When people hear the word “virtue,” they think someone is trying to take the fun out of life. When they think of cynicism, they think of Diogenes, who allegedly lived in a barrel, destitute, and owned nothing. And “minimalism” is also associated by many with the moralistic, virtuous pruning of all needs to the absolutely necessary. The term minimalism is much more popular than cynism. I will therefore try to bring you closer to cynism via the hype of minimalism. I hope you then understand minimalism to understand cynism.
Sometimes it’s enough to make your hair stand on end. You talk for an hour with a friend about the beautiful life of us cynics, only to finally realize that in almost everything he understood the opposite of what you conveyed.
So I once talked with a friend for a whole evening about our rejection of selflessness. Then, before I went home, he said he didn’t understand everything. In any case, he said, I was the most selfless person he knew and he also found that very endearing about me.
It has been my experience that it is easier to explain the path of cynicism to people when they understand what kind of anarchism and minimalism we are cultivating.
Just as one must fundamentally distinguish two movements of anarchists, since they could not be more opposite, one must do the same with minimalists.
Interestingly, the criteria that make the difference are almost the same. And after that, we can apply the same criteria to cynism as well.
So, what are these two worldviews that clash in all three cases?
Might or Unmight, that is the Question here
It is no coincidence that I allude here to the saying of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Because, in fact, that’s what it’s all about: to be or not to be.
No power for no man?
This was a famous title of the German group “Ton Steine Scherben”.
And this reflects the dream, how people imagine an ideal world. A world in which everyone is doing well, in which no one can rule over anyone. That’s exactly what anarchy would be. Everybody just does what he wants and nobody stops him.
What a crazy dream.
It was the dream of the 70s. Even when no one in the hippie community wanted to do the dishes because they didn’t feel like it, there were arguments. And if someone doesn’t feel like working, then someone who feels like it should support the person who doesn’t feel like it. If someone owns something that I like, then he should leave it to me. Even his girl friend, of course.
That, many Lefties still think today, would be anarchy.
Other anarchists, to which we Cynics have belonged for 2500 years, see it quite differently
We do not dream of powerlessness, but of power. We want not less but more might in the world full of unmighty people. Our enemy is not power, but domination.
Explaining the difference between power and domination is not so easy. Especially since English lacks an equivalent for the German word “Herrschaft”.
For us Cynics, power is everything that corresponds to our natural being. Domination is everything that gets in the way of our natural being: Morals, laws, borders, states. We want more power not only for us, but for all people.
Because we assume that people are good by nature, i.e. by God, and that it is the state rule, that disempowers people and alienates them from themselves.
We do not dream of a better world. But we want to live happily in this world. We are anarchists because we reject domination and seek power.
Liberals try to solve the apparent problems of forming a system from our understanding of anarchy by means of liberal ethics. Everyone is free to do whatever he wants, as long as he is not encroaching, as long as he does not interfere with the freedom of others.
But for us, precisely such a system is already an exercise of domination, which we reject. We can only describe what we don’t want: no coercive system, no state. But not what we want instead, because that would be just another coercive system, another state. Our only goal is the attainment of eudaimonia. And the way to achieve it is parrhesia, self-realization.
Minimalism
Do you understand minimalism? If so, it is more easy to understand cynism.
Minimalist live style is often described as relatively new hype, but actually, like pro-power anarchism, goes back to ancient cynism1at least in the West. There are concepts for a simple life also long back in Asia.
Today, even in minimalism, there are the two very different motivations. Some justify the lifestyle morally. While we are rich, others have to starve. We should therefore limit ourselves. Or currently also the alleged lack of raw materials and the alleged man-made climate change. We should therefore not consume so much. The smaller our carbon footprint, the better it is.
On the other hand, there are again those who associate only one thing with the minimalist lifestyle: To achieve eudaimonia. The do-gooders can hardly understand them here too.
So, living in Aachen, Germany, I had very little income for years. Of that I still saved a third. I drank only water, often ate only rice or potatoes, took only cold showers and did not heat the apartment. Three solar panels hanging on the balcony were enough for my electricity consumption. I enjoyed the independence from the power plants and also that my wealth grew. I counted my wealth in months, soon in years that I could live without income, from my assets alone. After all, the calculation is simple:
The lower the expenses, the longer a given fortune will last.
