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Some people want a ritzy inner-city apartment, in which they can recline on a bespoke eight-seater couch upholstered in the finest polar bear pelt, snort mountains of cocaine, and sit on their balcony dining on poached Galapagos tortoise and stroking their pet snow leopard while observing the plebs below. Others want nothing more than bowling, marijuana, White Russians, and a rug that really ties the room together.

At the close of a particularly materialistic and megalomaniacal decade, 1999 film The Big Lebowski injected a shot of modesty back into the public consciousness. The film championed life’s simple pleasures, throwing back not only to the sixties through hippie protagonist The Dude, but to third century BC philosopher Epicurus.

Like all ancient philosophers of note, Epicurus lived in Athens. There he founded a school in his garden, which was imaginatively dubbed the Garden. Here Epicurus and his students would mill around, talk philosophy, relax, drink lattés and watch experimental German films.

The Dude channels Epicurus’s philosophy, living a simple life in the company of friends (even if one of these friends tends to fly off the handle and brandish pistols during bowling competitions). The Dude is buffeted through the story by our culture’s more tempestuous, un-Dude elements – vain capitalists, gold-digging libertines, porn barons, rug-pissers, German nihilists – and only a strict drug regimen and an impending bowling match against pederast nemesis Jesus keep his mind limber and his soul grounded.

The criticism can be levelled, though, that The Dude’s lifestyle is propped up by others’ hard work. Someone built that bowling alley, someone distilled that Kahlua, someone wove that rug – and it sure as hell wasn’t The Dude.
“Are you employed, sir?” the capitalist enquires of The Dude. “Employed?” he blankly replies. Later, The Dude is asked what he does. “Oh, you know ... bowling ... driving around ... the odd acid flashback,” he reveals, before choking on a Thai stick.

Similarly, Epicurus could maintain a comfortable garden-based existence because ancient Athens ran on the labour of slaves and metics (non-Athenian workers). Therefore, the Epicurean way of life is arguably an incurably self-indulgent, middle-class ethos, which teaches us nothing about how to run society at large. Not everybody can live off welfare, for obvious reasons.

It’s easy to see the virtues of The Dude’s way of life, but it’s also important to puncture its egalitarian hippie pretensions. The discerning Dudeist can’t realistically claim to be against elitism when his way of life relies on the existence of free rides. Then again, if people like The Dude exist, they are well worth the cost of my taxes.