
The Myth of Self-Reliance: An encounter with Emerson’s essays - prostoalex
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2020/01/15/the-myth-of-self-reliance/
======
jeffdavis
There's a difference between relying on others in general and relying on some
specific entity or some particular way of doing things.

In general, I rely on lots of people. But for the most part, I choose who I
rely on, and in some cases the set of people I rely on changes over time. I
value that choice and the freedom to change.

The distinction is important. If you rely on a single person or entity, they
have some kind of claim to your success or failure. If you rely on people in
general but nobody specifically, then your success or failure is attributable
to you, and that's what "self-reliance" means to me.

I'm not suggesting that self-reliance is all-important or an unqualified good.
But I don't think that it's a myth, either. You don't have to be abandoned in
the jungle as a baby to be called self-reliant.

~~~
vkou
> In general, I rely on lots of people. But for the most part, I choose who I
> rely on, and in some cases the set of people I rely on changes over time. I
> value that choice and the freedom to change.

You don't have as many choices as you think, many of the choices that you do
have are meaningless, and many of the choices you can make are only possible
because of the particular level of wealth, power, and social standing that you
currently have.

If I'm unhappy with the scummy behaviour of a credit rating agency, my only
recourse is to cut off my nose to spite my face. (Opt out of credit entirely.)

If I'm unhappy with the scummy behaviour of my bank, I could switch to a
competitor, which has the exact same policies, that bring about the exact same
outcomes as the one I'm currently with.

I could move to a different city, and the players in this game will change,
but the rules, and the outcomes, will remain the same.

Even when you have actual freedom to choose (Do you want to buy unorganic
poor-person kale, or fully-woke, hand-raised, cruelty-and-gmo-free, organic
kale?) - your choices are highly constrained by powers and circumstances you
have absolutely no control over - and by your current personal level of wealth
and status.

Someone with cash in the bank, in-demand skills, useful connections, and no
debt hanging over their head has the choice to tell an unreasonable boss to
back off. Someone without that level of wealth, power, and status doesn't have
a meaningful choice in this regard. (And, ironically, are more frequently in a
situation where they have to make that non-choice.)

~~~
ixtli
Further, there are 7.53 billion people on earth. If you conclude (generously)
that, living in New York City, you have the freedom to associate and deeply
rely on anyone in the tri-state area, you have access to about 20 million.

That's 0.2% of the total addressable people, and living in NYC puts you near
one of the largest population centers in the world. It would take large
amounts of capital for you to switch to another fraction of a percentage of
the total population, and in doing so you'd be abandoning much of that
original 0.2%.

You are far more constrained by your circumstances, by our social
organization, and by physics than it might appear because of how easy it is to
talk casually with others. Some of this we can overcome with changes to our
society and development of technology, but some we probably can't. Your
freedom to change your conditions falls off in power really quickly. Or, put
another way, addressing the full set of choices gets expensive very quickly.

EDIT: I liked doing this math and, having lived in Tokyo as well as NYC, you
could increase that 0.2% to about 0.5% by moving to the center of Shibuya;
about 40m people live in and around the administrative unit. It's the densest
area of its kind on the planet. That said, measuring Tokyo is a bit of a
fraught problem because there are multiple ways to outline the city itself.

~~~
celticmusic
What's your point?

That your one true love may be in nigeria, but you'll never meet them because
you're in NY?

I don't really understand why people make these kinds of posts as if it's some
sort of wisdom. Everyone else innately understands that you can only interact
with the people available for interactions to you, and that tends to be
limited by locale. In fact, everyone understands it so well that most don't
feel it needs to be said.

But it doesn't change the point that you still can choose to move to nigeria
if you want to interact with more nigerians, and that you can refuse to
interact with that 1 asshole down the street even if you haven't met every
person who ever existed during your lifetime.

