‘Tis a gift to be simple says the old song. And indeed it is. Most of us, particularly the younger generation are living in a world that continually gets more and more complicated and at a faster and faster rate as the years go by. We have become avid consumers whose lives are judged by what we have acquired and can play with, paid for or not. Prestige is measured by wealth, appearance or connections with celebrities. Contact with mundane reality is continually attacked with virtual realities provided by the computer, not to mention cognitive and brain problems because of microwave frequencies from cell phones.

This article about simplicity by William George Jordan came out in 1905, when things were much simpler and yet perceptive people like him could see the trends in society and where they were leading. The high school graduates of those days had a better command of the English language than most of them today, so expect some words that you don’t often see nowadays.

At the end of it I put in a couple of cent’s worth of commentary, because I can. Here it is.

“No life can be simple unless it is based on truth—unless it is lived in harmony with one’s own conscience and ideals. Simplicity is the pure white light of a life lived from within. It is destroyed by any attempt to live in harmony with public opinion. Public opinion is a conscience owned by a syndicate,—where the individual is merely a stockholder. But the individual has a conscience of which he is sole proprietor. Adjusting his life to his own ideals is the royal road to simplicity. Affectation is the confession of inferiority; it is an unnecessary proclamation that one is not living the life he pretends to live.
Simplicity is restful contempt for the non-essentials of life. It is restless hunger for the non-essentials that is the secret of most of the discontent of the world. It is constant striving to outshine others that kills simplicity and happiness.

Nature, in all her revelations, seeks to teach man the greatness of simplicity. Health is but the living of a physical life in harmony with a few simple, clearly defined laws. Simple food, simple exercise, simple precautions will work wonders. But man grows tired of the simple things, he yields to subtle temptations in eating and drinking, listens to his palate instead of to Nature, —and he suffers. He is then led into intimate acquaintance with dyspepsia, and he sits like a child at his own bounteous table, forced to limit his eating to simple food that he scorned.

There is a tonic strength, in the hour of sorrow and affliction, in escaping from the world and society and getting back to the simple duties and interests we have slighted and forgotten. Our world grows smaller, but it grows dearer and greater. Simple things have a new charm for us, and we suddenly realize that we have been renouncing all that is greatest and best, in our pursuit of some phantom.

Simplicity is the characteristic that is most difficult to simulate. The signature that is most difficult to imitate is the one that is most simple, most individual and most free from flourishes.

The longest Latin derivatives seem necessary to express the thoughts of young writers. The world’s great masters in literature can move mankind to tears, give light and life to thousands in darkness and doubt, or scourge a nation for its folly,—by words so simple as to be commonplace. But transfigured by the divinity of genius, there seems almost a miracle in words.

Life grows wondrously beautiful when we look at it as simple, when we can brush aside the trivial cares and sorrows and worries and failures and say: “They don’t count. They are not the real things of life; they are but interruptions. There is something within me, my individuality, that makes all these gnats of trouble seem too trifling for me to permit them to have any dominion over me.” Simplicity is a mental soil where artifice, lying, deceit, treachery and selfish, low ambition,— cannot grow.

The man whose character is simple looks truth and honesty so straight in the face that he has no consciousness of intrigue and corruption around him. He is deaf to the hints and whispers of wrongs that a suspicious nature would suspect even before they existed. He scorns to meet intrigue with intrigue, to hold power by bribery, to pay weak tribute to an inferior that has a temporary inning. To true simplicity, to perceive a truth is to begin to live it, to see a duty is to begin to do it. Nothing great can ever enter into the consciousness of a man of simplicity and remain but a theory. Simplicity in a character is like the needle of a compass,—it knows only one point, its North, its ideal.

Let us seek to cultivate this simplicity in all things in our life. The first step toward simplicity is ” simplifying.” The beginning of mental or moral progress or reform is always renunciation or sacrifice. It is rejection, surrender or destruction of separate phases of habit or life that have kept us from higher things. Reform your diet and you simplify it; make your speech truer and higher and you simplify it; reform your morals and you begin to cut off your immorals.

The secret of all true greatness is simplicity. Make simplicity the keynote of your life and you will be great, no matter though your life be humble and your influence seem but little. Simple habits, simple manners, simple needs, simple words, simple faiths,—all are the pure manifestations of a mind and heart of simplicity.

