In short, self reliance is the acceptance you, and only you, have control over who you are and it is therefor ultimately your responsibility to ensure your own wellbeing. As discussed in Who Is Responsible For Your Wellbeing all of the most essential elements of life such as a positive mindset, knowledge, and a healthy body can only be achieved by your own efforts. Nobody else can do these things for you.
In that same discussion it was also acknowledged that is it wise and beneficial to have friends to help you train, to share knowledge, and to motivate you when you need it. The concept of self reliance is not that of “lone wolf” survival of the fittest, isolationism, or disregard for others. Instead, self reliance is the concept that in order to create a society that is good in any respect, whether morally good, materially good, economically good, and so on, that it starts not with the community, or some kind and all caring charismatic ruler, but with the individual.
The most basic and essential building block of any community or nation is the individual. People are not born out of a community. They are born from their parents and enter into the community as they develop into independent adults. It is these independent adults who then shape the community and define its characteristics. And so it is, that good communities are made up of good people, and bad communities are made up of bad people.
The idea of self reliance is that none of us have any ability to control the thoughts, will or actions of anyone else. We are only capable of controlling our own thoughts, will and actions. It is from this realization that each of us then holds a responsibility to our families and communities to be the best people we can be. That is how we positively contribute to others.
If we want to contribute positively to the greater society, then we must first ourselves be good people. Too many people skip this step and go straight to judging others or worrying excessively about how other people conduct their lives and blame every bad element of their own lives on the negative influences of others. This is simply weakness.
It is very true that as people we do hold significant influence over others. This affords each of us unrealized power to shape the character of a nation and to spread morality. If it is instead used as an excuse to submit to the false authority of other people’s vice over your life then it is your own weakness, not the imperfections of others, that destroys your potential for good.
Bad actors will always be present and there will always be an abundance of excuses to choose from to justify your own deficiencies of character. Self reliance is accepting that you, and you alone, have control over who you are and how you will act. This is the only way to build a strong community, by first building strong people.
Another important concept of self reliance is that freedom can never be realized through dependency. Consider those who are dependent on drugs or alcohol. They know that these things are destroying their minds and bodies, yet they helplessly spend every last dime they have to get a constant supply of poison. Many of these addicts must want desperately to kick their habits and achieve better things with their lives, to treat their friends and families better, but they can’t because of the power a substance holds over them.
That substance makes them feel better in the short term and they are so consumed with their present misery or fears that they no longer possess the ability to see into a potential future that is much brighter. Because the poison makes them feel better now, they continue taking it, even if at the expense of their future.
Reliance on government is not at all dissimilar to substance abuse. In the short term it relieves us of our responsibility to ourselves and to our community. It gives us the ability to say that it isn’t our responsibly to take care of our own lives, that government should provide us with our education, healthcare, basic income, and safety from anything and everything imaginable. But in the long term this is destructive to our freedom and to our security.
When we surrender the responsibility for our own lives over to government, we surrender along with it the ownership over our lives. With the new found power that government holds over us by providing our needs and desires they hold leverage over our lives to compel us to submit to policies we otherwise would not. In order to fund these provisional programs we must pay more and more taxes, paying along with those taxes our liberty.
Our country was founded on the principle that all men are created equal and it is therefore right that we reject being ruled by a king and establish a system of self government. The freedom from despotic rule that we enjoy can only exist so long as the people remain self reliant. If we begin to rely on government for our every need or want they will happily accept that responsibly because with it comes a power over the lives of each person.
A people who are depending upon a government for their livelihood are very poorly positioned to hold that government accountable. The population can easily be punished or fall victim to widespread corruption due to their inability to bite the hand that feeds them. The difference between dependency and slavery is a faint blurry line.
Another benefit of self reliance that was outlined in What Does It Mean To Be Free? is the overall lower cost, greater efficiency and better safety it provides each individual over that of governmental provisions. Relying on governments to provide the basic necessities or emergency supplies, whether in normal life or a crisis, creates massive overhead which adds incredible cost to the very simple actions that each individual could take on their own behalf. This argument is restated below:
One of the challenges in riding out the Covid-19 disaster has been the lack of adequate supplies like personal protective equipment such as face masks. Many have criticized the government for not having the foresight to hold large enough strategic reserves of critical equipment to supply to the general populace. Think for a few minutes what governmental strategic reserves of basic necessities would entail.
Firstly, the government would have to purchase bulk supplies over time to build up massive reserves. Then they would have to store these reserves in extremely large warehouse which would need to be strategically placed around the country.
Next, when the appropriate crisis finally arose, there would be the logistical challenges of determining when to release the supplies and how to physically transfer them to the individuals. Would they be shipped out to local communities, would people be required to go retrieve them, would they be mailed to each home? How many masks would each community or household need? How would we ensure that the supplies were released appropriately, not prematurely to deplete the strategic reserve unnecessarily, but not too late where they didn’t serve their intended purpose. All of the warehousing, transportation, logistics, and manpower necessary to manage the whole process would represent significant overhead, all funded at the expense of the taxpayer.
Conversely, suppose the government did not choose to build a strategic supply of face masks and left it solely to the discretion of the individual. Suppose each household were to purchase their own private supply of masks. Each person could then decide for themselves when it was appropriate to begin wearing a mask. They would not have to wait for congressional action. There would be no warehousing, mass transportation, or overhead necessary, each person would already have the equipment in their possession.
Rather than the taxpayer having to fund not only all of the masks, but also all of the warehousing, transportation, manpower and management of large reserves, he would only have to purchase the number of masks he felt were necessary for his own family. This system is not only more affordable to everyone who pays taxes, but it is a much more efficient process as well. Most importantly, it would be safer for each individual since all the necessary equipment would already be in their possession the moment it was needed, whether for a local, national, or global emergency.
Add to this model the undeniable fact that government has proven to be the least cost effective and least efficient means of nearly every endeavor it sets out to, it becomes reasonable to expect that on top of the additional required overhead for government provisioning of the people, you would also realize a significance level of waste, or even corruption, throughout the process that would be transferred to the taxpayer in the form of additional cost. Personal responsibility and independence affords tremendous efficiencies over socialist or collectivist strategies.
In conclusion, self reliance is the acceptance of the responsibility for your own life. It is a dramatically more efficient and cost effective method of ensuring widespread security from natural disasters and it is the only method is which we can maintain liberty over tyranny.