Voluntary simplicity is a ‘strategy’ for succinctly living within your ecologic, ecomonic means. It’s best and brightly summarized by the sunny phrase, “Starving the tapeworm.”
“Starving the tapeworm” is a strategy for systematically dismantling top-down systems from the bottom up. This strategy suggests that Leviathan (the military), Octopus (the economy), and other supra-human systems of habitualized degradation, depravation, and unyielding hunger are de-facto tapeworms — by the facts, poignant and plain, of cancerous urban sprawl, capitalistic, militaristic yens to consume without censure or limited ceasure, and, inevitably, death by brute starvation, as briskly, picturesquely documented by Fredy Perlman‘s Against His-story, Against Leviathan! — whose gullets know no depth.
“Starving the tapeworm” strategically suggests that the simplest mechanism for dismantling an economic system is candid non-participation in that system. This stems of the First Principle: “Your dollar is your vote.” Human, animal, and chloroplastic plant parts are fluid cogs that spin the biomechanical mechanurgy of the economic system that, having assimilated those parts as cogs into its biophobic, concrete tissues, consumes the toughness of that life until it’s roughly dusted, and dead. Your withdrawal of dollar-fed support is akin, by unkind analogy, to the metal housing of an RPG (rocket-propelled grenade launcher) refusing to spin. You are the metal housing. You must refuse to spin. Today. Now. Pale launchers of rapacious business rapport shay whine, slow, and, in low time, stop — when you stop. You dismantle the machinery of an economic system by refusing to spend dollars, which act as agile lubricants within that machinery, within that system; and the supra-human tapeworm, of its dollar-fed dependencies, languidly decays. (Such is the force of the soul, that is an archon of good freedom.)
“Starving the tapeworm” also suggests that, as a formative strategy for reconstructing economic systems, economic non-participation is a constructive form of asymmetric warfare. No economic system can enforce participation in the machinery of that systems without, insofar as it remains an ‘economy’, disabling the innovative fluidities of capital and liquidity upon which that system systemically depends. They, asymmetrically, have no recourse. Dollar disinvestment is your dagger.
We pretend to work. They pretend to pay us.
— Russian aphorism.