Hacker News Reader

Comment by MeinBlutIstBlau | Hacker News Reader

It is incredibly ironic that the very people that claim the system is bad, effectively cannot survive on their non-conformist lifestyle without the current system. In a way though, it's no different than a religion. Priests cannot effectively survive without parishioners giving them money. Priests likewise preach things about the modern era of morality are bad and we must change them. So if you think of these vagabonds as "roving priests" then what they are doing is of the same concept. Although the difference between a local priest and some modern hippie rhetoric is a priest has relationships with his congregants. The idealist vagabond does not. So it's much harder for them to garner any support.

View on HN

Traveling Buddhist monks in Southeast Asia live solely on donations. They don't necessarily have an individual relationship with "parishioners" any more than this particular hippie does (probably less). Whether it's beneficial for anyone for too much of society's resources to be allocated to the practice is a question. If you view spiritual comfort and the pursuit of karma as a kind of social glue, then some amount of tolerance for it might be positive for society.

I have to say, I agree with the traditional Christian practice that discourages this sort of monasticism, called gyrovagues[0] in the West. The more usual forms of monasticism, although they accept donations, are expected to me more or less self-sufficient on a daily basis, and thus less parasitic on society. Either a monk would live in a monastery and work to support the monastery, possibly selling some of the products to the outside world, or a monk would live on their own in the wilderness, only occasionally meeting with a priest and generally actively avoiding donors, at least for the first few years. An exception is anchorites, who generally spend all their time in prayer and do rely on donations, but they generally don't move around from place to place.

Even the large monasteries over time became less favored by the populace in Europe, since they had acquired enough land through donations over the centuries that they often began to act more like landlords.

In summary, those who wish to live outside of normal society, particularly economically, should strive to avoid being parasites, and, failing that, should not move from host to host.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gyrovague

The only difference is, at least in my experience, many hippies don't actually do the things necessary to create change. They are individuals touting a known consensus. It's the reason why green measures generally fail in politics but stupid things like protecting the second amendment are upheld strongly. There is no centralized institution to fight for these beliefs. This is why you see the Freedom From Religion Foundation actively fighting against many religious bills. It has a goal, the ability to garner funds, and a means to support people to achieve them. Most hippies are just getting by and eventually wake up realizing they need a job to survive once the donations wear out because they don't have a stable supply of people believing in their individual cause.

It couldn't possibly be that the inertia of the system at large is highly resistant to progressive policy?

"The system" is just the full stack of human avarice. The eradication of which had proven to be nontrivial throughout recorded history. As soon as someone wants more than the next guy, you have a system.

Arguably a modern priest/minister/whatever is providing a service and getting compensated for it, just like any other job.

Why is it ironic? The system may be bad, or it may not be, but the fact that it is virtually impossible to survive completely outside it is not evidence of it being bad or not.

Maybe one could see it as a form of civil disobedience ... surely it counts that the person lets another person take the job he might have taken and ultimately uses less resources than the average worker (commute, buying power, paper trails etc) ... also one might argue those opting out help push up wages... I personally am in favor of working as little as possible, outlawing"big corporations" encouraging artisans and entrepreneurs and veggie farmers... I don't know what to say to the poster about the druggies.. except maybe have some compassion and consider maybe society should reach out and help more (maybe he lives in the US where the recent oxycodone epidemic was caused by the permissivness of said society)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com