Thinking about simple living...

I'm pretty sure I read somewhere not that long ago, an argument by someone on the web, pushing for the rich/poor type of world economy that we have now. Pushing perhaps for a more feudal system.

Why? Because their argument was based on human intelligence requiring TIME. They were pretty much saying that if it wasn't for the inception of a system where some people are brow-beaten into doing the menial labour of washing/growing food/cooking/childrearing/building etc, then we would NEVER have developed the technological things we have today - simply because with an "every man supplies his own needs' type philosophy, there isn't enough TIME in the day to get over the humps of providing and have time to think and dream and create new ideas and get them to fruition.

Now, I'm an avid reader of fantasy, as anyone who knows me will be able to confirm. I love it. I love my books. I love reading about kings and queens - but more-so, about the little everyday people who leave their rutabaga patches and go on awesome life journeys to discover skills they never thought they had and change their entire existence.

That is fantasy however. For every single human being who wants to uproot themselves from wherever they are and go on a life-changing journey there are costs, and sometimes, the costs are too high.

So I ask you this - are the costs of our modern-day conveniences, the ease at which I can disseminate this very blog post out to the world, while a machine does my washing and another machine cooks my dinner and other people teach my children and somewhere, someone is growing the food I'm going to eat tomorrow, - are those costs WORTH the price? The price happens to people in other countries that I don't have to see. I never have to notice how they slave away every single day to produce the rice I'm eating for dinner tonight. I never have to see the tiny fingers that get horribly disfigured in the factories that make the clothes I'm wearing.

And I will never ever see the generations of people who have had nothing of their own for thousands of years because they were too busy with life to do the 'thinking' that provided us with all the benefits to start with.

Is all this cost worth it? We may have intellectually made more gadgets than we can think of uses for, but have we completely missed the point? All those people who lived in the fields doing back-breaking manual labour all day every day whilst being paid practically nothing in physical terms - they are the price we have paid to be where we are today.

I wonder what they thought. I wonder what their reward was. They lived. They pushed on regardless. And sometimes when I sit outside after doing some achey work of my own, something raw and earth connected, like washing fleeces by hand (none-the-less with the aid of hot water on tap, not having to cart it from a well miles away and boil it to get hot over a fire...) I think that whoever it was that said all that stuff was wrong.

Because it's when our hands are occupied with the manual labour of everyday tasks, when we are busy creating something from the raw materials we have, THAT'S when our brains are free to wander and think and create ideas. It's like there's a switch in there that turns on the imagination while our other side of the brain is busy working on what our hands are doing.

I wonder if there's research somewhere about how many of history's amazing discoveries were actually attributed to upperclass people when in fact it was the gardener toiling away in the potato patch with his hoe whose imagination leapt from there into the horse-drawn plow.