05-10-2019, 09:59 AM
While MO has been advocating a more outdoorsy lifestyle, tent living, and what-not, she has also touted the benefits of owning your own land. Tent living and so forth needn't necessarily mean being a nomad. Private land ownership is the real foundation of liberty. It's much harder to kick someone off their own property than to kick them off BLM land. I'd say the freedom to wander about the country is of dubious value compared to that. One place is as good as another as long as our essential liberties are intact. One place is as bad as another without them.
Commercial interests will always try to cash in on any movement because that's what they do. They keep an eye out for new cultural and counter-cultural phenomena and find ways to monetize them, create new product genres and new markets, and so forth. That's just capitalism. It's not in their best interests in the long run to so impoverish the masses that nobody can afford to buy their products.
I think modern nomadism is really just an extreme reaction of people getting tired of the consumerist lifestyle. We've been barraged with advertising and consumer goods of dubious value for well over a century since the industrial revolution, and the luster of the consumerist cult has worn off for many people. In Victorian times, easy affluence, or the illusion of it, was a fresh phenomenon, and people crammed their parlors full of "Empire goods" - mostly useless items purchased for show that were made abundant and affordable due to industrialization and more efficient modes of global trade. Unfortunately, that early pattern of consumer behavior became the standard habit of life for most people for the next century. It's difficult for a cult follower to recognize himself as such while he believes he's reaping some benefit from the situation. Only when things turn sour does he begin to question his circumstances.
More and more people are realizing the pursuit of excessive wealth and its material trappings hasn't created a more fulfilling life. Not only that, excessive mindless consumption has created in mega-corporations that are so wealthy and powerful their existence threatens liberty. While in some cases becoming a nomad may seem to have been forced upon people by economic hardship, the cause of their privation itself may very well be due to their deciding it's not worth the sacrifice of time, effort, leisure, and liberty to keep up with the Joneses.
Commercial interests will always try to cash in on any movement because that's what they do. They keep an eye out for new cultural and counter-cultural phenomena and find ways to monetize them, create new product genres and new markets, and so forth. That's just capitalism. It's not in their best interests in the long run to so impoverish the masses that nobody can afford to buy their products.
I think modern nomadism is really just an extreme reaction of people getting tired of the consumerist lifestyle. We've been barraged with advertising and consumer goods of dubious value for well over a century since the industrial revolution, and the luster of the consumerist cult has worn off for many people. In Victorian times, easy affluence, or the illusion of it, was a fresh phenomenon, and people crammed their parlors full of "Empire goods" - mostly useless items purchased for show that were made abundant and affordable due to industrialization and more efficient modes of global trade. Unfortunately, that early pattern of consumer behavior became the standard habit of life for most people for the next century. It's difficult for a cult follower to recognize himself as such while he believes he's reaping some benefit from the situation. Only when things turn sour does he begin to question his circumstances.
More and more people are realizing the pursuit of excessive wealth and its material trappings hasn't created a more fulfilling life. Not only that, excessive mindless consumption has created in mega-corporations that are so wealthy and powerful their existence threatens liberty. While in some cases becoming a nomad may seem to have been forced upon people by economic hardship, the cause of their privation itself may very well be due to their deciding it's not worth the sacrifice of time, effort, leisure, and liberty to keep up with the Joneses.
