The Moneyless Manifesto by Mark Boyle, Permanent Publications, 320 pp, about $16.
“Moneyless Man” Mark Boyle, living as he does in the UK, has an advantage over Yanks like me in that he can survive without an income but still enjoy free healthcare through the British National Health Service. Gotta love that socialism.
Yet, Boyle still argues against hospital-based high-tech medicine and for localized healthcare based on herbs and natural remedies because the results will be healthier for both our bodies and our spirits.
Wherever we live in the industrial world, we all groan under the rule of mammon and suffer from the spiritual disease of greed.
But trying to break up Wall Street banks or make the tax system more fair isn’t the answer according to Boyle’s latest book, The Moneyless Manifesto: Live Well, Live Rich, Live Free (also available for free download through Creative Commons license).
Building off three years of living with little or no money that he described in The Moneyless Man, Boyle is now ready to share his secrets for living better with less.
Boyle has accomplished something pretty extraordinary in living so long without money. I can barely go a couple hours without dropping a few bucks on coffee or parking, not to mention having to scrimp and save to pay the mortgage every month.
Yet, Boyle’s style is refreshingly casual and un-smug. And he’s not proprietary about his secrets of living über cheap but is generous with helpful hints to make daunting tasks, like assembling a bicycle from old parts you can find for free, seem do-able.
Boyle’s tone is light and he coats technical information with enough fun to make it go down easy. Just take his discussion on going off-grid, which includes advice for safely stuffing your stove from the 1930s in stanza form in “The Firewood Poem”:
Beechwood fires are bright and clear
If the logs are kept a year,
Chestnut’s only good they say
If for logs ’tis laid away.
Make a fire of Elder tree,
Death within your house will be;
But ash new or ash old,
Is fit for a queen with crown of gold.
Watch an interview with Boyle below or at YouTube.
– Erik Curren, Transition Voice
About Erik Curren
I’m working on, and doing my part.
I”m reminded of “Brewster’s Millions”. Other than just giving away one’s cash, the sensible thing would be to use it to buy tools, land, seeds, etc..to have a place to go and live. That, however, leads to more cashflow-based decision making.
Capitalism (belief in Capital) is ubiquitous. Those who do manage to step off the paved road and live without cash do so at the convenience of those who don’t.
I don’t think that bringing down the system with force will work, either. The system, like all systems, needs to be completed. As it currently runs, it is going ‘open-loop’ with consumerism. We will either implement feedback mechanisms (sales tax) or they will manifest in other ways we don’t have control over (collapse). The logic is undeniable: there is no Invisible Hand. There is only missing parts that we have managed to survive without until the System is called upon to be Net Useful, and it won’t be able to because it will have consumed the resources necessary to make the parts that have been missing and ignored.