The original essay is here: How to Drop Out


Health care is not a manufactured need but a necessity.

Good health care is a necessity, but the industrial medicine that we've been trained to call "health care" does more harm than good at enormous expense. A good book on the subject is Medical Nemesis by Ivan Illich. Another good book is The Health Of Nations by Leonard Sagan, which presents evidence that modern improvements in health and life expectancy have not been caused by "advanced" medicine or even by better sanitation, but by social and psychological factors. In industrialized nations, infant mortality increases with the number of doctors!


Modern medicine saved my life.

You were lucky. At the same time, it was sickening, crippling, and killing a lot of other people while robbing all of us.


People in the developing world are dying from lack of health care.

They're dying from development. There were no starving people in Africa until the colonial powers came in and forced people out of their nature-based cultures to make them slaves in the extraction of "resources." What these people need is to be permitted to live autonomously in balance with the Earth, not to be made dependent on still another layer of expenses and "experts" and poisons to half-patch the troubles caused by the last layer. Of course, it's a little late now that the forests have been cut down. I'm not sure how we're going to get out of this hole, but at least we need to stop digging.


What if you get hit by a car? I hope the doctors and nurses haven't dropped out.

I hope they have! Because then they will carry their interest in healing, and the truly helpful things they learned in their medical training, into an environment that's no longer driven by profit, where they can afford to charge very little money, and where they're permitted to follow paths that undermine the dominance of the medical-industrial complex, like homeopathy or herbal medicine or alternative cancer treatments. It's true that big-money allopathic medicine is ideal if you get hit by a car, but other forms of medicine are adequate for acute injuries, and much better for chronic sickness.

And if I did get hit by a car and go to the hospital, I would end up tens of thousands of dollars in debt. If I didn't pay it, maybe they would put me in prison, and if I tried to escape they would shoot me. That doesn't sound like healing!

The problem is that the present medical system is too expensive to be helpful to more than the elite. Instead of trying to bring everyone into that system, we need to build a new system that by its nature is available to everyone. Part of it would be better awareness of diet and nutrition (I recommend the Weston Price people). Part of it would be a low-stress lifestyle. And part would be a network of local healers, some of whom would be dropouts from big-money medicine. Anne comments:

Dropping out does imply a responsibility to the rest of your community. It does not mean abandoning the wealth of knowledge and talent you may have inherited in the civilized world. Doctors drop out all the time -- check out how many vineyards and liveaboard sailboats are operated by retired MD's -- but don't necessarily use their knowledge and skills to help others outside the 9-5 paradigm. If you drop out with valuable skills, share them freely, and others will share theirs with you...

Isn't living with somebody without paying them anything called "mooching"?

Yes it is called that, because we live in a slave culture with a slave language! Our ancestors "owned" only small personal items, but now we think we can "own" information and physical space. This idea is a social construction that serves to concentrate power: if I already have power (represented as "property"), those with less power/property have to give me more. If I "own" a space, you have to pay me just to live there, and if you don't, you are taking advantage of me. We have it backwards! It is the alleged "owner" who is mooching, benefiting from the legal right to deny someone their natural right to occupy space in this world, to build a shelter and gather food and live in a cooperative community. (Not that rent-chargers are bad people. Many of them have been forced into a situation where they have to charge rent so they can make payments to still more powerful people.)


Dropping out is elitist because not everyone can do it.

People who make this criticism are failing to grasp the basic situation. This society is a prison. If we're all in prison, and you have a chance to escape, do you refuse on the grounds that not everyone can escape? If you find yourself in an unusually thin-walled cell with good digging tools, you have a moral obligation to escape -- and then to come back and help others escape. That's the key, and the difference between what I call "dropouts" and the elite. The elite don't want us to be free because they depend on our enslavement. I never stop fighting to get people free even when it goes against my shallowest interests. I want my friends to quit their jobs, even though they'll have to move out of their places where I now sleep free on the couch. Life will get more challenging but I'll have closer allies.


What you're suggesting is parasitism.

Civilization/empire is the real parasite, taking from nature without giving back, killing the Earth. If we weaken it or undermine it, we are anti-parasites. But I think motivation matters. It's tolerable to destroy a bad system out of selfishness, or revenge, but it's much better to destroy it out of love of the alternatives, to be motivated by a positive vision.


It's impossible to totally separate yourself from the system (so there's no point in trying).