Simplicity is never to be associated with weakness and ignorance. It means reducing tons of ore to nuggets of gold. It means the light of fullest knowledge; it means that the individual has seen the folly and the nothingness of those things that make up the sum of the life of others. He has lived down what others are blindly seeking to live up to. Simplicity is. . .the secret of any specific greatness in the life of the individual.

William Jordan may not have given his viewpoint a name but I would say that he was an existentialist. They were philosophers in the 19th century who pointed out the dangers of living an inauthentic life. It blossomed after WWII because it dealt with the sort of problems that faced everyone during the war. It was a favorite topic in faculty lounges in universities that I attended in the 1950’s. The main thrust of the existentialists was that of living your own life, however difficult, rather than someone else’s idea of what your life SHOULD be. An ultimate ‘follow your bliss’ philosophy.

Existentialism is unusual then in that it is a very practical philosophy, not as so much philosophy is nowadays, mainly word spinning by intellectuals who seem to be divorced from reality. The existentialists just said that people should ask themselves two questions and not stop till they had the answers and could apply them to their lives. The questions were “Who am I?” and “How shall I live?”

Although the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard has the most organized writings on existentialism there is no standard, college type, systematic treatment of existentialism with a nice syllabus and a school. That would be like having an organization of anarchists with different levels of authority. The people who were the founders, or popularizers of existentialism all seemed to be extreme individualists who stubbornly refuse to be put into pigeon holes.

It is not as popular now as it was when I was a young man because a lot of reading and self examination is required. There aren’t DVD’s of Friedrich Nietzsche or Jean-Paul Sartre reading their seminal essays. You won’t find them on 30 second video clips on YouTube. Most graduates today probably couldn’t even spell Nietzsche.

Long, dense novels with those two questions at the basis of them, like those of Albert Camus and Dostoevsky aren’t popular with people who read the Cliff Notes just to pass the test, not to get to the guts of why the writer would go to all that trouble to write the novel without a word processor.

The same themes are present in the plays of Paul Tillich and Harold Pinter, and even here and there of the recent birthday boy in his plays King Lear and Hamlet. People have been thinking about these matters for years before a popular movement became cocktail party conversation in Europe when the essays of Jean-Paul Sartre became popular, or notorious, among intellectuals.

Though existentialist writers vary enormously in their themes these few turn up regularly:
• Mankind has free will.
• Nearly all decisions made from free will involve negative consequences somewhere down the pike.
• Life then, is concerned with making choices, which in turn cause stress.
• A person who makes a decision doesn’t second guess it. He or she follows through.
• Some things in life are meaningless, irrational or absurd, and can’t be explained.

The conclusion from ‘Mankind has free will’ is that one that most people avoid as quickly as possible, and that is, we are responsible for all our actions and their consequences. Taking responsibility leads to the simplicity principle. Look around you. Most people are pointing fingers or viewing with alarm. Problems are always caused, it seems, by other people or circumstances.

Since Americans as a nation are more interested in conflict than harmony, witness the tabloids, the standard American view of existentialism, where one exists, comes from the writings of Camus, Sartre and Nietzsche. These three were embroiled in political controversies, and like all existentialists believed in fighting fiercely for what they thought was right. Women have their own representative in the feminist Simone de Beauvoir.

To prove a point about existentialists believing more in individual freedom than most academic philosophers I’ll just say that Camus, Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir were all members of the French Resistance against the Nazis in occupied France during WWII.

If you read about the politics of the existentialists what they do have in common is that they stand up for the maximum individual freedom for the people in any society. Look again at the five principles mentioned. What comes out of living these in any life are several concepts that existentialists live by differently from the non thinking masses.

Authenticity. Most people are so screwed up by worrying about what other people think that they find it pretty much impossible to do what they really want to do. I know of a physically robust young man who secretly wanted to be an actor. His macho father and friends however wanted him to be a football player. He even got a football scholarship, but his dream never left him. His subconscious took a hand and managed to get him so beaten up so badly in a game that his football career was over. Now he is studying acting and playing small parts. But he’s a lucky one, and of course a happy one. How many happy people do you know? And how many who are doing something they don’t really want to do?

Until you do what you want to do and not what others expect you to do you are not living a life of authenticity. It’s a lot easier to go with the flow than to paddle upstream. People who follow their dream against popular consensus or family expectations are likely to be thought of as trouble makers, ones who rock the boat. But unlike the masses, such people are in control of their lives.

