The hippies got exactly one thing right. That was dropping out. The whole “turn on, tune in and drop out” gag was mostly nonsense. Sitting around getting high all day is no way to live. Hallucinogenics will certainly make you feel like you are reaching a higher consciousness. You’re not. You’re just high. Maybe it is a good idea to get in touch with yourself and your relationship to nature, but if you need drugs to do itm odds are you will never really reach your goal.
Dropping out, however, has merit. A great deal of what ails the world is due to participating in it. Even if that bit of philosophy is nonsense, active engagement with society brings a lot of misery. This former hermit probably had it right the first time.
A man who lived nearly three decades in the woods now has a job and is adjusting to life back in society.
Christopher Knight, who survived brutal winters in the Maine woods by stealing food from homes and camps, could graduate from a special court program as early as this fall, Kennebec County District Attorney Maeghan Maloney said.
After serving about seven months in jail, Knight, known as the North Pond Hermit, was admitted last fall into the program, whose participants receive treatment and counseling.
While in jail, Knight told GQ magazine that he didn’t like the society he was being forced to re-enter.
“I don’t think I’m going to fit in,” he said in the GQ story, which will appear in the magazine’s September issue. “It’s too loud. Too colorful. The lack of aesthetics. The crudeness. The inanities. The trivia.”
Knight never fully explained why he disappeared into the woods, telling GQ that he didn’t have a reason and that it was a mystery to him too. He committed more than 1,000 robberies while he lived as a recluse, he told the magazine.
Maloney declined to say what job Knight had taken and where he was living. Members of Knight’s family couldn’t be reached for comment on Wednesday.
Maloney said Knight has done everything that he has been required to do in the court program and has done a “remarkable job.”
“He has been working hard to understand what it takes to become part of society again,” she said.
He was better off in the woods.
Yesterday I read the GQ profile of Christopher Knight. Fascinating guy, but not for the reasons that the author thinks. I’ll say one thing for Knight – he’s more honest about himself than his interviewer is. But he is still deluded.
Knight is the ultimate refutation of Rousseau’s ruinous nostrum that man is born free in nature, and enslaved by civil society. On the contrary, only in civil society can man fully realize his potential for freedom. This is not to assert that civil society is not capable of being destructive and injurious to freedom. Of course it can. But civil society is the starting point.
I can’t think of anyone who was less free than Christopher Knight. An intelligent man was reduced by Nature to total need. He was reduced to his most basic functions, sensory, gustatory, and excretory. Knight could not see ten feet in front of him – his world was eventually reduced to a dim grey screen. Despite incessant reading to pass the time, Knight’s intellect ceased to function; in his solitude, there was no deep thought or soul shattering illumination. By his own admission, when he left the woods he had nothing to say, nothing to reveal. He drifted in, drifted around, drifted out. He gets points for surviving, but again that is basic, primal. A roach can survive a nuclear event – does that make the roach free, in the celebratory and hortatory sense of the term?
Like I state, I give Knight credit. He knows that there is no “lesson” to be derived from his experience, no “moral”. His freedom was the freedom of nothingness.
The welfare state has demonstrated an impressive efficiency in destroying every people in it’s reach wherever it has been deployed, excepting, possibly, the Jews, for whom it merely tends to freeze progress.
“Knight never fully explained why he disappeared into the woods, telling GQ that he didn’t have a reason and that it was a mystery to him too.”
I hope they got his DNA sample and are running it through cold case databases. Something tells me this guy wasn’t in the woods because he enjoyed camping. I might agree that the “aesthetics” of modern life feel diminished, but that sounds like a flimsy reason to spend 30 years hiding in the woods.
North Pond is not Walden Pond and Christopher Knight is no Henry David Thoreau. At least he wasn’t on government welfare. A lot of Mainers are, city dwellers and rural folk alike. They’ve “dropped out” too, but I don’t see any merit in that.
My definition of dropping out does no include sponging off society. As far as Maine, it is becoming Appalachia North. I blame the French.
This hermit unlawfully, by means of force and fear, took personal property? A thousand times? That’s what robbery is. If Michael Brown taught us nothing else…
I’m sorry, but the hermit had it wrong. He was no independent yeoman living off the fat of the land. He was a thief, and a mooch. He only survived by stealing from the poor saps who sucked it up and participated in the system.
This is always the case with all these forms of higher hippiedom. They claim they are separating themselves from a corrupt society, wrapping themselves in a mantle of purity, but they are utterly dependent on that society. They get sick, they go to the “free” clinic, or the emergency room. They steal, or busk, in order to eat. They spend their money, if they have it, on pop culture and drugs. They think they are free, but they are more enslaved than the office dorks they hold in contempt.
There is no freedom in nature. The guy who loved grizzlies got eaten by one. The kid who dropped out and walked into the woods died of starvation and exposure. The days of Davy Crockett are over. These days your back to nature drop out is likely to be a vegan. He won’t hunt or fish, so he steals. There is no tofu in the paradise.
The only viable drop-out model is the old medieval monastic order(s). The monasteries were a haven for those who could not function in the wider culture, but were genuinely independent and self-sustaining. But note that a monastery is a community, with strict rules and discipline. You don’t get to sit around and smoke weed all day, and get in touch with yourself.