Lifestyle! Interview: Hartmut Von Hentig

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One can only be the master of his tools if he's made himself and is thoroughly familiar with their every aspect. Anything I use but don't know the workings of takes away from my freedom, takes away even from my opportunity to accept or reject it . . . if I don't know what it does and why, I can't throw it away because I might be discarding something very valuable. This is one of the reasons we should return to a less complex life.

Paul Goodman was very close to the answer, I think when he said that we must engage in "simplification", although he never really spelled out what that is. He said it's a task for everybody to think about and to accomplish for himself. Simplification involves a reversal of our thinking . . not trying to perfect everything by supplementing it—by making it "bigger and better"—but by first asking, "How can I make this simpler?" All things are too complicated already.

I think that Illich has made a good start by saying that we must break down our institutional and industrial structures to manageable to levels. He wants to reinstate the individual, human element in our activities, and would say something like, "it would be better for us to decentralize . . . everyone will have more work—and more meaningful work—if we do away with automated machines in sprawling, impersonal factories and replace them with simpler devices people can operate proud with their own hands."

It's become a matter of practical wisdom to make our functional living and working units much smaller, simpler and more manageable than they are . . . yet larger than family-sized groups, which are only the atomic cells or building blocks social organization and can't provide any of the opportunity and benefits to be found in a society. Something in between is necessary, so it it seems that communes of some sort are a good of way of living

LIFESTYLE. The communes are a desirable reorganizational move, then, if the attitude that motivates them is right?

VON HENTIG: A massive movement in that direction would be good, yes. I think that the future will probably be organized more along the lines of groups of 200 to 2,000, connect together to form federations of some kind.

These small groups won't become autarkic—that is, self-suffcient and cut off from their fellows—in economic terms, at, certainly not in psychological terms. Groups will depend upon one another and will want to know what others are doing and how they're meeting difficulties. Once we realize how limited the world is and how much everything in it depends on ever thing else, we can't pretend this knowledge doesn't exist and try to live in isolation.

I think that to realize its full potential the movement will have to free itself from the romantic, anti-political notion that I find in it now. Communes must be used as a means of reordering society, not of getting away from it. People who run to a commune in order to escape are only fooling themselves . . . nobody can possibly "drop out" of society. They may find a more marginal place, but they'll still depend on the outside world in some way. And I can't believe that anyone would want to drop out if he's really examined what he's doing. No human mind—no sensible and sensitive mind—could bear the idea of existing in apathetic seclusion with 200 people, knowing that 2 billion people are outside suffering. Dropping out can only be a selfish, temporary solution to a continuing problem involving all mankind.

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