~~~
ixtli
The top-most comment said

> I value that choice and the freedom to change.

and my _point_ was that not only is this freedom curtailed by capital and
circumstance, deploying capital to modify circumstance requires a _shitload_
of it. Far beyond what is implied when people bandy about the slogan of "i'm
free to associate with whomever i want." In reality, you're not! You're
constrained six ways from sunday and the size of the constrained set is a
fraction of a fraction of the total set of choices.

I guess you can argue that this is totally intuitive to everyone and so my
comment is obtuse but judging by the way people talk and behave it doesn't
seem that way to me.

~~~
celticmusic
> and my point was that not only is this freedom curtailed by capital and
> circumstance, deploying capital to modify circumstance requires a shitload
> of it. Far beyond what is implied when people bandy about the slogan of "i'm
> free to associate with whomever i want."

I'm just going to quote myself.

_But it doesn't change the point that you still can choose to move to nigeria_

This is like the people who argue that you shouldn't put in a solution that
only makes the problem 20% better, that we should wait until it's a 100%
solution.

You should probably just curl up in your basement and wait to die since you
apparently can't interact with everyone in the world.

~~~
ixtli
You’re doing the thing I talked about exactly! Our ability to chat with people
in other parts of the world like we’re doing now is not at all what the
original comment was talking about when they talked about reliance on others.
Facebook and slack are not a substitute for community or family. That
community needs to be strong because the fact that a small subset of all
people have the ability to move to Nigeria isn’t at all evidence that we’ve
got the freedom to just keep roaming about life until we find a group of
people who just happen to provide everything we need.

In other words the fact that you CAN deploy capital and time to go to Nigeria
hardly means we live in a world where you can shift the context of your life
at will. Most people don’t even have a fraction of what it would require to do
this.

~~~
celticmusic
What you're trying to argue is that poor people can't move to other countries,
and that's just not reality.

------
reggieband
Sounds like the author is having an existential crisis moment. I recall
reading Sartre's Nausea and there was a scene where the protagonist is riding
a bus. He focuses on a bolt in the seat or some other trivial object and is
overwhelmed by the idea that someone put that bolt there. IIRC, this is at a
point in the story where the protagonist is having a bit of a mental break.
That is, it is emblematic of the exact kind of malaise the author of this
piece is experiencing (or was experiencing when they contemplated their
privilege at Thanksgiving dinner).

In my experience, this kind of thinking leads to nowhere other than the nausea
mental state described by Sartre's novel. It isn't my fault the modern world
is structured around me any more than it is my fault that the Earth is
perfectly suited for the kind of life that exists on it. I bear exactly the
same responsibility and blame for both of those circumstances.

A better line of thought is the boring old chestnut of encouraging compassion
for the suffering of others.

~~~
commandlinefan
I’ve been trying to watch all of the Oscar nominated movies before the academy
awards. I’m down to the documentaries now, so I’m watching the documentary
“American Factory” about a Chinese company that bought and refurbished an old
GM plant in Ohio that had closed down. The camera crew followed around the
Chinese workers and the American workers. The difference you see, over and
over, is that the Chinese workers have this underlying belief that they are
nothing by themselves and that they owe everything - their success, their
focus, and even their lives - to the company and, by extension, the
government/society. This results in factory workers who work 12-hour shifts,
28 days a month, forbidden to joke around with one another, and still praise
their good fortune to be there. If you look back over the history of the
Chinese cultural revolution, it started with this mantra: “you accomplished
nothing. Society accomplished it and you were there.”

~~~
wwweston
It seems like there might be happy medium between the idea that your
accomplishments are insignificant and the idea that you're a Ayn Rand action
figure.

Maybe most citizens of 1st world nation states are beneficiaries of an
incredible network of mutual support we call society and stand on the
shoulders of many who came before... and yet deserve some recognition and
reward for individual effort.

~~~
AstralStorm
A lot of our "accomplishments" are indeed meaningless even when averaged into
a society.

A few are important, such as healthcare.

