Declaration of Principles

  Early in Citizen Kane (1941), a brash young Charles Foster Kane takes over the New York Inquirer, a struggling morning newspaper that Walter P. Thatcher’s bank acquired in a foreclosure.  We immediately see that the young millionaire has big plans for the paper:  He tells the aghast editor-in-chief that the news goes on for twenty-four hours a day and that he plans to release multiple editions daily; he immediately begins trafficking in yellow journalism, groundlessly speculating on the fate of a missing Brooklyn woman and preparing to ambush her unwitting husband by sending a reporter to pose as a policeman; he also sets about increasing his paper’s circulation by poaching the staff of the Chronicle, a rival daily newspaper.  

On the flip side, he also takes up populist causes, exposing corruption in businesses that he is personally invested in.  Early in the morning, just as the first edition of the new Inquirer is being put to bed, Kane drafts a “declaration of principles” that he plans to run on the front page, swearing to fight for the rights of the downtrodden.  Bernstein, Kane’s business manager, advises him not to make promises he can’t keep.  “These’ll be kept,” Kane solemnly replies.

If you’ve actually seen Citizen Kane, you know that he doesn’t keep those promises.  The film follows Kane as he compromises one principle after another, not in the pursuit of wealth, which he already has, but in search of purpose.  He spends his life looking for something, anything, to fill the vacuum left in his heart after his mother sent him away to escape his abusive father and his hardscrabble roots.  Kane owns so many things that many of them have never been unpacked from their shipping crates.  After he dies, Kane’s belongings are cataloged for storage, with countless articles of ephemera—including the sled he was pining for as he died—consigned to the furnace.  

I didn’t intend for this to be an essay about Citizen Kane, but it’s my all-time favorite movie and I’ll grab any opportunity to talk about it.  

The point is that, before I get into the nuts and bolts of Abundant Sufficiency, I want to write a little declaration of principles of my own.  Will I keep them?  At this point, I certainly intend to.  The problem with declaring a principle is that you’re likely to be held to it.  Back when they started, Alphabet (then Google) adopted the slogan, “Don’t be evil”.  That seems like a pretty simple principle to stand by.  But fifteen years later they quietly abandoned it when they reorganized under a new name.  Somehow, the experience of the past decade and a half proved that not being “evil” was too much of an ask in corporate America.  Of course, I can’t compare myself to a fictional newspaper magnate or a massive computer company.  I’m just Zu Tzu, a silly little guy with some silly little ideas.  

Nevertheless, it’s my intention to state here at the outset that I will never monetize Abundant Sufficiency for profit.  I have no plans at present for selling branded merch, but if I ever do, it will be for fund-raising purposes only.  I’m interested in alleviating suffering, not profiting from it.

There are elements of Abundant Sufficiency that relate to personal practices, but I do not intend for it to become a “lifestyle brand”.  I will never sell you courses or modules with promises of self-improvement.  Adopting the principles of Abundant Sufficiency may well improve your quality of life, but I won’t gatekeep those potential improvements by putting them behind a paywall.  As I’ve said elsewhere, I’m not an expert or a guru.  I don’t have the answers to life’s questions.  I’ll never claim to have such answers.  Abundant Sufficiency will not cure erectile dysfunction or fight the germs that may cause bad breath.  They won’t make you a penny richer or an inch taller.  They won’t firm your glutes or strengthen your chin.  But they might make you a tiny bit happier and a little bit wiser.  I say that they “might”, I won’t say that they “will”.  

Finally, I swear that I will never allow Abundant Sufficiency to become Goop-ified.  If you already have money, good for you.  It will undoubtedly be a lot easier for you to put these ideas into practice, but it’s not for the already-well-off.  This isn’t a way for rich lefties to salve their consciences.  Learning to hop off the consumer treadmill may well make you happier, but that’s just the beginning.  Once you realize how much better life can be when you stop chasing status symbols, the next step is to ask yourself:  Why can’t everyone have this?  And once you realize that everyone should have the ability to live in dignity and basic material comfort, you need to join the effort to help liberate others.  A $500 Abundant Sufficiency-branded notebook isn’t going to accomplish that, which is why nothing like that will ever exist as long as I have anything to say about it.

We live in a world that we have made through the choices we’ve made, as well as the choices we’ve refused to make.  We’ve allowed enormous wealth to pool into the hands of very few people.  Once we make ourselves understand how immoral it is for one person to have hundreds of billions of dollars while another has nothing, not even a roof over their heads or food in their bellies, the moral catastrophe that we’ve allowed to perpetuate unchallenged becomes so blindingly obvious that we cannot unsee it.  That recognition demands action.  Maybe Abundant Sufficiency isn’t the solution, but I’ll do my damnedest to make sure it doesn’t become part of the problem.  See you next time.