That’s everybody. Nobody is fully self-sufficient.
There are some people who are capable of getting off their asses and doing something but just don’t want to bother, true. (Though I suspect that they’re not a significantly greater percentage of the people currently in need of financial assistance than they are of the people currently not in need of financial assistance.) But telling everybody that they should somehow attain an impossible goal won’t fix that.
I think many of you are adopting some kind of weird, extremely literal view of self-reliance as meaning ‘not needing anyone, for any reason, at any time.’ That’s just not what it means in most contexts.
Self-reliance is just an attribute that can be applied in many ways. "I am fully energy self-reliant’ could mean that someone is off-grid and doesn’t need the energy distribution system to work to have energy. Maybe they have solar cells and batteries and a wood stove for emergencies.
Wouldn’t you think it would be weird if someone said, “You are not energy self-reliant! Someone else made your solar panels!” That would be ignoring the context in which self-reliance is used in this case.
Another perfectly acceptable usage of the word: “Mary decided to get her own job, even though her husband made lots of money, because she wanted to be financially self-reliant.”
Another common usage: “It’s better to help people become self-reliant rather than have them be in a situation where they have to rely on charity to survive.”
Would you say that the speaker of the sentence above means that those people should go off and live in a forest or something? Or that self-reliance in this context has a more limited meaning?
BTW, a common synonym for self-reliant is ‘independent’. Again, it’s true that no one is truly independent. But when we say, “Our soon is saving money so he can move out and be independent,” no one would think that he’s going off to live with the animals, and it would be weird if someone responsed to that by saying, “But he won’t be independent! He still needs shelter, and groceries, and…” Of course. The independence here is independence from having to lean on his parents. Likewise, if he needed a monthly subsidy, he might decide to seek a better job so he could become self-reliant.
I would have thougth all of this was obvious.
If you thought it was obvious but you find yourself in a room where a lot of other people are not finding it obvious, and who are not defining words in exactly the same way you do… perhaps you should consider that your viewpoint is not universal.
You see, where I come from we call that financially independent.
Again, we’d say independent rather than “self-reliant”.
It is possible that we have stumble upon a difference between US and Canadian English. Or, again, your viewpoint is not as universal, or even as common, as you believed.
What’s obvious is that you keep trotting out the dictionary, and we’re talking about a RW meme. Because the RW meme is what the OP was talking about.
And like almost all RW memes, the actual meaning is lightyears away from, and often polar opposite to, the dictionary meaning. It’s a ball of hate coated with a thin layer of glittering generality.
You may well love the latter. Which does have many valuable features. Best to also consider the former, since it’s the vast bulk of the volume of the sphere containing the meaning.
…except the immigrants worldwide - undertaking arduous journeys to escape political and economic problems, are only a tiny fraction of the people that are suffering under arduous political and economic regimes. It isn’t a lot of people at all. Most can’t escape. It says nothing about “self-reliance.” It says everything about desperation.
With “ban the boat” rhetoric being used in the UK, and with the Biden administration considering reintroducing migrant family detention, there are fewer “opportunities” and it isn’t a matter of “self reliance”, but a matter of being at the mercy of often cruel and heartless border enforcement policies.
I know a lot of people who ‘champion’ self-reliance on the right. I don’t kow a single one who thinks that ‘self-reliance’ means being completely cut off from civilization.
Maybe we’re talking past each other because what you see as a ‘right wing meme’ I see as a left-wing stereotype of what the right believes. The right’s view of self-reliance (except for nutters in compounds in Idaho or something) is all about not leaning on others when you don’t have to, protecting yourself from the vagaries of political opinion by retaining an ability to look after yourself, self-defense instead of relying on authorities to maintain order, maintaining enough savings to see you through hard times, etc.
I think what you are actually talking about is ‘Rugged Individualism’, where people attempt to completely cut themselves off from the need to interface with others, or who look down on any kind of social assistance as a magnifier of dependency. There are such people in the Republican party (and in Conservative politics in Canada) but they are a very small minority and not representative at all of what the ‘Right’ thinks.
I suppose, but it really means having enough money. When we talk about America and the concept of an overemphasis on self reliance, it means money.
It doesn’t mean canning your own food, or fixing your car, or being able to walk to work. It means having money.
The problem with the phrase is that it’s trying to hide the fact that it’s about money with some filigree about doing for one self, not having to rely on others for things, not being a burden to anyone. The RW couldn’t care less if a person can do anything for themselves, as long as they have the money to pay for someone to provide the service.
I’ve been busy today so have resisted opening this thread.
I’m pleased to see that it’s pretty much exactly what I expected it to be when I saw the topic pop up last night.
I think the communication problem is that we bring such different priors to these debates that we just don’t understand each other. I would *never have considered self-reliance to be just money, or even primarily money. And I was taught self-reliance my entire life, and taught it to my kid.
To me (and the dictionary, and everyone I know), self-reliance is self-explanatory. It means don’t rely on others unnecessarily. Don’t lean on people to do things for you that you could do yourself. Take steps to make sure you can handle yourself in a situation before you get in that situation. Don’t assume others will save you from your stupid choices. Use public financial aid only as a very last resort. Save some money for emergencies. Don’t put your fate in the hands of others. Make your own future. Have insurance for critical items you can’t live without and can’t afford to replace. Get an education that allows you to care for yourself and your family. Keep extra food on hand. Hedge your bets. Don’t burn bridges. Don’t take unnecessary risks. Act as though there will be no one to bail you out if you screw up, because it causes you to focus on not screwing up.
