In Mark Sundeen’s book, The Man Who Quit Money, he tells us of his first sighting of this money-less man, “Suelo,” after Suelo had become Suelo and quit money: “…but could this old guy, gray in the muzzle, with deep lines on his face and pants worn thin, be the Daniel I had cooked with a decade before?... He smiled at me. The sight of his teeth, dark and crooked, rotting right there in his mouth – it chilled me.” Yes, that is the fate of anyone who quits money – bad teeth, bad clothing, and eventually bad health. Oh, and don’t forget – cold wet nights and never enough food. I know: I went mostly moneyless for months at a time in my youth as I hitchhiked the country in search of some sort of heaven (see my book Dream Weaver, Amazon). It is uncomfortable stuff. But I know something of why he does it: to live by fate, and to live free.
I still remember those times as something, if not beautiful, then special. To live free. Funny how that coincides with a notion that came to me recently, just before I bought this book, from Bible study, of all things. Not everyone would note this, but an old hitchhiker would: in the Bible, people pulled up stakes and hit the road on a whim. Joseph took Mary and Jesus to Egypt after Jesus’s birth in Bethlehem, just like that. Later, Jesus and the Apostles often camped in the wilderness, cooking fish over a grill, while later still, Paul went and lived off the Arabian Desert for three years after his epiphany on the road to Damascus. Afterwards, he traveled for tens of thousands of miles, often on foot, camping off - road as he moved from town to town. It was OK then; travelers abounded, and given that they moved by foot or hoof, a journey from Jerusalem to Macedonia could take months. They were given food here and there, worked (Paul was a tent maker) on the fly for necessaries elsewhere, and foraged when possible. He and his disciples were not considered ancestral hippies or bums. The world then, for all its barbarities, was unquestionably more open, if one had the courage to face bandits, and the luck not to run afoul of some local petty tyrant.
It did not take too many pages more of reading to discover that Suelo’s life-style and my conjuring of Biblical times was more than coincidental. Suelo had been raised a Christian fundamentalist, waiting and expecting The Rapture to come any day. Material goods had little value in a world that could disappear at any instant, and the words of Jesus about the sparrow and the lilies of the field – that they did not reap nor sow, but were cared for by God, just as you are – were taken literally. His family did not live that lifestyle, but understood it as the ideal. Daniel, aka Suelo (from the Spanish, meaning earth) was determined to live the ideal, and he did.
Most of us don’t, and the author of this book ventures to tell us why. Much of the beginning reads like soft neo-Marxism: before white man, the land was open and free to all, beyond owning, but with his coming came capitalism, and from thence forth, we became slaves to money. This is Marxist because we are told here that Man is made from his economy; that is, that before capitalism hit America’s shores, the living was free, if not easy. That was not the case. Indian clades, or tribes of chiefdoms or states, did own land. It was seldom owned by an individual, but by the group, owned individually only as long as it was put to use. Go onto Iroquois land in, say, 1700 to settle for good and one would not get a wave of love, but either be forced to pay tribute to the nation, or be killed. No – the spirit of man comes first, and his systems follow. The systems differ but emanate from the same spirit, which is almost never one of open love. It is this spirit that marks the story, and the struggle, of humankind - a clash between the primal powers of greed and want, and of love.
Still – land in Biblical times was there to camp on for the traveler, just as it was at an earlier time in America. At an earlier time, too, we were nearly self-sufficient, living from that land, needing money only for extras and some low-tech tools. Nowadays, it certainly seems like we are slaves to the almighty dollar. Even if one owns a house outright, the taxes due must be paid. Homesteading, even in Alaska, is illegal. Only American Indians can live for free on their reservations, and almost all have long given up self-sufficiency. This is not only because much of the land left to them is too hard to live from, but also because our tech economy of money is, simply, easier. We get a lot more for our hours of work – or from welfare checks – than we do from gathering and shelling hickory nuts.
