July 24, 2009

In Moab Utah, Hobos Pity You!


Oftentimes someone acting in a manner completely harmless to others still deserves to be called an idiot. (The Henry Louis Gates kerfuffle is one example.) Daniel Suelo decided in the Fall of 2000 to stop using money, live in a cave in Utah, and survive off the scraps of commercialism. Daniel Suelo is an idiot.

Witness his catharsis:
In 1987 ... [Suelo] joined the Peace Corps and was posted to an Ecuadoran village high in the Andes [and] charged with monitoring the health of tribespeople in the area. ...The tribe had been getting richer for a decade, and during the two years he was there he watched as the villagers began to adopt the economics of modernity. They sold the food from their fields ... for cash, which they used to purchase things they didn't need, as Suelo describes it. They bought soda and … big bags of MSG to flavor [their] starchy meals. They bought TVs. The more they spent, says Suelo, the more their health declined. He could measure the deterioration on his charts. "It looked," he says, "like money was impoverishing them." [emphasis added]

Well. He could measure it on his charts. In two years, Suelo witnessed a healthy agrarian society embrace capitalism, amass imported goods, incorporate them into their lifestyles, and physiologically deteriorate to a measurable degree. That’s some potent TV.

So, broken by the woe of watching Ecuadorians get what they want, Suelo moved on.
He moved to Moab [Utah] and worked at a women's shelter for five years. He wanted to help people, but getting paid for it seemed dishonest—how real was help that demanded recompense?

Answer: entirely real. But Suelo was evidently so offended by his own salary that he decided to never help anyone, anywhere, ever again. Abandoning society, he holed up in a cave outside Moab and now subsists mostly on whatever he scavenges from daily dumpster-runs into town.

Again, Suelo’s eremitic lifestyle is harmless. If anything, he is (unintentionally) living out a form of libertarian fantasy. It’s the Herculean leaps of cognitive dissonance necessary in reconciling his philosophy with his choices that make him an idiot.

Pick out your own laconic gems from the full Details piece here.

Hat tip to "Darrell" for the article.

1 comment:

  1. Didn't somebody write a boring book which became an even more boring movie starring Emil Hirsch about this guy? No? Oh well, all these society-lamenting hippies look the same to me...

    ReplyDelete