romantic revival work today-you bet.

A modern bacteriophage wielding biological anti-rationalist might introduce genes in to viral constructions 'bypassing evolution by a billion years' and erase all but 20 million people on Earth-sufficient numbers to control the runaway nuclear and chemical plants from becoming global disasters themselves. A modern romantic revivalist might consider that the biological death of all biologists could safeguard the remnant of society from the perversion or annihilation of the species-once the redaction of human civilization was accomplished it should take quite a few centuries for another high-tech mess to recur.

Thoreau wasn't a European style romanticist perhaps such as Carlyle, Coleridge or Byron-he was an escapist of the American sort who simply loved nature and its natural law as and values. I think that point of view may have been lost to the Europeans of the holocaust era.

Thoreau did not have a simpleton's idea of important values. Henry David Thoreau found much of what people do in the ordinary business of living to be boorish and wasteful-and who could rightly say he was wrong. Perhaps people do not have the political backbone to go off on their own today and build a good, independent life for themselves. An unholy triple alliance of Republican, Democrat and broadcast media parties support a global concentration of wealth, the enslavement of American and over time the destruction of the United States as it is reduced to a landing strip for globalist concentrated wealth, the Chinese Communist Party and Mexican drug organizations from the Narcocracy and its illegal migrant minions south of the border.

An 'idea of a simple' life could be less onerous so far as it avoids labeling one's idea pejoratively 'simplistic'; Thoreau made no implicit premise such that the manufactured environment is more complex than that of living closer to nature. In fact it may be the opposite; nature may be so challenging for most that living in one-level safe, sterile environments without challenges from wildlife or uneven walking surfaces is simpler, yet never simple enough for some. Should life be as plain as an Epicurean feed lot without stress at all?

One does not want to go to the opposite extreme and support a democratic collapse in to Aristotelian tyranny wherein the wise tyrant keeps the people forever in debt, living naked in public before the gates (having huge and nearly defaulting home mortgages or homeless in tents), has foreign wars to keep the people occupied, kills off or subverts all potentially intelligent rivals, censors but does not seem to censor the Internet and so forth. Republican party dumping of debt and building up of foreign interests the past 5 Republican presidential terms was all in pursuit of greed. If they were to support Obama's spending plan with constructive additions to build in America that would be a change. Instead they seek tax cuts so trans-nationalists can have extra money to build in China with.

How simple did Thoreau want life? Wasn't urban, human construction of his day a somewhat ratty sprawl best avoided for an independent guy like Thoreau? Can modern life be made to be a low-carbon society that works much more efficiently? Keep in mind that classical economics is biased toward concentrating wealth and a natural selection of capitalism without competent democratic government over it produces a non-optimal badly designed civilization with a lot of follow up patchwork on it. The ecological wilderness of your dreams cannot be as without legal ownership such as it was in Thoreau's day, and presently there are left just 600 mountain gorillas in Africa so get your Bush meat while it lasts (just humorous cynicism my friend). Does one plan Utopia for oneself alone or must it be mass produced like a tele-tubbies concrete bubbles of Elysian fields housing development in Houston suburbia? Would it have room for the snap turtles and fire ants? Does it require thousands of tons of annual pesticide? Can it meet the SUV only gated community trend to eliminate anyone that might not be prosperous form within several square miles? Life can be simple if one gives over one's manhood to corporate power. They have an answer for anything I think, yet they may call upon you some day to leap off the tower of Babel to one's death at the command of a Governator.

If one builds owns dream hut in the wilderness it is good to have a building plan. I tried that once without a plan and its difficult. It really is simple to build an 8 by 10 barn shaped roof gusseted shed to live in-by a Texas toaster electrical toilet (it needs to be emptied every 6 months if fewer than 4 people are using it). Have good fishing equipment and eat lean yet healthy. Take up astronomy and buy a cheap telescope.

