our fantasy of self-sufficiency

A wind storm last night took our power out, so this morning I made coffee in the French press after heating water on the grill, and started a fire in the woodstove, and did paperwork by candlelight while waiting to use my computer again. Any time this happens I am reminded that I need to come up with more self-sufficient methods of living, since as it stands just about everything in our home depends on electricity.

I know how to survive off-grid. For nine years my family lived in an old abandoned farmhouse, drew water for drinking and washing from a spring, canned food from our gardens, tapped maples for syrup, heated with a single woodstove in an enormous drafty room. After the first few months we did get electricity, but never had television or a telephone, so we relied on books and imagination for entertainment. I know how to grind wheat for flour, make cheese, brew beer, ferment vegetables, save seeds, and butcher animals. I can cut down a tree with a bowsaw, and split logs with a maul. I can shoot if I have to. And because I have a variety of apocalyptic scenarios floating around in the back of my mind, it alarms me when I feel too dependent on a fragile tottering system, especially if I don’t immediately get my coffee.

The picture of radical independence from the system leaves a lot out, however. Because the reality is, even in my ideal zombie-apocalypse survival scenario, I am depending on the factories that manufacture my ax and saw. I depend on whomever makes the spiles for my trees, on the Ball jar company for my canning materials, and of course the manufacturers of guns and ammo for hunting. I depend on bigger farms for chicken food, and on the purveyors of organic growing products such as rock phosphate. Even our pioneer ancestors who were a lot more adept at self-sufficiency still depended on the communities they’d left behind in order to have the tools for survival.

One response to this might be to go into freak-out mode and stockpile all the things. That would mean delving very deeply into collective dependence in order afterwards to showcase a temporary independence, and in having a lot of storage space. A few people do this, and they have a wild-eyed look about them. Periodicals that feed on doomsday scenarios advertise corporations that make big money selling self-sufficiency to the fearful in the form of survivalist packages, vast quantities of canned food, etc.

Or one could go out into the hills and survive in mountain man mode, eating raw fish and chewing bark and not worrying about hygiene. A few people do this, too. Usually they have to keep out of sight.

Or one could be a stylite, and perch atop a pole, and hope birds bring you sustenance.

Or one could just admit that the idea of radical independence is a fantasy. Which, if you’ve studied your metaphysics and have a healthy religious sense, you knew already.

Recognizing this doesn’t mean that I’ve given up my dreams of a more off-grid lifestyle; but I’ve replaced the ideal of self-sufficiency with the ideal of sustainability. We’re accustomed to talking about this in terms of ecology and environmental responsibility, but we should think of our dependencies in this way, too. I would rather depend for my tools on a local blacksmith than on a foreign corporation, for instance. I do not want to depend on organizations or persons who do harm to communities, so I get the seeds I haven’t saved from an excellent co-op (Fedco, check them out) and not from Wal-Mart (their seeds are crap, anyway). I depend on my customers for income, and I want to establish enduring, sustainable connections with people whom I trust and who trust me. Even in terms of our civil engineering, we should think about how we can create spaces for sustainable interdependence: enduring structures, open and inviting places, footpaths across the countryside.

The ideal of independence is part of the American Dream. We worry about “creating cultures of dependence” but, in reality, we depend already on our employers to keep employing us, our public officials to maintain justice, our states to make roads and offer free public schools and maintain parks and forests. Children depend on their parents, sometimes for quite a while, and then parents depend on their children. A stay at home parent depends on his or her spouse for financial security. A working spouse depends on his or her stay at home partner for childcare and meals. An employer depends on employees. We depend on farmers who grow food and raise animals, truckers who move materials, stores who provide them, companies that keep the utilities on.

So instead of worrying about whether we are creating cultures of dependence, we should keep in mind three things:

1. Not everyone has the parent to provide assistance, the spouse who makes enough to maintain a whole family, the employer who has a sense of justice, the community that offers ranges of living options. Social welfare systems exist not to create dependence, but to provide for those who otherwise would be more dangerously independent than the rest of us.
2. However, we need to think about sustainable and ethical dependence in both our “natural” networks of dependency, and in any additional programs provided to provide equity. The principle of subsidiarity helps here. So do the principles of distributist economy. We need to think about the wide-ranging effects of actions that we have both within the home and in the public spaces, especially in marketplace transactions where the goal of immediate profit too often obscures our idea of long-term effect. Or even of basic morality. We need to consider whether in our dependence we are implicit in evils such as slave labor or ecological deprivation. We should consider whether in offering low wages and no benefits to employees we are depending on abortion. We should ask whether our entire monetary system creates a dependence on the military-industrial complex  (see this piece for a better discussion on this than I can provide).
3.  We depend on God. And on coffee. And I had to wait for mine this morning, so pardon anything I said that doesn’t make sense.