The Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s need, but not for every man’s greed.
- Gandhi
Principle One – Reductionism (decrease our dependence on distant and external sources for the provision of necessary goods and services): I have often thought that we live in a world of incredible abundance and beauty when measured by our basic human needs to live good lives, but we live in a world of great violence and scarcity as measured against our actual practice of driving economic growth with our limitless desires. The ancient philosopher, Epicurus, suggested that nature easily supplies what is required to simply satisfy our real needs, while our desires for unnecessary things will constantly upset our happiness.
Epicurus taught that only three things were required for human happiness.
1. Friends
2. Freedom or self-sufficiency
3. A reflective life
He believed many fail to meet these three simple requirements, and so fail to be happy, in large part because they fail to distinguish the different types of wants they experience. (He realized long ago what happiness psychologists are now empirically confirming; namely, we are terrible at knowing what will truly make us happy.) Epicurus said the first type of want is natural and necessary. This is a desire for those things that are both harmonious with a good life and required for it as well. These were wants that had to be satisfied in order to live a good life, and yet nature had made these things easy to acquire – things like enough food and shelter to be neither hungry nor homeless. The second type of wants were natural but unnecessary. So these are things that are harmonious with a good life but not required. These might be things like cell phones, TV’s, many electronic devices, etc. The third type of want was for things that were both unnatural and unnecessary. These were things that were not only not required to live a good life but would also jeopardize your ability to live a good life. Any of our needs taken to an extreme become unnatural and unnecessary – large homes, big cars, designer clothes, over eating, etc. His basic idea was that if we could simplify our wants to be congruent with our natural and necessary wants, then we’d have more time to pursue those activities that actually increase our sense of living a good life – more time with family and friends, and more time to engage in self-reflection. Yet our world seems to incite people to chase after unnatural and unnecessary wants and so to lose their freedom to indebtedness and have no time for friends or self-examination.
I had a student, not too long ago, decide to take yellow post-it notes and go around her apartment and label all her possessions as natural and necessary, natural but unnecessary, or unnatural and unnecessary. Her goal was to get rid of all the unnatural and unnecessary items, to find ways to minimize all the natural but unnecessary items, and then from that point on before any purchase she would ask, “Is this item natural and necessary?” If it wasn’t, she wouldn’t buy it. She told me this exercise was fantastically liberating and freed her mind from financial anxiety and envy. She discovered surplus time to spend with family and friends, and more opportunities to enjoy community. All experiences that have a greater and more long lasting affect on our sense of wellbeing than the acquisition of more and more material goods and services.
Localism, in part through the principle of reductionism, leads us to simplify our wants to those that can be satisfied locally and aids us in achieving the three objectives Epicurus claimed essential for our own happiness.