An alternate way to live the good poor life might be to work a couple years as a school teacher in Mississippi, save 20,000 dollars and go live amidst the poor in a hut in some rural area of the world that haven't got qualified school teachers in quantity and work for free now and then-the rest of the time look and giant insects and all of the sights they haven't got in Chicago (except roaches?). There are several selective criteria for living the life of Walden pond, including living in a concrete certified safe beaver hut in shallow water below the ocean with fishing and diving forming the gist of one's simple life-maybe Thailand would let those that like to pour their own concrete set up such a humble place to live?
I had thought of hollow aluminum log homes with super-insulation that could be assembled on the moon rather easily as away to make lunar cabins cheaply. I noticed once that log homes can be made with a drilled hole for rebar inserts to hold in place tongue and groove log ends. If one can get beyond the range of the evil invisible empire I would think that cheap, carefree living must be in sight someplace just over the horizon.

One may believe that the United States is too complex for a simple, unchallenged existence-yet was life ever really such? Didn't Thoreau just have a method of prioritizing values that differed from those of his fellow citizens to some extent? Yes it is possible today to develop a simple paradigm for living, though the living must be of a more independent model.

If one buys a home it should be paid off as soon as possible and have a low maintenance cost. A monolithic geodesic dome is said to last maybe a thousand years and has an r value of 100 effectively at 30 dollars per square foot. Get enough real estate to grow your own food supply, keep your own water from rain and produce electricity from wind, solar and fuel cells. Drive and electric bicycle that costs 2000 miles or get a Mitsubishi or a mini electric car next year and recharge it at home-that's all fairly simple.
In the countryside life should be simpler-by a Pacific Yurt and grow an orchard around your tent...that's not too complex is it? With all of the conveniences at Wal-Mart and on-line for making l.e.d. light and recharging it life can be fairly simple if you buy 5 acres of real estate and want to get away from it all, or do you really? Perhaps you should take 200 or 300 used classic paperbacks with you to read...books were a lot costlier in Thoreau's day.

Thoreau's ideas about nature and its value should become an accepted ethic in the United States. Simply turning off the broadcast media can make quite a change for people. An evolution toward an advanced management of life's affairs for survival and business integrated with a rational environmental ethic should be directed toward simplicity. Simple things tend to work well while unnecessarily complex things to break down.

Biologists have developed a new field of research in to P.N.A.-a sort of parallel of R.N.A. P.N.A. is entirely synthetic and could be used to create new forms of life quite alien to the Earth. The complexities of that seem rather complex and worth several science fiction stories-simplicity should be a virtue in beautiful things that work beautifully. Minimalism is a sort of abbreviation for Occam's razor for a test of necessity. Yes it can be good to create elegant things yet it is those that serve as a transformative bridge in to nature and health that might be thought to be of more value than the phenomenal and novel inclined to disappear faster than a flower made of thin ice-cream petals in West Texas.
Henry David Thoreau for some reason valued self-reliance and independence especially associated with nature. Taxation and a variety of human social artificiality tended to bore Mr. Thoreau. Such political phenomenalities are minus a certain element of truth obviously and it is good to pursue the given in the Universe occasionally in preference to the artificial.

What understanding one might learn from a walk with Mr. Thoreau was remarkable-his awareness of nature was as profound as an American Indian of the time in some ways. Today it may be simpler to describe the problems mankind has caused to nature on a walk through much of America that to notice how the hydrological cycle functions naturally for example. All of these roads and automobiles, housing developments and so forth have 'poisoned out precious bodily fluids' yet it wasn't the Russian Commies that did it, nor can Coca-Cola repair the damage alone. The oceans receive all of the run-off and pollutants from every city street gutter in the world now, ships pour a variety of pollutants including noise in to it, generally it is a declining environmental quality that will reduce increasingly the fundamental purity of the oceans as conceivers and nurturers of life-oh well. It is to simplified high technology ways of life that mankind must travel in order to move closer to the respect for His creation, for oneself and others. To the intelligent and directed studies of the science of life and how to apply the knowledge to human social structures even Christians should move within a priesthood of believers architecture if the cyclical and catastrophic transition theoretical apocalyptic remediation goals are to meet with probable success.

One can walk with God-the spirit of Jesus Christ in a careful comprehension of the sub specie aeternitatis phenomenality of the temporal experience of the world and its place in the Universe. The Universe is a temporal yet in some ways simple place obscured by so many phenomenal political and material insults upon it and on common sense. Thoreau was for the conservation of common sense and mankind's elemental, simple relationship to the world and to other people. I think Jesus would have like Henry Thoreau-yet of course he probably does.