Self Sufficiency
One
The Misguided Ideal of Self-sufficiency
So many of us love the idea of being self-reliant. Self-reliance is, in fact, a particularly American ideal. It conjures up some kind of pioneer, homesteader mentality, people who don’t rely on the government, don’t even necessarily rely on other businesses. People who can take care of themselves. It’s kind of a comforting, secure feeling to think you don’t depend on anyone else. That you, yourself, can supply yourself with everything you need.
Well, it may be a comforting feeling but it’s a completely misguided idea. And when you make it your ideal, you’re actually setting up a false idol, one that goes directly counter to love of neighbor, and love of God.
Two
No Self-Sufficiency on the Physical Level
The truth is that none of us come into this world being self-sufficient. We all depend on our parents for every, single, physical need we have. That kind of dependence lasts a long time, and for nearly all of us it doesn’t actually go away. We may fantasize about being some kind of primitive survivalist, but we actually depend on society for just about everything.
Almost none of us can grow our own food, sew our own clothes, build our own houses, design our own power tools, or construct our own TV and develop our own TV programming and movies. It’s ridiculous, really, that we’d talk about self-sufficiency when we depend on other people for everything. So why not stop pretending and just admit that we’re not enough for ourselves?
Three
Having A Bunch of Money Doesn’t Make You Independent Either
One of the biggest illusions of being self-sufficient is when you have a lot of money. We even have that silly phrase, “Independently wealthy.” But, of course, the fact that money has any value at all depends completely on other people. All money only has value if other people are willing to give you things for it. And if, for some reason, a bunch of people become uninterested in your little green bills, or your lines of code in a bank computer or in bitcoin, well, then your money doesn’t mean a hill of beans.
Now maybe you feel confident that a lot of people will continue to value bitcoin, gold, or the American dollar for the foreseeable future. But that just means you feel like you can rely on the bulk of your fellow men and women to keep taking care of you in exchange for these little symbols. And if you feel like you can rely on a bunch of other people to take care of you, guess what? It means you’re not self-reliant. You never were, and you never will be.
Four
Psychologically and Spiritually Dependent
Not only are we dependent on others for our physical needs, but also for our psychological and even our spiritual needs. Psychologically, our concepts and the words we have for them come from our culture and our cultural heritage. We rely on other people for the news, for information about what’s going on anywhere where we don’t happen, personally, to be.
Most importantly of all, we rely on one another spiritually. St. Paul makes that explicit again and again when he says that the Church is like a body, and all the members depend on each other. Just as the eye and the hand depend on one another or the head and the feet, so too do each of us in the Church depend on the others.
So do you see? Self-reliance, not needing to depend on others, that’s not the way God has made us. It’s a myth. It’s an illusion. A delusion. We need each other physically, psychologically, and spiritually. What can we do to remember that?
Five
Depend on Those Close to You
Maybe the reason people get deluded into thinking that they don’t need anybody else is that a lot of the people we depend on are so remote from us. Our food and consumer products come from people we’ve never met. Our political leaders and news providers are people we’ve never met. And when we go to Church, the people who surround us in the pews, and these are the people, remember, who we spiritually rely on, are often people we’ve never met.
So here’s a suggestion for getting your head out of the “I don’t need anybody else” delusion – make an actual effort to meet someone new from your Church. Talk to them after mass, maybe invite them over to dinner. Because we aren’t in this thing by ourselves. And it’s time we stopped acting like it.