<p>"^^geeps, apparently there are those who believe that self reliance and self empowerment is selfishness. "</p>
<p>It all depends, and I have heard terms like ‘self reliance’ and ‘self empowerment’ used by people who are doing so denigrating others. There are a ton of people in this country who make out like they have to pay for everyone else, they get nothing from the government, are ‘self reliant’ and when you look under the covers you can see outright the hypocrisy behind that. Farmers tend to be big on that kind of thing, evil government, etc, yet they collect 10’s of billions of dollars in subsidies when commodity prices are at all time highs, or corn farmers make out like bandits because of the idiotic government subsidies for ethanol. People in certain states sneer about ‘liberal welfare states’, yet those liberal welfare states get a lot less back from the feds then the states those people hail from, and so forth. Old people on medicare rail against “socialized medicine” when they are recipients of it, and so forth. </p>
<p>Then, too, there is the extreme of this, the ‘self made man’ kind of people who follow the precepts of Ayn Rand (one of the more vile people ever to come onto this earth; what really gets me is hearing religious right types praise her writings, when she was the anti Christian in so many ways), those who say “hey, I made it, to hell with everyone else”. The subscribe to the notions of people like Rourke, the architect, who believes he and the others of his level are basically ‘the chosen’ and everyone else is parasites, that they have no duty to anyone else. </p>
<p>Self reliance and self empowerment are important, the opposite of that is people who are perpetual victims. But those who proclaim themselves as examples of ‘self reliance’ and ‘bringing themselves up by their bootstraps’ are basically lying, deliberately or not. Chances are they went to public schools, paid for by people who might not even have kids (and if their family had multiple kids, even more so). They probably used a public library, if they went to college they probably had aid or scholarships someone funded or government backed loans or grants; they probably at one time or the other had mentors who helped them to achieve (David McCullough, the great historian, had a line that in effect said show him any great ‘self made man’, and he will show you probably at least 10 people who have helped that man achieve).</p>
<p>The problem is when self reliance and self empowerment is thrown out there as a bromide to those less fortunate, when people who were not always so self reliant knock others for not being. As Dr. King said, expecting someone to pull themselves up by their bootstraps when they don’t have boots is idiotic. More importantly, it often is denigrating, it is saying ‘look what I did, look how great I am am, I did this all by myself’ (which is prob an exaggeration if not downright lie) with the not so indirect implication that those in need of help are simply lazy or lacking…</p>
<p>Funny thing about the settlers, one of the first things they did when other people moved into an area was to try and recreate civilization, in a lot of cases for mutual benefit…settlements became towns, and they established schools and churches; people in the area helped each other raise a barn or do other things, and so forth. It didn’t take all that long for this happen, and in many ways the ‘rugged individualist’ settlers couldn’t wait to ‘civilize’. </p>
<p>John Muir, when he wrote about nature, said that when you attempt to touch one thing in nature, you found it inexplicably tied to everything else. With human society, we don’t live on an Island, unto ourselves (paraphrasing Mr. Donne), we are connected in a tangled web of threads to others, some coming into us, others going out.</p>