Big organizations that depend on conformity don’t like such people. That’s why the Catholic Church put all Jean-Paul Sartre’s books on the Vatican Index of Prohibited Books, including any he hadn’t yet written but might write after the ban went into effect. To people like me of course, that is a major qualification about the quality of any writer. It certainly helped make him popular among the natural rebels in the colleges I attended in the 50’s.

Personal Freedom. Existentialists tend to believe that life itself is meaningless, until you begin to make authentic choices. Those choices direct your life and show who you really are. And you must live with those choices. The other side of the coin of free will is responsibility. If you accept your choices you cannot blame anyone else: parents, friends, teachers, relatives, spouses, and government or anybody else for what happens after the choice. And with the acceptance of that responsibility come inner freedom and simplicity of life.

Individualism. I tell my students and conferees that they were born into a tribe that it is their job in life to leave. The tribe, their family and their society will continually press their buttons to make them conform and be like other people. I suggest that the fight to leave the tribe strengthens the individual and that after the tribe has no further pull then it is possible to go back to it from a totally different and healthier perspective. Be who you really are is the advice of the existentialists, after you have found out who that is, and do the Joseph Campbell thing and follow your bliss whatever society thinks about it.

Passion. Being passionate is a word with a restricted meaning in America. It is almost only used in relation to sexuality. But existentialist passion means more. Sexuality is certainly acknowledged. Simone de Beauvoir was the lover of Jean-Paul Sartre. But the guts of the word passion in existentialism is devotion to a cause outside yourself. Existentialists of all different types believe that you should be devoted to a cause, one that you will organize your life around, and probably be willing to die for.

For Kierkegaard, that passion was the pursuit of truth. He insisted that leaps of faith were necessary in applying religion to life and destroyed the arguments for rational Christianity. That idea didn't go down well in certain theological quarters either. It is pretty clear even nowadays that passionate men and women are more purposeful. It doesn’t follow that their behavior is optimum. It may be based on a passionately held ignorance. One of the problems of this epoch is the truth of the prophecy of Yeats…”The best lack all conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity.” The Tea Baggers and Fox News come to mind.

Accepting the Absurd. When we take a breath and look at the world it’s clear that much of what goes on is totally absurd. What it is and why we are in it is a mystery. Existentialists believe that it's only when you confront the fact that on the face of it, life and living is pretty ridiculous and pointless, that you can make your life authentic.

Accepting Death. There is a limit to everyone’s life. Everyone is going to die. As the Hindus say, “What experiences birth experiences death,” and that isn’t limited to just humans. Ordinary folk sometimes get depressed thinking about this. But existentialists don't see this as a reason for pessimism. Facing death directly makes you take life seriously, use your time wisely, and make careful choices. And there are really only two options available. In that great movie The Shawshank Redemption, the framed lifer Andy advises newcomers to the prison "Get busy living or get busy dying."

Nietzsche uses the analogy of life as a currently unwritten book that you write with every thought, word and deed. In another area, your life is a work of art and you are the artist. Except that you are the paint and the brushes, the canvas and the model.

One thing on which all the existentialists agree is that life has the meaning you choose to give it. This is quite a New Age type idea now, but when Sartre and his buddies began to popularize it it was revolutionary. It isn’t circumstances that determine your life, it’s your attitude to the circumstance. To one person a circumstance can seem a stumbling block, an immovable obstacle. To another, the same circumstance might be a stepping stone. The stepping stone one is the existentialist. He takes responsibility for dealing with the circumstance.

In Existentialism there is no room for excuses. No matter how bad the hand you seem to have been dealt it’s your job to play it the best you can. You must always start from where you are, not from where you hoped you would be. And then you move forward. And you move forward by accepting responsibility, making choices and living with them. Nobody can see all the consequences of making a choice. But that is no reason to sit around and do nothing, because that also is a choice with consequences.

Obviously this isn’t always or even often an easy path. You cannot be authentic without fierce self-examination and self discipline. Being authentic will undoubtedly cause discomfort or friction with others who are in conformity. But inauthentic lives, by comparison, are shallow and trivial. We see them everywhere focused on accumulating wealth, social status or approval.

At the very least Existentialism is a way of thinking about the world. It offers personal freedom and empowerment. It is a path to dignity and nobility. Existentialists never procrastinate or fritter away time or opportunities. They never put off until some indefinite future the things they really want to do in case someone living in a box is upset. Each moment is valuable to an existentialist. They are the happy believers in the motto Carpe diem. Try it. You’ll eventually like it.