Self-reliance used to be one of my favorite words. What a beautiful concept it could have been had it not been co-opted by so many unintelligent people!
Now the word has been killed for me by my blogroll. Don’t believe me? Read the following:
You have to ask yourself whether you want a culture of dependency or a culture of self-reliance. What is so offensive about Obama and his ilk is their undermining of such traditional American values as self-reliance. And as I said yesterday, many of these same liberals such as the “race troll’ Chris Mathews got where they did in life precisely because of such virtues as self-reliance. And yet they refuse to promote them and pass them on. It shows the contempt they have for their clients such as blacks who keep them in power. If it hasn’t happened already, some liberal will now besmirch the beautiful word ‘self-reliance’ as racial code. There is just no level of scumbaggery to which a leftist will not descend.
Now, whenever I hear this word, I immediately imagine a mean, spiteful curmudgeon who just sits there judging everybody all day long.
The most beautiful part of the word “self-reliance” is “self.” And it only makes sense when you cultivate this virtue in your own self without lecturing others on it. You can’t “promote” it or “pass it on.” A person who can’t exist without lecturing other on self-reliance is not self-reliant for the simple reason that s/he needs others to confirm his or her point of view as valuable.
Clarissa's Blog 
When you have a culture that is primarily based around the concept of Me, Myself and I then how can you be surprised when someone who suggests helping others gets vilified?
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What is particularly alarming about this attitude is not the selfishness, but the idiotic arrogance. There is no such thing as perfect self-reliance — we are all dependent on whole networks of people providing various things we need for our very survival, material and emotional. It is especially stupid (and prejudiced) to suggest that a group of people who have been systematically exploited and deprived for centuries have failed to reach the same summit of success as members of the privileged groups because they refuse to be as ‘self-reliant’ as the latter. I wonder how the Maverick Philosopher would respond if armed factions in Somalia, to take a random and frankly quite ridiculous example, decided to sponsor a new, radical self-sufficiency programme by amassing enough force to colonise the US.
Not with enthusiasm, I suspect.
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Not to mention racist. “The blacks who keep them in power” — yeah, real nice phraseology there, couched, of course, in fake “concern.”
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Just in general, looking at Republican rhetoric lately, it all seems to be such a great case of projection. Constant assumptions of conspiracy to defraud on the part of people who actually do conspire to defraud; assumptions about random, exploitative sex; etc., etc., etc.
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Isn’t self reliance a Ukrainian invention?
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Yeah, blame the Ukrainians. 🙂
Of course, as a culture, Ukrainians are traditionally more individualistic and self-reliant as the Russians. This doesn’t happen because anybody is inherently better or worse but because of climate and geography.
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OT, but thought you would be interested to know that Ukraine is currently fourth in the medal table of the Paralympic Games:
http://www.london2012.com/paralympics/medals/medal-count/
🙂
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Yay!! That’s an incredible achievement. Especially given the attitude to the disabled in my country.
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or try
ukrainian self reliancein the search engine of your choice…LikeLike
This person is a very bad writer. Those ho-hum ideas have been around forever, but this person expresses them in a particularly awkward way. Again, it really is a waste of time to try to analyze what is being said. It’s just crap.
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Yes; he seems a garden variety internet conservative who is operating under the tragic misconception that he’s a consummate intellectual. Even his non-political posts are dumb.
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“This person is a very bad writer. Those ho-hum ideas have been around forever, but this person expresses them in a particularly awkward way. Again, it really is a waste of time to try to analyze what is being said. It’s just crap.”
– Exactly. But this kind of thing makes me so angry that I need to vent or my blood pressure will go up. I tried to delete him from my blogroll but it doesn’t work.
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You know, for someone who talks such a good game about individualism, this MaverickPhilosopher fellow sure seems to use a hell of alot of collectivist arguments.
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Ugh… I feel another clash… there are two points that need to be made. 1. Everyone certainly relies on others (their family, friends, schools, etc.) for help and for shaping of their attitude. People or whole races that have had historical disadvantages have it harder than a traditional middle-class white person. To argue against this strains credulity. However, the situation is what it is… and what really matters then is what can be done.
2. “Self-reliance” is a real concept (as you acknowledge Clarissa) and many stuck in cyclical poverty in general have less in GENERAL (of course there are exceptions) and changing there attitude/mindset/behaviors/cultural awareness is the only way they will reach a different socio-economic status. One point to consider is immigrants who have come to America for the last 150 years have come as poor, or more poor than those in poverty now and have flourished in this country. You can literally pull yourself “up by your bootstraps” in this country. I say this because the original authors post contains nuggets of truth about the importance of self-reliance and about the Democrats sometimes appearing to want to keep a dependency society.
The one critique I can see that is valid to the fact that immigrants with equal (aka almost no) means have had greater success than those in cyclical poverty here is that for immigrants this appears like the land of opportunity, and those who are entrenched in poverty face “hopelessness” and are used to be “tread upon” by society. I can’t imagine what that must feel like (and my heart does break for people in that situation.. more on that later), but the fact is regardless of how they get there, they need more “self-reliance”, accountability, and ambitious “upward striving”.
I am ready to be attacked but I HOPE I have articulated a much more intelligent, nuanced version of what most conservatives think and why it is at the minimum a valid positon to hold!
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The thing is, Matt, that it’s hard to learn self-reliance when the government is not self-reliant and just keeps borrowing and borrowing. And the Republican government does that a lot more than the Democrats. Then the bailouts also don’t teach a message of self-reliance. People mess up royally and don’t suffer any accountability, so what does this teach all of us? The very folks who drove their companies into the ground because of being irresponsible and inept awarded themselves huge bonuses out of taxpayers’ money.
It’s the same as if I were a very public and notorious plagiarist who lectured my students on how wrong plagiarism is.
This is why I say that it is always best to look at oneself in terms of how self-reliant one is.
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Appearances, while important, can be deceiving. Sure, Democrats are “sometimes appearing to want to keep a dependency society.” From another, equally valid (and I’m sure also equally erroneous) perspective, Republicans are appearing to want a darwinian society which features survival of the fittest, and only of the fittest.
Perhaps we leftists err in assuming that it’s normal and natural for people to desire very strongly to be contributing members of society. I certainly feel that way. No doubt conservatives would like to persuade me that the reason I feel that way is because I’ve been enculturated to feel that way. I want to believe that I feel that way because it’s normal and natural for anyone to feel that way, because I find human nature essentialism to be limiting, depressing, and frankly, insulting. I am, after all, a human.
I think almost all factions of the Democratic Party regret much of the Great Society program, and would like to “walk back” large parts of it, perhaps in a “face saving” way. BTW, I could become a “swing voter” if the Republicans would do the same with “family values,” but so far I see no sign of that on the horizon.
At the risk of sounding like a loser or some other type of (by what I imagine to be conservative standards) contemptible person, I must confess that my main complaint with the economic status quo is that a modest (but nevertheless robust) level of self reliance isn’t a lower-hanging fruit—
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