The impossibility of dropping out? Must we inevitably discover that from technocracy there is no escape?…
…So it is not easy to find historical precedents for the peculiar malaise that our advanced post-industrial society faces. How a company like Facebook with a $50 billion market cap can employ only 3200 people are the kinds of new challenges in a post-industrial age that the Woodstock era radicals could not have foreseen. Still, the distaste for oppressiveness of a society that imprisons so many people in what appears as a dead end has some suggestive parallels from the past that also denounced the “power structure” as a burdensome weight of life.
—Besides, David’s certain to be named senior vice president. He and Linda are so sure of that, they’ve bought a new house and David’s pricing Mercedes-Benzes. Life’s not passing them by. Really. And things will look better once David gets the promotion – and that hefty new salary – he’s been working toward for so long.
So why, on the very day he’s supposed to be climbing the next rung of the corporate ladder, does David burst into Linda’s office demanding that she quit? He wants her to join him in his sudden state of unemployment. It seems that “his” vice presidential stripes were pinned on someone else’s sleeve, and David blew up, insulted his boss, got himself fired, and generally acted “irresponsibly.”
Instead of being shattered, David feels, for the first time in years, truly alive and excited. For Linda, the years ahead suddenly lose their dreaded predictability; it’s time for her to grow again.
Reveling in their newfound sense of freedom, the Howards sell their house,…
The monks and hermits who at the beginning of the fourth century went into the deserts of Roman Egypt to fast and pray were certainly motivated by religious feelings, but also by a more human desire to escape from a society in which the hand of landlords and a tax-collecting buraucracy had become unbearably heavy. One terrible feature of the Roman and the Chinese Empire was that there was no real escape from oppression.A civilized Roman could not find among the Goths across the Danube or among the nomads of the Arabian peninsula the cultivated urban society that made life worth living. If he offended the emperor, he could submit to savage punishment, open his veins, or go into the miserable exile of Ovid, who spent his last years remembering Italy beside the Black Sea.
—”Saint Macarius and a Cherub” from The Holy Monastery of Saint Catherine, Sinai, Egypt.—WIKI
Given these conditions, it is not surprising that the caves and deserts of Egypt seemed to offer the possibility of an “interior emigration” more agreeable than flight to the court of a barbarian chieftain. The ascetics led by Saint Anthony, who sought to avoid the pressures of society, formed the communes of their day, though their visions and ecstasies were attained without hallucinogenic drugs, free love, or fringe ideologies that make up an aesthetic of fleeing the system in a search for individuality.
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