I have long believed that being reliant on the external, can cause immense problems!
I am not alone in being reliant on others, for everything from clothing to food, to energy, to travel, to accomodation…
and all this tak of self reliance is actually, wishful thinking at best, ignorance of reality, at worst.
Being resilient in the face of great adversity is very different to true self reilance.
Unless you live in the woods, catching and killing your own food, building shelters with your bare hands, finding a water and energy source, you, like me are reliant on the giant industrial machine that powers our happinness, and unhappiness…
Forget all this talk of green energy, and electric cars, the fact that we rely completely on others to provide us with the basics through the money system, keeps us chained to work, to living in fixed locations, obedient to a system that relies on our labour and taxes to keep it going!
In the not too distant past, communities were more self reliant, but now due to specialisation, one man equals one task, and there is no time to be a generalist, nor any call for it,
Go to work, do your job, get paid, pay your bills, pay your taxes, repeat.
Even if you are a farmer growing their own food you are sill reliant on the wider system for other services including public health, emergency services, water, energy, clothing, fertiliser companies, etc etc…
A Balanced Relationship?
I have spoken many times about us all being in relationship, that nothing exists in isolation, so maybe it’s just natural evolution that we have arrived where we are, with each of us dependent on the other,
In a small community of say 50 people, only working towards fulfilling the needs of the community, and not worrying about reliance on the wider world, they could survive, but it would be dependent on them having chosen the right location, and having the necessary resources.
But what happens when the population expands and the resources run out?
Well, as history has taught us, governments and their armies have a tendency to invade other ‘countries,’ to expand their resource pool, and also impose their ideology, and increase their status and influence!
The idylic island – a semi fictional scenario to challenge your thinking
“I have just purchased a small island for the ariana project to educate, support, grow food, and offer sanctuary to all who need it. A Lovely idea!
We currently have 50 people working towards world peace on the island and we grow all the food we need and have a natural spring for water.
Unfortunately, word of this wonderful peaceful island project is out and we are inundated with small boats laden with men women and children escaping war, violence, poverty and famine.
At first we welcome them with open arms, providing food,clothing and shelter, but soon there are nearly a 1000 people living there, all “needing” our help.
We reach out to an island community adjacent for support but soon we start to exhaust their supplies, and their patience and tolerance, and they refuse to supply us any more… but still more small boats arrive.
The original residents are starting to grow weary of this constant influx of people, their demands, and their problems, and the incomers are starting to cause problems..
they are saying the accommodation isn’t good enough and there isn’t enough to eat for their children…
The residents are now becoming resentful, and there have been outbreaks of violence between the residents and the incomers…
The residents decide to organise themselves and create a small police force to quell the violence – this only seems to enrage the incomers more, creating an us vs them situation.
amd still the boats kept coming …
We had an emergency meeting of the leaders of the island and we decided that we could no longer accept any more incomers as we could no longer be self reliant.
We were now looking to external agencies to provide support for those already on the island and our peaceful sanctuary was now a very tense, volatile place to live, far from our ideals of a safe space for all.
So we have now built a large fence around the island and trained volunteers to be guards, and also armed them as people had been violently trying to get onto the island …. and we are unsure what to dowith the several thousand people already on it.
It has become a nightmare scenario.”
lessons to be learnt?
We criticise governments trying to keep people out, by force if necessary, and charities and NGO’s say “let them in!”
but there is always someone who is in “need”, someone who is not resilient , and not self reliant, who doesn’t care if your resources are stretched to breaking point, and as we uncovered in our little scenario, once resources are depleted, the friendly welcome suddenly changes into resentment that they are taking too much.
because they are!
It’s hard for eight billion people to be resilient, let alone self reliant
There are too many people on the planet, using too much, wanting too much, and we little humans cannot help everybody, even if we want to, not without the fabric of individual communities and possibly the wider society breaking down.
add to that extreme differences in the way people think and act due to their individual conditioning, and as we found out on our little island, peaceful island life with a Co-operative group of people working for the benefit of others, becoming a fortress, using violence and extreme measures just to “survive.”
In the next investigation we will look at how we can create self reliance and resilience for billions of people! That should be easy, no?