The book, then, is not, or at least should not, be primarily about money and capitalism, but about what we have traded for an easier life: freedom. Money chains us, but so have social and cultural obligations for all of human history. Money is the contemporary monster, but that monster has always been with us in other guises. Again and again in the Gospels, Jesus admonished us to be free, even in those pre-capitalist times. To be free is to be free of human law as the driving factor and at one with God’s law, which gives us everything we have always wished for, if we only knew it. To sway from God’s law – God’s will – is to be perpetually dissatisfied. In dissatisfaction, we create situations that we believe might alleviate our dissatisfaction. One of those situations is a capitalistic system, with its emphasis on monetary wealth, but the emphasis could have been on prestige and social position, as it was for Biblical – era Jews. Then, they lived by the letter (rather than the spirit) of the law and the respect that this garnered, and it was this system that Jesus addressed as hypocritical and enslaving.
Now, however, money has become our greatest master. Suelo has decided to be free by being free from money. I have only read 40 pages into the book, and I am impressed with his freedom, but also with its downside. This includes not only the material disadvantages, including the lack of medical and dental care, but also the impracticality of us ALL living like this. Suelo, after all, lives primarily from the garbage of the mainstream. Like a buzzard or jackal, he requires the skill and energy of the hunters so that he can live from the leavings. If land were open to all, he could forage for more, but not for long if we all decided to do the same thing. Our system might be moneygrubbing, but it is efficient. Industrial farming, with all its machines and genetic manipulation, is what allows over 300 million people to worry more about weight gain than loss. Without that tech, and without the incentives of private property to develop and buy and utilize that tech, most of us would, simply put, die.
It is not his lifestyle, then, that is practical. Anyone who has pondered Jesus’s comments about living like the wild things knows that, without special powers, we cannot actually live like that. It is, rather, the attitude of trust in God, and of understanding our place in the cosmos, that frees us. We are not to be consumed by money, or our stores of grain or gold. Some of those things are essential for life, but we should not be oppressed by their possession. Do what has to be done in an honorable way to survive, but then move on. Live, instead, to find and to follow one’s cosmic role. With this perspective, one becomes free to fulfill the adventure that we are intended to live. With this perspective, we see the stars at night, and not just the ground that we strain to see to keep from stumbling.
A lot more pages left in The Man Who Quit Money. I have no idea if the author or his subject will bring the reader to further wisdom, but the questions raised even this far into the book certainly can. With this, I do believe there will be more to come from this fortunate literary find.
In Mark Sundeen’s book, The Man Who Quit Money, he tells us of his first sighting of this money-less man, “Suelo,” after Suelo had become Suelo and quit money: “…but could this old guy, gray in the muzzle, with deep lines on his face and pants worn thin, be the Daniel I had cooked with a decade before?... He smiled at me. The sight of his teeth, dark and crooked, rotting right there in his mouth – it chilled me.” Yes, that is the fate of anyone who quits money – bad teeth, bad clothing, and eventually bad health. Oh, and don’t forget – cold wet nights and never enough food. I know: I went mostly moneyless for months at a time in my youth as I hitchhiked the country in search of some sort of heaven (see my book Dream Weaver, Amazon). It is uncomfortable stuff. But I know something of why he does it: to live by fate, and to live free.
I still remember those times as something, if not beautiful, then special. To live free. Funny how that coincides with a notion that came to me recently, just before I bought this book, from Bible study, of all things. Not everyone would note this, but an old hitchhiker would: in the Bible, people pulled up stakes and hit the road on a whim. Joseph took Mary and Jesus to Egypt after Jesus’s birth in Bethlehem, just like that. Later, Jesus and the Apostles often camped in the wilderness, cooking fish over a grill, while later still, Paul went and lived off the Arabian Desert for three years after his epiphany on the road to Damascus. Afterwards, he traveled for tens of thousands of miles, often on foot, camping off - road as he moved from town to town. It was OK then; travelers abounded, and given that they moved by foot or hoof, a journey from Jerusalem to Macedonia could take months. They were given food here and there, worked (Paul was a tent maker) on the fly for necessaries elsewhere, and foraged when possible. He and his disciples were not considered ancestral hippies or bums. The world then, for all its barbarities, was unquestionably more open, if one had the courage to face bandits, and the luck not to run afoul of some local petty tyrant.
It did not take too many pages more of reading to discover that Suelo’s life-style and my conjuring of Biblical times was more than coincidental. Suelo had been raised a Christian fundamentalist, waiting and expecting The Rapture to come any day. Material goods had little value in a world that could disappear at any instant, and the words of Jesus about the sparrow and the lilies of the field – that they did not reap nor sow, but were cared for by God, just as you are – were taken literally. His family did not live that lifestyle, but understood it as the ideal. Daniel, aka Suelo (from the Spanish, meaning earth) was determined to live the ideal, and he did.
