I took a lunchtime walk recently through London’s stockbroker district, the Square Mile, and revisited The Wasteland: I had not known that death had undone so many. In the richest trading centre in Europe, unspeakable sums of money flowed invisibly by day and night through phone lines, fibre optic cables – even the very air. Yet for those office fugitives in the street all was misery and debt, relieved only by bad cappuccino.
Even those who flaunted their wealth – with a designer suit, winter tan or rail season ticket – were more likely to owe it than own it. I'll wager they slept in highly mortgaged houses owned by the bank, and slept fitfully because they knew the bank could – and would – take their home back any moment their income, or the UK economy, sneezed.
Where in those hapless serfs, I asked myself, was the spirit that defeated Hitler, or the courage that built a global British empire? Or even the arguable greatness of heart that moved us to give it all back again? No doubt it was still there, awaiting the call, doing duty meanwhile in the mundane battle to keep up appearances between payday and penury.
I wrote my book Self Reliance as a Wake-up Call. Its ideas go far beyond resolving the short-term dilemma we all face: ‘Give me liberty or give me debt’. (Although it has answers for that too.) It also suggests new, practical and proven solutions to longer-term, more serious questions, those that touch every aspect of our lives, as we lurch into the technological dreams of a new millennium.
In truth, most of us are already living a millennial nightmare but because we don't know we are asleep, we can't wake up. Put simply, we have let ourselves slip into a seductive but dangerous coma. We trustingly depend for our very existence today upon all-powerful third-parties – mostly unknown to us – who know us not, and would not care about us if they did.
The minutest details of our lives are now dictated or recorded by blind machines, rules and systems that daily become more oppressive to us. An daily, more out of our control. We are doubly helpless because, in the New Serfdom, we have no single ‘Big Brother’ figure to hate, know, locate and so hopefully overthrow. Rather, there are a myriad Little Brothers – invisible, robotic and inaccessible to us – who determine how, or even if, we live. Even George Orwell could not have imagined the depths of insidious slavery to which today's salaried commuter has succumbed.
Consider this typical day for the main family breadwinner in almost any developed nation... We prepare breakfast in a house we didn't – and couldn't – build ourselves, that's partly or wholly owned by someone else. We eat food, grown we know not where or how, and distributed by shops or supermarkets which – if the trucks stopped rolling – would be empty in three days or less. Our food is cooked by fuel manufactured and brought to us in ways we don't understand. If the supply ceased, we probably have no reserve. The same is true of the water we use to shower, make coffee, wash the dishes with and flush the toilet.
Perhaps we drive to the office, factory or rail station in a car so complicated by electronic gadgetry (which can no longer be repaired, only expensively replaced) that one failure in a tiny microchip reduces the family wagon to immobile junk. If our petrol became unavailable, even temporarily, we don't have the skills to make a substitute.
In the train itself, we have little more freedom than cattle to control the conditions in which we travel – or when or if we will arrive. If we end our journey in an underground train or taxi, a labour dispute or other disruption can leave us stranded miles from home, among strangers who'll fight us for the last hotel bed.
We may feel more ‘in control’ in the office or factory, but that's an illusion. If the computers, telephones, machines or other utilities go down, we might as well go home. Except that thousands of others, if similarly afflicted, will be competing for transport too.
For our daily cash, we trust the banks or automated teller machines to deliver. But our credit cards, even our pensions and life savings, are only as good and accessible as the computers that process them or the banks that secure them. Moreover, every monetary transaction we make by computer, including use of a supermarket loyalty card, is massively analysed – so that every tiny detail of our lifestyle and spending can be echoed back to us to coax us into further related purchases, then revealed to the tax inspector, police or regulatory bodies on demand.
Privacy is dead, in the age of the New Serfdom. So is individual liberty, for as long as we are totally reliant on the supply infrastructure governed by Little Brothers. A major glitch in just one of our support lines could render us in a moment more helpless than a mediaeval serf. For even that lowly unfortunate probably owned a hovel outright plus a ragged vegetable patch to sustain him. Do we?
By the word ‘serf', I mean no insult to anyone. When we are young, we are all dependent serfs. Then habit, custom and domestic obligations appear to give us little choice – except to remain one... But I do suggest there is a better way. Am I saying, we should all go back to the land, acquire three acres and a cow, and weave our own bed socks?
Of course not. Thoreau of Walden fame lived very well in the wilderness, entirely self-sufficient. But he put up with it for just two years. He did not have children to educate, income tax to pay nor a planning officer to placate. (And as he ate only beans, I'm sure he had no choice anyway but to be a hermit.)
Every pioneer of rural living since has made it eloquently clear: ‘nobody in a developed nation can any longer hope to be 100% self-sufficient and live remote from all human intercourse’. It's just not possible.
Instead, I propose a new way – neither total dependence (the salaried ‘serf'), nor total independence (the romantic and doomed survivalist), but inter-dependence – more simply stated as self reliance.
Self reliance is the skill and mindset that equips you to move in or out of the consumer society at will. You have the freedom at all times to enjoy it or live, for a time, entirely remote from it. You take from it what you need – and give back to it what you deem to be just and fair. You are the judge of what you take and give, and how you live. Not your neighbour, nor your preconceptions of what society expects, nor any government official. Just you. You are neither selfish nor self-centred, nor do you break any laws. You have grown the skills, and earned the resources, to live any way you wish. And you'll find yourself in very good company. I'd say, the best company available on this planet at this time.
From Self Reliance, copyright 1999 and 2003 by John Yeoman, published by Permanent Publications.
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