The Dharma of Interdependence and What it Can Mean to American Culture

Just read Zen teacher Dosho Port’s post on the rich and the poor as a Dharma issue.

I think he’s pointing to a major issue for our times.

And, I agree, it is a spiritual problem. It is how our very culture wishes to deny the real problems which endanger it…

Which, if you haven’t figured it out are endlessly arising greed, hatred and abiding certainties.

Our American romance with capitalism and its perverse ideology of greed is good and selfishness is virtue makes it hard for us to see through to the heart of poverty.

We need a new way, a third way beyond capitalism and socialism.

And I think the Dharma offers it, or can.

We need to see how the individual is precious. And we need to see how the individual only exists within a social context.

So, any system that calls for the exultation of the group over the individual is a half truth, become in practice a lie. And any system that exults the individual as beyond society is a half truth, become in practice a lie.

We have no socialist tradition in America. Our shadow is rampant individualism. The libertarian ideology of self verses state is the shadow of our tradition. Particularly in that the dismantling of communal protections for individuals, labor laws, health and safety, minimum wage, old age pensions, public schools in the name of individual freedom or “choice,” in fact leads to the concentration of power in the hands of ever fewer people, and dire consequences for the majority.

At the heart of this is a spiritual illness.

And, as I suggest, the heart of that illness in our culture is the denial of our mutual responsibility, our radical interdependence, and the movement to deny the development of the protections of good government and even to dismantle what little there is…

A voice crying in the wilderness…