Freedom’s Just Another Word for Bubonic Plague

British writer Tom Hodgkinson has a recommendation for attacking stress: fuck it. More precisely, according to the chapter titles of his new book, The Freedom Manifesto, you can just opt out of it all--give up on work, say no to government, abandon the rat race, and somehow enjoy life without alienating the friends and family members I imagine you'd soon be mooching off of. (Flipping through the book, I gather a ukulele is involved.) Still, I was willing to give the book a chance, lured in by the subtitle: How to Free Yourself From Anxiety, Fear, Mortgages, Money, Guilt, Debt, Government, Boredom, Supermarkets, Bills, Melancholy, Pain, Depression, Work, and Waste. Hey, I have a mortgage and go to supermarkets! Let's find my Zen!

It took only three paragraphs before I crashed into this brick wall:

In the Middle Ages, despite the hierarchies, we used to organize things for ourselves. The vast majority of the manacles discussed in this book had not been invented. Life was self-determined and full of variety.

As this guy would say: What up the fuck? When Hodgkinson writes, "full of variety," he doesn't mean "full of death, pain, and abuses under feudalism." He means: "full of amazing, freewheeling joy." In a perverse way, I'm sort of in love with how Hodgkinson dismisses countless examples of war, oppression, enslavement, disease, and all-around soul- and body-crushing horribleness that was life for most people during medieval times, just by inserting a qualifier between appositive commas. Oh, there were a few "heirarchies," sure, but otherwise the 14th century was awesome.

Skipping ahead, desperate for something that might justify this silliness, or identify the book as a prank, or at least make a lick of sense, I came across this: "Yes, I would have been happy to be a peasant, a cleric or a noble." Clearly the British are different than we Americans, but Hodgkinson has apparently enjoyed some success with his magazine, the Idler. I'm not familiar with it--if you are, could you please point me to something of Hodgkinson's that isn't brain-shatteringly idiotic?