Ignorance and independence

In the modern world, each of us is dependent upon others to fulfill many of our needs and desires. The self-sufficiency of Robinson Crusoe may still be popular in first-year graduate school classrooms, but it has little relevance elsewhere. Contemporary “survivalists,” fearing a coming conflagration, stock up on manufactured weapons and commercially prepared and preserved foods. They transport these items in commercially acquired vehicles over government funded roads to rural areas selected on the basis of their social character. No one can start from scratch and create any semblance of a modern standard of living. Society is, by definition, “social.”

What we need from each other, however, is less a sharing of effort than it is a sharing of information, of technology, of simple knowhow.