Are there people in situations where they just can’t do it? Of course. And they should be supported. But if the people who CAN be self-reliant don’t consume public resources, more can be directed to those who can’t. That’s a good thing. And that’s why we ‘preach’ self-reliance.
Or looked at another way - pure self-reliance is an ideal no one can actual reach, but being as self-reliant as your own personal circumstances will allow is a good thing and should be praised.
I think that when people on the left hear ‘self-reliance’, they immediately think it’s an attack on the welfare system by ‘rugged individualists’ who don’t care about the poor and disadvantaged, or they immediately feel for the people who are told that self-reliance is good but who have no resources to do anything about it, or they get a bad vibe because it seems to conflict with their communitarian ethos, or whatever.
But maybe I’m wrong, because I’m not on the left and don’t understand the thinking. But it does seem like one of those concepts that is interpreted very differently depending on which side of the aisle you are on.
Why do you assume anyone who doesn’t think exactly the way you do to be “on the left”?
And if you hadn’t started off talking about the definition meaning not relying on anybody else, I might have thought you meant it that way.
I refer you, yet again, to your very own definition, in your very own words:
Maybe you didn’t mean that. But that’s certainly what you said.
That’s also part of the issue. But Sam_Stone’s own words are why I thought they were using an antisocial, or at best an asocial, definition.
There are reasons why we don’t put the law in the hands of every individual.
That’s because, when you do that, you don’t have any law. All you have is that whoever’s strongest does what they please, until they have a moment of unavoidable weakness compared to somebody else.
If the cops can’t get there in time, then you do what you can, sure – but you don’t do that instead of having the authorities maintain order. If you’re in the really unpleasant position of its being the cops who are doing the attacking – that’s a huge problem. But it isn’t one that’s solved by saying ‘every individual should rely on themselves’.
Nice platitudes. Not possible goals.
You can do some things to affect your own fate and your own future, of course. And you should do what of those things you can. But your fate and your future are always also in the hands of others; as well as in the hands of Chance.
That’s arguable.
I don’t think it’s better to wall yourself off from your neighbors, and your community in general, as much as you possibly can, than to make yourself as much as possible somebody they can rely on for some things, while you rely on them for other things, and all of you rely on each other for the things that need more than one person’s hands. You should make yourself as capable as you can, of course. That’s not the same thing.
What is “on the left” about a community barn-raising, by the way? About a quilting bee? About sharing expensive farm equipment among farms? About a canning party, you bring the tomatoes, I’ll bring the peppers, James down the street who doesn’t garden any longer has a lot of canning jars, Judy got a deer, we’ll all chop and wash and cook except Jessie can’t but they can keep an eye on the baby, and we all get to tell stories?
One other pithy thing that occurs to me:
Some people are born on third base and go through life thinking they hit a triple.
“Self-reliance,” quite often, simply isn’t.
See post 48
Yes, Everyone has heard the story of “The Ant and the Grasshopper” or “Who Moved My Cheese?” These are fine lessons on preparedness and personal responsibility that everyone should probably take to heart.
But they don’t necessarily translate to good economic or social policy. And in many cases it seems like those policies are being implemented to benefit the wealthy and big businesses while regular working people who are negatively impacted are told to “be self-reliant”.
At least that’s how people who are a bit left of Ron Swanson feel about it.
This has gone off the rails, completely. And it’s abundantly clear that people have a different idea of what ‘self reliance’ means to them.
I think most of us have similar ideas of what “self-reliance” means when applied by intellectually honest people to non-contrived situations. Which means most of us here most of the time.
Where we differ, and apparently wildly, is in how much we recognize, or care, that the term has been co-opted as a dog whistle and how much we believe others out in the wider world are usually dog-whistling when they use it, rather than trying to communicate honestly.
Well said LSLGuy.
If you do not have a ready network of people to catch you when you fall, or at least a list of agencies and/or people to fall back on, if something unexpected happens and you finally admit to yourself that you need help(and you haven’t waited too long out of misguided pride)…what do you do?
As always, there’s undeniably some kind of tenuous spectrum joining the two categories. Even people who make hammers and mend clothes are getting their tools and raw materials from somewhere. And so forth.
But I think there’s a significant distinction here that you’re missing. Namely, ISTM that a crucial component of “self-reliance” (which, as I noted, is not merely a synonym for prudence or common sense or personal responsibility, all of which are good things in their own right) is its implied ability to tackle challenges not solely by relying on extra consumption of economic resources.
If a button comes off your shirt at work, and you’re not bothered because you have the skills and knowledge to immediately sew it back on, then you’re fixing the problem. If a button comes off your shirt and you’re not bothered because you bought an extra shirt to keep at the office to change into in case of such emergencies, then you’re not so much fixing the problem as protected against the problem. Which, like I said, is still an admirable instance of prudence and forethought, but is not quite the same thing as what I think of as “self-reliance”.
ISTM that there’s an important difference—not an absolute binary distinction, but still an important difference—between being able to use knowledge and skills to overcome a challenge using less resources, and being able to use disposable wealth to overcome a challenge using more resources. The first ability is what repairs an otherwise unwearable shirt, and the second is what replaces the unwearable (but repairable) shirt with a new one.
Yes, that’s the potential “toxicity” I was trying to articulate. Once again, neither I nor anybody else here is claiming that there’s something wrong with using one’s money prudently and responsibly to protect one against potential adversity.
But yes, there is an essential difference between saying “I can cope successfully with this problem even though I don’t have money” and saying “I can cope successfully with this problem because I have enough money”. When one’s ability to pay for extra resources to protect against potential adversity is perceived as fundamental to the definition of “self-reliance”, then it’s easy to assume that poor people are lacking in self-reliance just by definition.
And we thought you’d come to save the day!