The Self-made Man

“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.” John Muir

Muir was referring to the interconnectedness of the natural world – how all of nature is a web of connections – predator and prey, symbiotic relationships among plants, how the loss of one species can have ramifications on all species, etc.

I wrote yesterday about humans needing community. The human community (really, a subset of the nature community) is also a web of connections – buyer and seller, families, schools, churches, even government at all levels – and each of us, as an individual, is in the middle of our own personal web of connections, which intersects and overlaps with the personal web of connections of everyone we know and everyone we interact with, as well as the larger community webs of connections.

So, what is meant by the phrase: self-made man (or woman)? Usually, the person making that claim is asserting that they got to this point in life through their own efforts and accomplishments. Physicists have learned that, at the subatomic level, just the act of observation changes the interaction being observed. (https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/1998/02/980227055013.htm) How then can a person arrive at adulthood without being shaped by the myriad overlapping communities in which that person grew up?

Your favorite teacher, who sparked your interest in the subject matter which became your vocation, or simply inspired you to apply yourself to your studies, or conversely, told you that you were stupid and would never amount to anything? Your parents who made sure you had three healthy meals a day so your physical body had the brain-building nutrients it needed for your developing brain? Or conversely, the parent who beat you daily because he or she was a violent alcoholic? The community your were born into – a caring, nurturing small town, or a big city slum where drug use and gunfire were daily occurrences on the street outside your door? The school you attended – well funded with excellent teachers, or a leaky cold building with armed police in the hallway?

All of these circumstances were an influence on the person you became. Yes, I totally agree that each of us always has the choice of how to react to circumstances, though even your understanding of that choice was influenced by your upbringing. Were you taught that you can be anything you want to be or were you taught that people with your skin color are second class citizens under the rule of law?

President Obama sparked outrage when he explained that the owner of a successful business did not build that business by himself, even though it was a true statement. The success of that business also came about because of the governmental infrastructure – roads, schools, government regulations (FDA, for example, if the business involves food) even courts where the business owner can seek redress from a customer that refuses to pay. Even more directly, that successful business is built on the efforts and integrity of the employees it hires (and the schools that educated those employees), and the general state of the economy –  local, regional, national, even international.

The economy is an extremely complicated web of connections. Businesses won’t thrive if the masses do not spend money. If wages are kept low, people have less money to spend. When a business lays off employees due to lack of demand, the demand is also weakened because those employees are no longer pumping their income into the economy. In the trickle down theory, so long as the wealthy are thriving, the rest of the economy will do so as well. It has been well-known for many years that consumer spending accounts for close to 70% of the nation’s Gross Domestic Product. When that spending stops, the entire house of cards collapse. Businesses go bankrupt, government at all levels lose funding just as reliance on the social safety net is increasing, resulting in the lay-off of public workers, who then join the ranks of consumers no longer spending. One of the lessons learned from this health pandemic and the resultant shuttering of the economy must be that the trickle down theory is flawed, and hopefully, a shift in government policies to supporting the Main Street economy on which the entire structure is built, and not the Wall Street economy which siphons funds out of the economy and into the pockets of the wealthy.

Finally, let me say none of this is intended to deny the existential reality that each of us always has a choice about how to react to circumstances in our lives. Nor is it intended to deny the existence of Kierkegaard’s solitary individual – “the individual as as separated from the rest, the individual as he would be if he were solitary and alone, face to face with his destiny, with his vocation, with the eternal, with God himself who had singled him out.” (Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing, Soren Kierkegaard, p. 15) Ultimately, one is always responsible for one’s own choices, but each one of us is the result of all the circumstances of our lives AND our response to those circumstances.

‘No Man is an Island’

No man is an island entire of itself; every man 
is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; 
if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe 
is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as 
well as any manner of thy friends or of thine 
own were; any man's death diminishes me, 
because I am involved in mankind. 
And therefore never send to know for whom 
the bell tolls; it tolls for thee. 
                       John Dunne