Since we can't be perfect, might as well not do anything: a common fallacy used by people in despair. I disagree with all-or-nothing thinking. Being free of the system is a path, not a condition. Even if you can't ever get all the way out, you can always go farther, and it's never too late to start.


Isn't it hypocritical, or contradictory, to use the resources of a society you despise?

No. What's wrong with taking advantage of something you despise? If you were in a prison camp, would it be hypocritical or contradictory to steal food from the guards? To find ways to avoid forced labor but still eat? If you're Frodo in Mordor, do you refuse to disguise yourself in an orc's uniform because orcs are bad?

We are in Mordor. We are in a big prison camp that's very subtle. As I said in the essay: it's not about being pure or avoiding guilt -- it's about getting free. If you're a swallow, living in the woods, and they cut down your beloved woods and put up a bunch of barns, what do you do? You live in a barn! Scavenging is a temporary tactic, an adaptation to this wasteful society. When we can't scavenge, we'll adapt in other ways, surf whatever wave keeps us free.


Hey, you preach about separating from the system, but you're on the internet!

See the swallow metaphor above. The reason to avoid connections to the system is to maintain autonomy, not to avoid guilt. So I'll use any by-product or resource I can, as long as there few or no strings attached. I'll especially use a resource like the internet, a powerful tool to find allies and to transform human consciousness. As William Kötke says, not only is it OK to use the resources of the present system to build the next one, ideally all its resources would be used that way.

For me, the point of dropping out is not just to selfishly escape while others are still suffering. The point is to get myself in a position from which I can fight better and build the foundation for a society where everyone's free. This world is full of people with the skills and knowledge to build paradise, but they can't even begin, because they would lose their jobs. The less money you need, the more powerful you become.


What if everybody dropped out? Who would you scavenge off of?

The question is moot. In practice, everyone is not going to drop out. Most people will cling on to their unsustainable habits to the very end. I'm not the utopian dictator who gets to tell everyone what to do. But I do want to increase the number of dropouts, because there are not enough of us right now, and the more there are, the better we can help each other out and the faster we can build the healthy societies of the future.

In those societies, there will be no need to scavenge, because there will be no police to stop us from digging up the pavement and planting fruit trees. When we are freed from shuffling data in the command structure, and manufacturing attention-wasting gadgets, and laboring to provide excess to the elite, we can turn our attention to giving each other what's really necessary: shelter, water, food, fuel, and human caring.


That kind of cooperative, sharing society seems impossible given our history.

But not our pre-history! Read some anthropology or some anti-civilization authors like Daniel Quinn or Derrick Jensen. For the last million years, minus the last few thousand, our ancestors have lived in tribes that were mostly peaceful and free. The nasty tribes were the minority, and even warlike tribes had rituals to minimize injury and death, and even hierarchical tribes took care of everyone. Living in balance with each other and the Earth is the human norm, and I don't think we have to strip ourselves down to stone age technology to do it, just choose our physical and cultural tools more wisely.


We need modern advances in agriculture and medicine to maintain our population. Without them, a bunch of us will die.

Indigenous people are much healthier than industrialized people. The technologies of the moment sicken and kill us more than they help us. Our population is so high not because industrial methods are more efficient -- they're actually much less efficient. Our population got so high because we've been cheating, stealing from the Earth and the future, depleting soil, turning forests to farms to deserts, and burning oil -- industrial agriculture is almost completely dependent on fossil fuels. It all started just a few thousand years ago, when we went out of balance with other life and began intensive agriculture, storing surpluses, having too many kids, and conquering the neighbors to get more land to exploit. What we call "growth" is just a big pyramid scheme that's about to crash.


So you advocate lowering the human population. What's your evil plan?

The human population will fall because it exceeds the carrying capacity of the environment. The blame for the dieoff rests on the system that allowed the population to get out of balance in the first place, not on people who support a system that would keep the population in balance. I'm actually trying to save people by moving them into the "lifeboats" -- ways of living that consume fewer resources.



I get the sense you think you're better than people who are inside the system, that you're trying to make us feel guilty.

That's not my position, and I've never even seen that position expressed. It's like a dropout bogeyman, a position that everyone's afraid of but that doesn't exist. Let me be explicit: 1) I'm not better, just luckier. I see my luck as a karmic loan, which I repay by helping less lucky people get free. 2) If you've spent your life working hard all day to earn a living, I don't want you to feel guilt, and I don't want you to feel pride. I want you to feel grief!


(last revision, June 2006)