Are There Huge Dangers With Overemphasizing Self-Reliance?

In My Humble Opinion
21

But it would have been if the food supply was cut or the power went out, right? Self reliance means being prepared for emergencies. just like buying home insurance is preparation for an emergency. The decision isn’t wrong if the emergency doesn’t develop, because it is insurance.

Do you wring your hands over the waste of money every year that you don’t make an insurance claim? I doubt it. You buy insurance - and emergency equipment - in the hope that you never need it. Hell, I have to throw out an unused fire extinguisher that’s expired, and I never even used it once! What a waste.

22

No, as I said in my past several posts, I don’t think that that’s a very useful description of “self-reliance”.

Of course, and it’s very sensible and prudent to do so. But I don’t call that “self-reliance”. You seem to be missing the point that I made back in post #10:

To clarify that further: What we’re doing when we buy insurance, or buy gasoline-powered generators as emergency backups for potential grid failures and so forth, is not in any meaningful sense relying on ourselves instead of external societal systems to cope with emergency conditions. What we’re doing is just selectively relying on one aspect of external societal systems instead of another.

That’s why I described having the skills and knowledge to, say, grow or cook one’s own food or repair one’s own house or clothing as “self-reliance”. Merely buying additional goods and services, like generators and insurance, as backups to reduce the risk of financial loss due to deprivation of other goods and services doesn’t really count. It’s still sensible and prudent, as I said, but I don’t class it in the “self-reliance” category.

23

Can you elaborate on that? How is self-reliance bad in the context of interaxting with complex systems? I didn’t respond tomthat becuse I didn’t really understand what you meant.

If encouraging self-reliance is a public good, then ‘valorizing’ it makes sense, just as we valorize people who overcome obstacles to get an education or who work hard to stay employed rather than go on social assistance.

Are you conflating self-reliance with anti-social behaviour, or atavism, or something? Maybe we are talking past each other.

24

Sure, before I saw this most recent post of yours, I did so in a paragraph appended to my last post.

25

Okay… that’s a pretty narrow definition of self-reliance. It certainly can be part of it - learning how to do things without any help at all is good. But I fail to see the difference between learning to fashion your own hammer vs just buying one, or learning to mend clothes vs buying extra. Either way, you are self-reliant if systems break down.

By your definition, no one can be self-reliant unless they cut themselves off from society completely. That would indeed be stupid. But I don"t think anyone else would accept that definition. I think if most people saw someone buying and installing emergency backup, commercial survival rations and other emergency prep, they’d say that person is trying to be self-reliant in an emergency. They wouldn’t say, "that’s not self-reliance, because he didn’t grow his food from scratch without modern tools.’

So to be clear, my definition of self-reliance is to take steps in your personal life to make sure that you don’t have to lean on others or the system to save you when the crap hits the fan, to the degree that you have the ability to do it. Your definition is more like survivalism than self-reliance, it seems to me.

26

And the opposite of drowning is not taking in any water at all, but jumping in the ocean is just as bad as stranding yourself in the desert. Perhaps a healthy balance is the solution?

27

Of course. That’s what I have been describing.

The fundamental principle should be that social safety nets and emergency systems are there for people who need the help. If you can avoid leaning on them, you should. Not because we shouldn’t have them, but because other people need them more.

Therefore, encouraging self-reliance for those who have the means is a good thing.

28

First, I apologize if the article was paywalled. One can sign up for a free month of scribd to read it, but it is about one person’s experiences. Here is a summary.

The author had parents with mental illness, spent time in foster care and being unhoused. She won a contest writing essays on self-reliance, got to meet Clarence Thomas and Condoleeza Rice, and [the winners] were touted as proof anyone can make it in the United States given the limitless possibilities of free enterprise. She won full scholarship to Harvard. She finds her ideas as a teenager, that success or failure were up to her alone, well described by Alissa Quart in her new book Bootstrapped.

“According to Quart, the fiction that anyone who works hard can have a better life increases inequality and promotes policies that hurt us. Meanwhile, blaming people for their supposedly bad choices is “a kind of nationwide bullying” that the poor internalize.” [She thinks some conservative policies, and politicians like DeSantis may be really against poverty].

”Quart then points out a number of cracks in our collective myth of self-sufficiency. While Henry David Thoreau stayed at Walden Pond—for many, the mecca of American individualism—his mother did his laundry. Ayn Rand, patron saint of libertarians, collected Social Security near the end of her life. Even Horatio Alger’s novels aren’t tales of genuine independence: In most, a wealthy benefactor steps in…”

”The belief that underprivileged teens can study hard, prove their worth, and access higher education thanks to charitable largesse also seems more and more like a fable. Donors disproportionately give to elite schools with massive endowments. Only 1.5 percent…of the total sum contributed goes to two-year colleges [with the highest rates of upward mobility].”

”I swelled with pride when my application essay for the scholarship, in which I compared my life to that of the Horatio Alger Award recipient Buzz Aldrin, delivered me into a State Department dining room…. And when things went wrong, I blamed myself—when I was raped…when I didn’t have a place to stay…when I went nearly broke from a mouthful of root canal… I’d bought into the intoxicating fiction that I was the master of my fate. When it turned out I wasn’t, the failure felt personal.”