On the other hand, in a phase of my life when I was an entrepreneur and relatively rich, I was dependent on the profits of my business, as I also spent a lot of money.
I just noticed daily how my minimalist lifestyle made me happier. And enjoyed it. In a conversation with my girlfriend I once said that I didn’t miss anything from my time with a lot of money, not the penthouse, not the expensive trips, not the expensive suits, and not the fat BMW. I only missed two things: one was tailored shirts, because the off-the-rack ones kept slipping out of my pants, and the tailored ones came up to my knees. So I had tailor-made shirts made for me, who was one of the poorest people in Germany at the time, from my savings. That was not very expensive. But the second thing was to have my own sauna. That was already more difficult.
Because of my minimalism, there was only one mattress on the floor in the guest room. I loved this empty room and always went into it when I wanted to relax. Now I had a sauna built into this room from a carpenter. With a loft bed on the roof of the sauna. Laying heavy current for the sauna heater I taught myself, including an intermediate meter for the sauna’s electricity consumption. Both purchases made me happy for a long time.
My minimalist lifestyle served and serves my happiness. Nietzsche’s definition of “virtue as desire for resistance, will to might”2NF-1883,24[31] – Nachgelassene Fragmente Winter 1883-1884. corresponded exactly to my life experiences at that time. I jogged, I drove almost 100 km daily to be able to bathe in a lake. I ate only in the evening. The resistance to all such actions did not weaken me, but was an additional source of pleasure. In everything I did, I felt my power growing. And my joy of life. All this had nothing to do with morality, with the claim to be a good person and to save the world or anyone else.
That’s also how I experienced Steve Jobs. When he had a job as a young man at Hewlett Packart, he didn’t wash because he was sure that as a vegetarian he wouldn’t stink, and he didn’t wear shoes. He accepted the fact that he had to work in the basement as punishment. When he was already rich, he bought his first big villa. But in it he owned only a high-end stereo system, a lamp and only a few records. Steve Jobs was also driven by his will to might and not by morals. He was also known for using handicapped parking spaces everywhere, which I always did when I owned a car, because they were always free. And people hated me because of that.
Cynism
So must a cynic live poorly? Can he have only a coat and a drinking bowl? Diogenes supposedly threw these away when he once saw a child forming his hands into a drinking bowl. Yes. Awesome! That’s where I could have been. The experience of living with as few things as possible is just so enticing, almost addictive. If I could throw away once a two weeks nothing, I became tingling. If I finally did think of something, I was as happy as a lark
One of the effects of owning very little is that you then see and love the remaining things all the more. Before I moved to Kenya, I lived in a motor home, a Ford Nugget, for three years. I had parted with almost all my books. Only Kluge’s Etymological Dictionary I still had for over a year, since it was not available electronically. And then I gave it away. I confess: I miss the Kluge sometimes, the information on the Internet is not always so reliable. But this is really the only book I miss, out of 1000s I once owned.
We know from Diogenes that he owned at least one slave who had run away from him at some point. I always saw this as proof that he did not live in a barrel after all. But who knows, maybe the slave found life in a barrel too primitive and that’s why he ran away? The fact that his slave had run away did not upset Diogenes any further. Although a good slave at that time was worth as much as a villa. He was not dependent on his slave.
This is what cynism and stoicism are all about: to understand cynic life as an art that makes us happy. The fact that many people find happiness in lack of possessions does not mean that lack of possessions is a compulsion that one must impose on oneself. Only if you feel like owning little, put it into practice. If you don’t believe people and think that being rich would make you happier, then become rich! It is easy, if you want to become it absolutely.
There is no duty of poverty in cynism. You are also allowed to lie, even about yourself. You are allowed to be ashamed. Shamelessness is also not a must.
But most cynics have made the experience that the less they possessed, the easier they could satisfy their needs, the more honest they showed themselves to their fellow men and the more they were careful not to fall into the traps of everyday propaganda, but to question all prevailing values, the more eudaimonia they achieved.
So go cynic, go your own way.
Keep reading: The will to might
- 1at least in the West. There are concepts for a simple life also long back in Asia
- 2NF-1883,24[31] – Nachgelassene Fragmente Winter 1883-1884.