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!


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. Of course, it's a little late now that the forests have been cut down and they've lost their indigenous cultures and skills. It now appears that the best way to help them is to make birth control easily available and culturally acceptable, and to remove the economic incentive for them to have kids, by teaching them more efficient ways to grow food and guaranteeing they will be cared for in their old age.


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. It's true that big-money industrial 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.

Anyway, the present medical system is so expensive that only rich people can afford it. 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, and a low-stress lifestyle. Part would be getting rid of the insurance industry, which enables hidden escalating costs. And part would be a growing network of more efficient 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! Before the 20th century, it was normal for extended families to live in the same house, with most of them supporting the household in ways other than paying rent -- if rent was paid at all. The very idea that you have to pay to occupy space is radical, and it serves to concentrate power: if I already have power (represented as "property"), those with less power/property have to give me more. 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.

I probably should never have used the phrase "drop out". It's seductive, but then I have to keep explaining that nobody is all the way out or in. And anyone can shift their life away from money and domination and waste, and toward cooperation and freedom and efficiency. It's true that some people have a lot more room to adjust. But if you have a chance to escape from a prison, do you refuse on the grounds that not everyone can escape? The key is, when you get more freedom and power, you have a moral obligation to help others instead of exploiting them.


What you're suggesting is parasitism.

Industrial civilization is parasitic, because it takes more from its environment than it gives back, and if we remove ourselves from roles that feed that behavior, we are anti-parasites.


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

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? As I said in the essay: it's not about being pure or avoiding guilt -- it's about adapting and becoming more free.


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

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 acceptable to use the resources of the present system to build the next one, ideally all its resources would be used that way.


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

The phrase "drop out" is a flawed metaphor. It's not about being "out" instead of "in" -- it's about becoming relatively free and self-sufficient, and helping others follow. In practice, the problem is not too many people looking for different ways to live, but not enough. The dumpsters are still full of good stuff that is not scavenged but wasted in landfills. Too many people still buy pre-made junk food instead of making their own healthful meals, or drive cars instead of riding bicycles. 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 shuffling data in the command structure, or manufacturing attention-wasting gadgets, or laboring to provide excess to the elite. As these roles are dropped, life will get easier, not harder.



(last revision October 2008)