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What can I hope for (from politics)? 1107
- Last but not least, we cannot live a good life in an ugly, unhealthy
environment. Even those unaware of this suffer from the lack of an
environment befitting their nature and from noise, light and air
pollution: their senses are being dulled, their capacities are declining
and their sense of wellbeing is decreasing.
I am scarcely wrong in supposing that for most people these constitute
the indispensable conditions of life. None of them are necessarily
connected with the multiplication of material goods and services or their
circulation on the market. We experience the opposite: when we choose
from the price catalogue of consumerist “wellbeing” (each according to
the measure of his/her solvency of demand), we sacrifice the opportunity
to choose something outside of what the system based on prodigality
and its perpetual increase has to offer: meaningful work, good company,
health and a safe social or whole and diverse natural environment. This
is unfortunately not helped by sorting our ever-multiplying waste,
buying products with an environmentally friendly sticker or taking part
in a self-awareness training in the meantime. To be happy, we would
first need to free ourselves from the illusion of plenty, which actually
makes our lives increasingly impoverished, and from the compulsion to
grow, which only increases our vulnerability.
(Voluntary self-restraint?2) I can imagine few things more suitable for
discrediting Green goals and the ecological movement than the principle
of self-restraint. The ecological movement follows goals that it holds to
be good precisely because they make life better and more beautiful, i.e.,
they fulfil it instead of restraining it. They would like to limit the
destruction of the resources needed for life and their dependence from
technological-economic necessities. It is more than misleading to label
the fight against the application and endurance of coercion as self¬
restraint, for at most we can talk of the restriction of the restriction of
freedom. Refraining from meaningless waste is not renunciation and
on no account loss. True, the Greens are full of ideas for how to ensure
the material conditions of our existence with significantly more simple
means (regarding nutrition, heating, housing, hygiene, transport, etc.),
but simplicity is not for them a goal in itself. They believe that this would
allow people to devote much more time and energy to solving the more
complicated, interesting and, let’s face it, important problems of life.
The avoidance of unnecessary complications, known as voluntary
simplicity, is therefore not renunciation, just as sensible thrift is not
either. Self-restraint would be the renunciation of something good.