The ultimate drivers are politics and high technology (research) to which the
common person has no access. (Even academia is limited.) The top half percent
does.

Being recognized for being average sounds like a participation award or
paraolympics. It's insulting to those who are not and are pushing state of the
art.

Let's face it, the worth of an average life is low because it is really
readily replaceable and not in short supply. Some number of average folk is
necessary to run economy that the actually important few can push everyone
forward - which they sadly lately do not do often, instead exploiting their
privileged position.

Instead of building laboratories and schools we build factories to produce
literal garbage and waste the environment... Shops to sell the aforementioned
garbage so that someone can profit. Create circular service jobs so that more
people can afford services, and especially get rich off it, not create
opportunities for advancement and betterment. Etc.

Selfishness is everywhere.

------
castlecrasher2
I'll admit I'm biased in that I'm the opposite of what I think the author's
stance is but even after reading it I'm not entirely sure what their point is.

In my mind self-reliance, is growing and having strength unto one's self but
giving freely of that strength to others to build relationships.

I feel like the author is speaking to an author audience, though, so maybe
that's why the article is obtuse to me.

~~~
pknight
Those who grow in strength are able to do so by receiving the support of
others. It's a causal relationship.

The myth is that we arrive at strength through overcoming the need for
support, having grown our metaphorical muscles through force of will. Many
have it as a goal, in fact. They think that the measure of strength is the
ability to function without external help of some kind and to indulge in the
fantasy that it is their unique individual application of their mindset that
is the source of that strength.

This illusion is actually quite easy to penetrate by looking at our biology.
Our body grows and heals to the degree it perceives it has external support.
There's a built-in biological feedback system that requires these external
inputs for our bodies to function to the peak of our abilities. At it most
extreme it can be seen in babies. If they are deprived of touch and attention,
their brain development stunts, they don't grow as healthy. It has a lasting
effect through life. People think that reliance only is required at these more
vulnerable phases of life, but not, say, as we become adults. But that's a
fairy tale, our physiology continues to respond positively to cues of support,
growing in strength when in receipt of support through all stages of life, On
the other hand it declines in the face of lack of support. The effects are
large and predictable, we are social creatures and our physiology is setup
that way, we don't have a choice over it. The concept of self-reliance tries
to tell a story that defies and in a sense denigrates our basic nature.

Rather than questing for self-reliance to indulge in the fantasy of
independence, it is far more empowering, to me at least, to live in the
knowledge that as individuals we have the ability to make others stronger.

~~~
friendlybus
The strength we need is not biological. We need the strength to pursue our
individual roles in life. All the collective strengthening in the world cannot
tell you which way to swim or do your life for you.

George Lucas got into film from cultural anthropology when it was near
impossible to get a career in it. He then made a soap opera in space which you
needed his background in anthropology to get what he was doing. The collective
was against it or didn't understand. The film nearly didn't get made.

The NBA stars that make it have individual advantages that put them ahead of
the pack. Wayne Gretzky was ahead of the game to the point where the
collective had little to provide in direction or competition.

Independence is fundamental and countries have wars over it. Codependency is a
psychological disorder that ruins lives. Strengthening people who are aiming
at ruin breaks the virtuous loop, no matter how much collective support. It is
a myth to think collective support is an easy task. Real support requires as
much time, effort and skill as the individual puts into achievement. A married
pair of doctors in the same field would know enough about each other and the
task to support each other.