Most of us don’t, and the author of this book ventures to tell us why. Much of the beginning reads like soft neo-Marxism: before white man, the land was open and free to all, beyond owning, but with his coming came capitalism, and from thence forth, we became slaves to money. This is Marxist because we are told here that Man is made from his economy; that is, that before capitalism hit America’s shores, the living was free, if not easy. That was not the case. Indian clades, or tribes of chiefdoms or states, did own land. It was seldom owned by an individual, but by the group, owned individually only as long as it was put to use. Go onto Iroquois land in, say, 1700 to settle for good and one would not get a wave of love, but either be forced to pay tribute to the nation, or be killed. No – the spirit of man comes first, and his systems follow. The systems differ but emanate from the same spirit, which is almost never one of open love. It is this spirit that marks the story, and the struggle, of humankind - a clash between the primal powers of greed and want, and of love.
Still – land in Biblical times was there to camp on for the traveler, just as it was at an earlier time in America. At an earlier time, too, we were nearly self-sufficient, living from that land, needing money only for extras and some low-tech tools. Nowadays, it certainly seems like we are slaves to the almighty dollar. Even if one owns a house outright, the taxes due must be paid. Homesteading, even in Alaska, is illegal. Only American Indians can live for free on their reservations, and almost all have long given up self-sufficiency. This is not only because much of the land left to them is too hard to live from, but also because our tech economy of money is, simply, easier. We get a lot more for our hours of work – or from welfare checks – than we do from gathering and shelling hickory nuts.
The book, then, is not, or at least should not, be primarily about money and capitalism, but about what we have traded for an easier life: freedom. Money chains us, but so have social and cultural obligations for all of human history. Money is the contemporary monster, but that monster has always been with us in other guises. Again and again in the Gospels, Jesus admonished us to be free, even in those pre-capitalist times. To be free is to be free of human law as the driving factor and at one with God’s law, which gives us everything we have always wished for, if we only knew it. To sway from God’s law – God’s will – is to be perpetually dissatisfied. In dissatisfaction, we create situations that we believe might alleviate our dissatisfaction. One of those situations is a capitalistic system, with its emphasis on monetary wealth, but the emphasis could have been on prestige and social position, as it was for Biblical – era Jews. Then, they lived by the letter (rather than the spirit) of the law and the respect that this garnered, and it was this system that Jesus addressed as hypocritical and enslaving.
Now, however, money has become our greatest master. Suelo has decided to be free by being free from money. I have only read 40 pages into the book, and I am impressed with his freedom, but also with its downside. This includes not only the material disadvantages, including the lack of medical and dental care, but also the impracticality of us ALL living like this. Suelo, after all, lives primarily from the garbage of the mainstream. Like a buzzard or jackal, he requires the skill and energy of the hunters so that he can live from the leavings. If land were open to all, he could forage for more, but not for long if we all decided to do the same thing. Our system might be moneygrubbing, but it is efficient. Industrial farming, with all its machines and genetic manipulation, is what allows over 300 million people to worry more about weight gain than loss. Without that tech, and without the incentives of private property to develop and buy and utilize that tech, most of us would, simply put, die.
It is not his lifestyle, then, that is practical. Anyone who has pondered Jesus’s comments about living like the wild things knows that, without special powers, we cannot actually live like that. It is, rather, the attitude of trust in God, and of understanding our place in the cosmos, that frees us. We are not to be consumed by money, or our stores of grain or gold. Some of those things are essential for life, but we should not be oppressed by their possession. Do what has to be done in an honorable way to survive, but then move on. Live, instead, to find and to follow one’s cosmic role. With this perspective, one becomes free to fulfill the adventure that we are intended to live. With this perspective, we see the stars at night, and not just the ground that we strain to see to keep from stumbling.
A lot more pages left in The Man Who Quit Money. I have no idea if the author or his subject will bring the reader to further wisdom, but the questions raised even this far into the book certainly can. With this, I do believe there will be more to come from this fortunate literary find.
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