American academic Harold Lasswell defined politics as “who gets what, when, how.” Let’s suppose Lasswell’s beautifully concise definition gives us a foothold here. It would stand to reason that what we’re really talking about when we use the P word is really the concept of decision-making and resources. Politics. It’s a social phenomenon.
Now it would seem to me that the words politics and rustication when combined don’t mix well. The root of the word politic literally means ‘affairs of the city‘ and its people, while the word rusticate loosely means ‘of the country’ or ‘ to countrify’.
So what happens when members of the polis choose to leave?
It becomes a bit metaphorical, I think. Political participation can happen just about anywhere. But those of us who call ourselves rusticators do so knowing that our emigration from away from urban centers indicates more than just the geographical.
I find that most off-grid blogs and websites sanitize their content of all things political. And I can understand why. Fraught with sensitive subject-matter, it’s a tough subject to write about, and we wouldn’t want to lose subscribers now, would we? But what about those of us who can’t deny the intersection between socio-political philosophy our motivation to rusticate? Sounds arcane, right? But believe me, nearly all the pert homesteaders and rusticators I’ve met over the years share kindred politics.
“I’m tired of the rising bills. The debt. The job. The monotony. A superficial social life. The consumerism. The digital wasteland. The systemic dependency. The slavery.”
Behold, these are the typical motivations of the rusticator!
Some of us are sectarian statists, some are good ol’ anarchists. Some are marxists. Some are libertarian. Some are rastafari. Some are pastafari. You’ll find some of us are transcendentalists like Thoreau and Emerson, or autarkist like Rojava Kurds. Whatever the label may be, the common denominator is always the same: A better way of life than the one we’re told we must accept!
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