Falling into taking or giving the signalling cues of the collective and
eating/massaging perks is a quick way to lose yourself. Meet each other's
needs, yes. Collective strength as a replacement for the individual? No.

~~~
pknight
You've put unnecessary tension between the collective/society and
individuality and individual achievement as if they are at odds here. Lucas
didn't need the whole of the collective to believe in his vision from the
start, he just needed some measure of support in his life coming from another
person or people. This is especially true for someone making films, as that
involves hundreds of people combining their individual talents to a project.
(ps he's donated 6 Billion into helping people get good education, a support
system for people to help get success)

Superstar athletes get to shine with their superior talents only because they
had some measure of support in their life to encourage their career and open
up the possibilities. This is _especially_ true for countless NBA athletes,
many of them having come from poor backgrounds. You won't find a single NBA
star who doesn't acknowledge that their success was made possible through the
sacrifices of others in their life. Their childhood peers who kept them away
from gangs, a parent who drove them to games, a mentor who kept reinforcing
their belief in their talent. Not to mention the infrastructure that was laid
before them by the pioneers before they were even born.

~~~
friendlybus
The individual and collective is at odds. By fundamental design like the
manager focusing for corporate profits over paying the employees a higher
wage. By nature like the expression of one's own character in the face of
collective difference. And arbitrarily too, between people who do not like
each other or two lovers breaking the rules.

An NBA star sacrifices teamwork with others to focus on his career. His
community gave to him in a way that he did not return. His amateur league
teammates taught him things he didn't return. His professional teammates are
ultimately left behind as he ascends up the hierarchy. He didn't focus on
teamwork, he focused on getting as good at the game as he could and that put
him in selection, on the advertisements, on the money.

The collective can kill the individual very easily. Falling into the
collective trap of an empire builder frequently has the outcome of individual
growth being limited for the sake of the team, the union, the standard. The
mindless waves of reputation based attacks can take down in the individual
regardless of fact or fiction.

Harmonious teams end in wars. You organize all the king's men into a tribe and
see what happens when a tribe's Juliet marries the other tribe's Romeo. You
pick your conflict, between individuals or collectives. The tension doesn't go
away, it just gets shifted forward in the circle of life.

~~~
AstralStorm
You have a mistaken idea that community is about repaying.

We're not in a just world, the community is supposed to be about bettering
everyone, but of course there are traps like sports or people who ignore it.

The honest rule is to pay back more as your ability to increases.

The teacher does not have to be directly paid back by his students, it is
enough that some of them will produce a generalized return, trickling down and
around.

However, we're all too local for that to really work. Hence witness flight
from cheap or rural areas to cities, draining resources.

None of this requires conflict. It just requires pure indifference. Teams can
cooperate too.

------
api
This is a case where I think both sides are true. One can be both self-reliant
and reliant on others, and it turns out that's pretty much reality. One cannot
rely on someone who is not self-reliant, nor can one be self-reliant without
others' help.

~~~
fdavison
I think "I, Pencil" would blow Odell's mind.