”By the time I graduated from [Harvard], my shame that I wasn’t a smiling overcomer became unbearable… [Quart] proposes commonsense changes to improve the social safety net, most of which are extensions of COVID-era policies: expanding the child tax credit, making recertification for Medicaid less onerous, and reducing administrative hurdles to seeking help. Just as important, Bootstrapped urges readers to rethink their narratives of accomplishment. Quart encourages us to stop shaming others, and ourselves, for needing assistance and to acknowledge the ways we are all interdependent.”

29

Many people try to be self-reliant because they are brought up to believe that asking for help, let alone accepting help, is a weakness. In relationships, in business, in society “doing it yourself” is seen as a strength, but this oft-misguided belief can cause people to refuse help when it is most needed because they have been told that others managed to do so somehow…not realizing that most of the so-called “do-it-yourselfers” tend to forget about the hand-ups they have gotten along the way, and that most of those that tried it that way and failed don’t write books or get featured talk shows.
If you wait to accept help until all else has failed, it might be too late.

30

Second, my intention was not that the discussion necessarily follow the article. I think self-reliance very important. But I don’t expect everyone to know a lot about medicine. Asking for help can be important. Certainly societies are interdependent, as Covid may have showed.

Third, I think Canadians are fairly self-reliant. They value this, but generally expect far more social services than Americans do — so likely not as much as Americans. I would say there is a clearer rural-urban divide rather than a provincial one. In remote areas such skills are non-negotiable. In Canada, as in the States, rural areas are generally more religious and more conservative (this varies a little by province). I dated someone from Saskatchewan in university, and she was always talking about Ayn Rand and “workfare rather than welfare”. Living in smaller towns, I think a significant chunk of rural Canadians would agree with her views.

31

Right, but we don’t really live in a society where one can truly be self reliant. Unless maybe they have the resources to buy a sustenance farm way out in the country. Most of the time people need to develop skills so they can find jobs. And for the most part, people will be dependent on the whims of their employer.

The “self reliance” attitude I see (which I think the article might be referring to) goes well beyond simple disaster preparedness or a good work ethic. It’s more of an attitude by the rich and affluent where they believe some fiction that they are the sole product of their own success and everyone else can go fuck themselves. It’s a false sense of self reliance born out of having the resources to shield one from life’s problems.

IOW, “be prepared”, “work hard/play hard”, “own your career” are healthy forms of self-reliance. “Every man for himself” is not.

32

A while back, someone shared a video on Facebook about a dad who was being helped unload the back of a pick up by his teenage kid, and the teenage kid was struggling. Instead of helping him, when the kid complained, his dad lectured him, more or less, and the kid fight and pulled, and by God at the end, he was able to move whatever he was trying to fucking move.

The only reason this video came to my attention is because one of my friends liked it, and the amazing thing is that her son struggled for more than a decade with heroin addiction because he refused to get help, and tried to fight it himself.

Everybody loves the fucking bootstraps, even when someone is hanging from them.

33

You have summarized this quite eloquently.

34

They live in communities. The people in those communities help each other, and are expected to do so. For that matter, IME they’re often quite willing to help people outside those communities, and to accept help from them (such as by riding in cars and planes, and using medical services.)

They minimize relying on the outside community when they can readily avoid it, yes. They expect everybody to be able to do useful things, to the extent they’re capable of it, yes. But that’s very far from an attitude of ‘every individual should be absolutely independent and not need anybody else’.

It’s not. But it’s also not

You do what you can to put yourself in a position in which you can be helpful to others, or at least not in the way of others getting help. But claiming that it’s possible to do that without relying on others is nonsense.

You are relying on others to get you into a position in which you can temporarily manage without others. This is fine. What isn’t fine is trying to define it as not having to rely on others.

No, I would say they were trying to be prepared for an emergency.

But you’re using others and the system to get into that position. Calling it ‘self-reliance’ looks like you’re trying to deny that.

The version in which the kid injures himself trying to move something too heavy for him, and without proper instruction on how to move heavy things, presumably didn’t get shared; or at least not by the same people.

And all the people who didn’t win the contest, however hard they worked and/or however well they wrote, were ignored. All they were proof of, after all, was that if things are set up as a contest, then there are certainly going to be people who lose.

(That may also be addressed in her writing, I don’t know.)

35

I can’t say, but the article does say that there were over a hundred contest winners.

36

I grew up in a tiny town in reddest-of-red America (no services like gas/groceries/etc). Self reliance was what we did. We had a garden (not huge; we were poor), my mom canned food every year (and still does)… but we didn’t have a multi-month stockpile. Because we still had to eat. We didn’t have a 500 gallon gas tank… because we were poor. We didn’t have a cistern, or generator, etc…

As nice as it must be to be able to go out and drop cash on a freezer and generator just because it looks like you might possibly need it in the future, does that make those that literally can’t do such a thing something other than “self-reliant”? Because in this country, it really does in the eyes of many.

37

How many entries?

38

I understand that. No one disputes that not everyone can do this. But those who can take their load off of public services make them more available to those who can’t. As I said, you should attempt to be as self reliant as you can, within the limits of your situation. For example, prioritizing enough savings to see you through a period of unemployment or sudden repair bills helps you to be more financially self reliant.

Whenever you can rely on your own resources rather than public resources, you should. This is ot a criticism or a put-down of those who can’t. On the contrary, it allows public resources to go to those who need them most. Resources are scarce.

39

The article doesn’t say. It was for a Horacio Alger essay contest that the article implies is still a thing.

40

This, maybe?

Not clear to me on five minutes’ googling how many people apply for it; but that also isn’t the kind of contest I thought was being referred to.