The Printer's 
Devil

Every new ‘movement’ starts somewhere. Scientology in a pulp fiction novel, Dudeism in a Blockbuster video in Pai, Thailand, in 2005 where a man named Oliver Benjamin watched The Big Lebowski for the second time and thought: yes. This is it.

​

What ‘it’ was is hard to pin down. A vibe probably, a bathrobe? A philosophy of radical unbotheredness so pure it bordered on the transcendent. The Dude – Jeff Bridges, White Russian in hand, bowling shoes on feet and not a single care located anywhere on his person – was who Benjamin decided to see as less a fictitious character and more a spiritual archetype. A modern Taoist who happened to really tie the room together.

He went home to build a website, made ordination free, instant, and available to anyone with an internet connection and two minutes to spare.

​

He called it the Church of the Latter-Day Dude. And he expected, perhaps, a few hundred sign-ups from people who thought it would be funny to send to their group chat.

​

Two million people are now ordained Dudeist priests. Which is more than the Scientologists, and they had L. Ron Hubbard and a much bigger marketing budget.

​

The question worth asking, the one underneath all the bowling jokes and the White Russian recipes and the annual festival where grown adults show up in matching bathrobes, is a genuinely serious one. Why this? Why him?

Of all the cultural objects produced by Western civilisation in the last hundred years, why did a Coen Brothers comedy about a mistaken-identity rug dispute become the vessel for two million people's spiritual identity?

​

The easy answer is irony. People get ordained because it's funny, because it's a good bit, because it costs nothing and means you can legally marry your friends in most American states. This is true. But it is not the whole truth, and if you spend any time in the loose, cheerful, surprisingly thoughtful world of organised Dudeism, you begin to suspect that the irony was always a door rather than a destination. People walked through it laughing and found, on the other side, something they weren't expecting. Something that felt like relief.

​

The Dude, after all, is not simply lazy. He is rarer and more radical: a man who has entirely opted out of the performance of striving. He does not work. He does not optimise. He does not post his morning routine. He exists in a world that is constantly trying to humiliate and destabilise him: nihilists, kidnappers, a very aggressive landlord with a dance recital. And his response, always, is to take a bath and go bowling. He abides. And in an era of burnout culture and the exhausting mandate to be perpetually, visibly in pursuit of something, the appeal of a man who simply will not be rushed begins to look less like ‘slacking’ and more like a resistance.

​

Oliver Benjamin, who now goes by the title Dudely Lama and runs the church from a beach town in Thailand, is the first to admit the whole thing began as a joke. He is also the first to tell you, without particular embarrassment, that it stopped being only a joke some time ago.

​

“Too many people confuse Dudeism with anarchism or selfish laziness,” he told one interviewer. “Dudeism recognizes the need for organization and rules, and the laziness it touts is disciplined and determined.” The Dude gave the people permission in a way that a self-help book never could, because he wasn't trying to help anyone. He was just being himself. There is something almost Zen in this. The Dude as teacher precisely because he has nothing to teach.

​

Beginning in Louisville, Kentucky in 2002, Lebowski Fest is the annual gathering that toured cities across America and beyond. This festival is where the theology becomes, if not exactly flesh, then at least terry cloth. Hundreds of people descend on a bowling alley. The costumes are, technically, not costumes: most attendees wear a version of the Dude's actual outfit, which means the dress code is essentially pyjamas. White Russians are consumed in quantities that would concern a cardiologist. Jeff Bridges himself has appeared, more than once, seeming genuinely moved by the whole spectacle in the way that only an actor who has made peace with being someone's messiah can be.

​

But the people who interest me most are not the ones in the bowling alley. They're the quieter ones. The woman in Ohio who got ordained and used it, she says, as a kind of permission slip to stop apologising for being unambitious. The man in his fifties who lost his job in the 2008 financial crisis and found, in the Dude's cheerful financial catastrophe, a strange companionship. The ‘academic’ who wrote a paper tracing the parallels between Dudeism and classical Taoism and did not find the exercise embarrassing because, she argues, the parallels are actually there. The Tao Te Ching, after all, is largely about the virtue of doing less. The Dude has simply updated it for people who find ancient Chinese philosophy a bit of a commitment.

​

None of them would necessarily call themselves believers, exactly. That's rather the point. Dudeism has no commandments, no tithing, no obligation to attend anything or read anything or be anything other than what you already are. Its central tenet, insofar as it has one, is that the world would be considerably improved if everyone would just take it easy. This is not, when you examine it, an especially demanding ask. And yet it turns out to be one that organised religion, therapy culture, and the entire wellness industry have largely failed to deliver.

​

And the dude, apparently, has not.

​

Image credit: Taste of Cinema

​

​

​

​