Spinning Straw Into Gold: Straight Talk for Troubled Times

“. . . if instead you follow the fairy tale of making straw into gold, you have a chance at a life that is full, meaningful, and pleasantly finite.”

Look at any list of popular books and you'll see it packed with self-help manuals, Chicken Soup for Teens, How to Be a Better Whatever, books about having better sex, better relationships, better jobs.

At the same time, we live in a world under attack from advertising that cleaves to a single theme: Whatever you have now, it is not enough. You need to buy something new!—to smell better, look better, have a bigger TV, a faster car. With all that need for personal and material improvement, it can be darn hard to just be . . . happy. So you get back on the circular treadmill and read some more self-help books.

Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

Really want more? Desire less.

Morris Berman has written a new volume, Spinning Straw Into Gold: Straight Talk for Troubled Times. Unlike his previous books focusing on society and economy in decline, Spinning Straw is different. Maybe.

Actually, maybe not. The themes here are indeed about society and economy, but zoomed out then into a very personal view. Berman reflects on his own life with mention of a failed marriage, his decision to move to Mexico—all part of tracing his personal journey away from a world based on I Want into one where one's happiness and contentment is divorced from more material things.

But this is no hippie trip, and Berman's book is no feel-good experience with a happy ending. In that sense—and it matters—Spinning Straw picks up the themes from his previous books and slaps them down inside you. In an interview, Berman spelled it out:

“I discovered that the best way of escaping American values—values that were killing me—was to escape America. It was the smartest decision I ever made. Most of us don’t realize how the corporate-commercial-consumer-militarized-hi-tech-surveillance life has wrapped its tentacles around our throats, and is squeezing the life out of us. Life has a tragic dimension, and no amount of Oprah or Tony Robbins can change that. To hide from sadness—and one way or another, that’s what Americans struggle mightily to do—is to remain a child all your life. To dull your sadness with Prozac or cell phones or food or alcohol or TV or laptops is to suppress symptoms, and not live in reality. Reality is not always pleasant, but it does have one overriding advantage: It’s real.”

In reading Spinning Straw, I was reminded of my chance encounter in old Kyoto with an elderly man who was one of the last makers of handcrafted wooden buckets for use in a Japanese bath. He worked slowly and seemed to make very little money, selling his product to mostly other elderly people.

I asked him why he did what he did. He said, "Because wooden buckets are good," and then turned away from me. It was up to me to discard the simple truth—He did what he did because it was right—or learn from it.

The old guy could have cared less what I thought; he had buckets to make. So it is with Spinning Straw; the author is not selling seats at a seminar or a CD collection of his happy talk; there are no "steps" or Five Most Important Things to Do Now. Indeed, you walk away with the feeling that while the author has much to say, if you're too stupid to listen he could probably care less. There are buckets to make.

If the author were however forced into making some sort of list, it would be short. Slow down. Think more, purchase less. Look for meaning more than Wikipedia-ized facts. Enjoy the dance. The journey's all we have until we get there. Hell, the whole book's only 90 pages.

Those 90 pages are packed with stuff to think about. The need to break a cycle of what the author calls "stuckness," the focus on elevating little things into big things where you end up screaming at a minimum wage worker because your coffee isn't right. There is the danger of buying (!) too deeply and quickly into a "narrative," a way of life dictated to you where you falsely think you're picking up safety and security but instead fall into a trap. Choosing competition over community isn't like deciding caff or decaf, it is a philosophical "vector" that shoots you down a very different life path.

Blended into the pages are inklings of the "old" Berman. Obama's seemingly overnight transformation from Hope and Change into a nightmare of drones and perpetual war is offered as an example of what happens when one doesn't care about one's soul. Power and influence require you to "inject poison into culture's veins on a daily basis." But if instead you follow the fairy tale of making straw into gold, you have a chance at a life that is full, meaningful, and pleasantly finite.

You get it. The book is brief, the lessons long. In the time it took to read this review you could be well stuck inside Berman's thoughts. Better to put down this and pick up those before another blink goes by.