------
neap24
This reminds me of a lesson I learned in an intro to Economics class :
everyone's lot in life is a combination of luck, effort, and ability. Those
whose view of the world from a left-of-center perspective (those who downplay
self-reliance) really just think luck far outweighs the other two. Someone
right-of-center thinks that effort is the most important. Most right-of-center
people I know don't discredit the impact of other people on their lives. They
just live as if effort and self-reliance can help them overcome bad luck.

~~~
AstralStorm
If by right of center you mean Republicans and not say Chinese or Japanese,
who also fit the bill.

(All of which are just as conservative. Chinese believe in circumstance,
Japanese believe in maximum effort in current circumstance with a few key
choices, Republicans believe any decision is mostly on the individual.)

It's never an absolute, but there is a big difference between living as if
effort is a major thing that matters and believing it is the only thing that
matters or more important than the other two.

Former can get you to push harder, latter brings nothing good - it is a
problem because it brings pathologies especially blame, false hope and
exploitation.

Ultimately there are only a few impactful things most of us can control.
Therefore these things are important.

These are key decisions and it is rather hard to change them. The unfortunate
fact is that we get to make them too early when we're inexperienced and some
are still dumb. And you get few or no retries. (High school, college, these
impact where you live, with whom, your late life social circles, even health.)

Whether you become bitter because of this is up to you.

------
jeffdavis
"And by placing the will so high above circumstance, it projects an untruthful
image of equal opportunity in which the unfortunate should have just tried
harder."

This seems to be the thesis of the whole piece, but ignoring the role of free
will is self-defeating. Recognizing that people can make decisions, and
encouraging them to make good decisions, is ultimately what leads to better
outcomes. Telling people that they have no free will doesn't lead anywhere
useful, even if it's true.

You can still acknowledge that improving opportunities for everyone is a good
thing without dismissing the importance of good decisions.

------
jancsika
I might agree more with the author if many of the problems in the modern world
weren't as trivial as they are.

How many times are respondents here passive aggressive because a poster
_clearly_ didn't read an article?

How many of the posters who argue either side about Damore's bibliography come
armed with their own annotated bibliographies on the subject?

How many comments here start by apologizing for what the poster _knows_ is an
inadequate sample size of one... followed by an opinionated anecdote that
cannot be verified because HN only requires a handle and a password (and HN
disallows talk about how inadequate this is for functional social media)?

If self-reliance is the tale that must be told to get respondents to do any
meaningful work _at all_ , its practical value far outweighs any questions
about truth value.

If you're reading this and are now amp'd up to actually go to the woodshed,
please help reverse engineer the touchpad for the Pinebook Pro because it's
not working very well for me atm[1].

1: [https://github.com/jackhumbert/pinebook-pro-keyboard-
updater](https://github.com/jackhumbert/pinebook-pro-keyboard-updater) Most of
the work done seems to be on the keyboard. There are some i2c captures of the
touchpad in /firmware plus some labeling of the hardware. I thought at first
that it might just be a problem of not polling often enough, but after some
more use it seems like the noise filter might be too greedy.

------
WalterBright
I view self-reliance a bit differently. I see it as taking the initiative to
solve one's problems, and accepting the consequences of one's decisions.

It's the opposing viewpoint to being a victim.

For example, I recently had a root canal. The dentist told me it was not my
fault. But I know it was, and I accept the consequences of my choices, despite
being unhappy about it. Maybe I can choose better and avoid getting another
one.

------
zMiller
\- There comes a time in every man's education when he arrives at the
conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must
take himself for better, for worse, as his portion

\- To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your
private heart is true for all men, — that is genius.

and most poignant of all :

\- Your isolation must not be mechanical, but spiritual, that is.

I remember the exact moment of my life when I read "Self reliance for the
first time, I'll never forget that moment.

------
selfishgene
Jenny Odell's essay was well-written.

No further comment here on the nurture vs. nature debate, except to mention
for those interested in learning more about recent research into volition and
agency (i.e. what is commonly referred to as "free will"), Rita Carter's
___Mapping the Mind_ __is a good place to start.

Remember though that this book covers recent experimental work in psychology,
so the usual disclaimers apply.

------
influx
I really tried to read this, but it was so bad I wonder if it was generated by
a script. The whole thing was pointless minutiae. Surely the author was
getting paid by the word.

~~~
thrower123
It's par for the course for this kind of outlet. "Literary" magazines like
Paris Review and the New Yorker are almost always like this, flowery and
baroque and overwrought, signifying nothing.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
Well... they're the literary version of "it's the journey, not the
destination". They're for people who have more time than they have things to
fill it, so something that takes time to go on a journey are perfect for them.

If you have more to read than you have time, it drives you crazy. "Just make
your point, already!" I suspect that many of us here are not part of their
target audience.

------
saas_sam
This is going to sound terrible to some but as someone who believes strongly
in self-reliance, I get a little giddy when I see anti-self-reliance
commentary get promoted in the media. It's the same feeling when I see
advocates pushing shorter work weeks, more time off, more lax leave policies,
and so on.

Why do I like these things if I disagree with them? Because it's convincing
people they shouldn't have to work as hard as me! Which is making me so, so
valuable to companies. My compensation is shooting up like a rocket. And I'm
no workaholic either. I put in a solid 50 or so hours a week and take
vacations and occasional personal days. I still ask for help when I need it.
Yet, I'm becoming more and more of a rarity in the modern workforce.

This is going to get me downvoted, but I thought it was valuable to share my
perspective. I suspect others are the same as me and are secretly cheering for
people to buy into the notion that they aren't personally responsible for
their success. We'll pick up the slack. ;)

~~~
jgwil2
People obviously have to take responsibility for themselves in order to be
successful, but this kind of article is a valuable corrective to the notion
that individuals are _solely_ responsible for their successes and failures.
This seems self-evident to me on reflection; we are all products of the
families and societies in which we grew up.

~~~
toomuchtodo
> This seems self-evident to me on reflection; we are all products of the
> families and societies in which we grew up.

And luck. [https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610395/if-youre-so-
smart-...](https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610395/if-youre-so-smart-why-
arent-you-rich-turns-out-its-just-chance/) (If you’re so smart, why aren’t you
rich? Turns out it’s just chance.)

~~~
esotericn
The idea is about increasing expected value.

I give you a machine, once per year say, and put it at the entrance to your
home. It's broken. If you fix it, it will, with 5% probability, give you a ton
of money. In the other 95% of cases you get nothing, it disappears, wait for
next year.

Is chance a major component? Of course. But not tinkering with that machine is
lower EV than tinkering with it.

If you stay in bed all day, ignore the machine and do something else instead,
you're not going to get anything, ever. It will never spontaneously open by
chance.

You post below that "you can do everything wrong and still succeed". No, you
actually can't. If you're picturing a startup founder that makes a lot of
seemingly silly decisions - well, they still made the (high risk) decision to
start that company.

If you lay in bed all day, or work your corner shop job forever, then you are
not increasing your EV.

I work in a field that is very heavily based on probability; I literally bet
for a living. Luck is a considerable component, but if you want to tell me
skill is irrelevant, then I'd like to show you what happens if I just tweak
this parameter here...

~~~
shkkmo
The point is that the variance in actual value based on chance is larger than
the variance in the actual value based on skill/talent/intelligence/effort.

This is not saying that there is no effect of
skill/talent/intelligence/effort, but that the effect size is smaller than
commonly thought and smaller than the variance due to luck.

~~~
esotericn
That's only the case if you make nonsensical comparisons.

I wasn't born to an upper middle class family and I didn't get a ten million
dollar trust fund. I don't have the correct muscle fibers to be an Olympian,
etc. That's happened, it's done. That comparison is completely pointless and
irrelevant for me.

From the perspective of decision making, what matters is the difference in
expected value of different decisions that I make now, from T=0, not some time
in the past that I can't affect.

(FWIW, 'skill/talent/intelligence/effort' are also part of that initial
distribution).

The idea that success is primarily random makes no sense at all, because there
are certainly paths that an individual can take that will not under any
circumstances result in outsized success.

There are paths that an individual can take that will by definition result in
failure, like if I went out and drove my car into a wall at 100mph.

~~~
shkkmo
> From the perspective of decision making, what matters is the difference in
> expected value of different decisions that I make now, from T=0, not some
> time in the past that I can't affect.

That still depends on the type of decision and context.

If you are talking about "should I play video game or should I study" that is
a type of decision where valuing individual effort is absolutely beneficial.

If you are talking about making a decision based on evaluating other
people/companies based on their life outcomes, then awareness of the role of
luck is absolutely beneficial. You need to look beyond the results and also
evaluate the decision making and luck that went into obtaining those results.

It's not an either or sort of thing. When we over-estimate the role of
decision making in producing outcomes, we end up with a worse model of the
world that will lead to worse decision making.

~~~
toomuchtodo
> It's not an either or sort of thing. When we over-estimate the role of
> decision making in producing outcomes, we end up with a worse model of the
> world that will lead to worse decision making.

Thanks for making my point better than I.

