We hear it a lot: the notion of a “free and independent people.” We hear a lot of wonderful ideas about what it might mean to be ‘self-sufficient’ in the modern world. For the bulk of modern Western society, self sufficiency equates to having a high paying job, having high social status, and obtaining material wealth. Oh, and it probably means throwing in a college education too. But in reality, when we think about where we as human beings come from, what really creates true resourcefulness? What resources should we even be using?

The pressures from the time we are in elementary school to have “lifelong learning” are immense, shoved down our throats by those who run and administer the public education system in the United States. But yes, even globally we see an expanded push for exploring the more liberal, social art aspects of societies and cultures. We should not just learn about the practical skills that will allow us to survive and thrive in our environment as grown adults, we should examine more closely the meaning of life, the things we can naturally ponder.

I’m going to be very honest here and tell you what I really think. (Don’t I always?)

The propaganda being pushed on us, even as we are youth, is a big giant scam. Okay, yes, we all like to hear a good rant about education or about the status quo but for this particular post I’m going to refrain from getting into any of that too deeply. The real point I want to drive home instead is the message that you have a HUGE level of individual power but that power rests upon your ability to sustain yourself, to be “self-sufficient” as we all like to say. To define what I mean by self-sufficiency, I mean truly having the ability to provide for all of your needs, from A to Z.

In the modern world, this can be next to impossible, right? I mean, we all have to rely on a number of different societal systems, be they healthcare, a job market, educational systems, city sewers and waste disposal procedures, and a whole mess of stuff that our evolutionary ancestors probably could not even imagine. In truth, none of us will ever reach that “sweet spot” of self sufficiency (within our lifetime, at least) of being able to sustain 100% of our needs without help from any others. We will have to continue to rely on others for certain things but is that any reason to say that we should just not bother with learning as much as we possibly can?

Well, the gut reaction is to say: of course not! We should learn as much as possible as often as possible! Realistically, I see a lot of people continuing with inaction, unfortunately, rather than taking up this massive ambition to take considerably more action than they may have previously done to ensure their own ability to take care of themselves. On Facebook, I’m often shouting off about a number of libertarian ideas and saying how important it is that we not lose our freedom. Although freedom might be highly important to a lot of people even after they understand the notion that part of freedom means taking care of yourself, a lot of people begin to realize what a monumental sort of undertaking “taking care of themselves” can be!

Think about all of the different aspects that you have to consider when taking on the life of a free individual. Ideally, you should be able to provide for yourself…

  • Electricity
  • Healthcare
  • Emergency Preparations
  • Transportation
  • Food
  • Water
  • Personal Defense
  • Entertainment
  • Shelter/Housing
  • Tools
  • Clothing
  • The list goes on…

When you really add up all of the things that you would need to provide for yourself in being totally self-sufficient, it begins to sound more and more difficult to gain that subsistence capability for a single individual. This would be why, in some cases, centralized systems that benefit entire communities make a little bit of sense in the grand scheme of symbiotic connection. For instance, the way that the government might build roads to allow us to use our vehicles to go from place to place or the way that having a publicly available database of scientific data may offer benefit to all for the sake of sharing knowledge with each other to further develop other advancements.

I’m afraid that while some of those systems do sometimes make sense, people have begun to take that to a crazy sort of extreme in certain cases. I mean, we’ve got guys who advocate the idea of putting pharmaceuticals into water supplies (like bioethicist Jacob Appel), the assumption that centralization is inevitable as in transhumanistic style evolution, or perhaps a better example than any would be that of the modern classical theories in sociology in which the entire field makes the presumption that collective phenomena could well override the actions of the individual (even though the individuals are the parts that comprise the greater whole and without the individuals there would be no collective phenomena to speak of).

There is, as usual, quite a lot that could be said for the various arguments about how much we should learn in regard to providing for ourselves, how much we should allow the government or our community structures to provide for others, or how much we should provide to each other. For me, the argument and debate is ended completely when I consider the fundamental foundation that we know from science about where we come from as human beings – the fact that we evolved over approximately two million years and, within the past 200,000-250,000 or so, have seen the emergence of the homo sapien as the most highly intelligent sentient species on the planet. Human beings are capable of solving tremendous, complex problems and they’re also capable of making disastrous new problems emerge.

Where self-sufficiency and its importance in the modern world really becomes greatly important is by examining the general tendency of our own evolutionary timeline. If we have continuously evolved to be the “fittest” species, top of the food chain, have been granted by this tedious evolutionary process the ability to create technologies, and so on – then shouldn’t our personal lifestyles likely reflect that particular premise’s logic? That is the essence of my Long Term Survival Model.

That is, if we are going to follow good, sound, valid reasoning in the structure of our argument for how it is we should go about our daily routines, then we must follow the logic of our evolutionary history. In our evolutionary history, we provided a lot of things for ourselves. Indeed, there are a lot of benefits to following our evolutionary logic that we can see a little more inductively, such as with food. When we eat what our evolutionary diet consisted of, we find our health in a better state and our bodies naturally adapt to the mechanisms that they’ve been “programmed” by evolution to have. We know that there are lots of different activities humans engage in that are both evolutionary in their motivation but on the flip side that, they are things which our genes sort of “hope” we will partake in, like physical exercise as another example.

In the process of gaining true self-sufficiency, none of us will be perfect, especially given the increasing learning curve that we have seen arrive in the modern world. I feel I can make no mistake in making that assumption, either, the contemporary environment we find ourselves living in is vastly more complex than what it was previously due to our own advancements in technology, both mental and physical, as a species. But just because we will not be perfect does not mean that we should not try! I would argue that on average, as an individual, one probably leaves too much to chance by leaving so much of their locus of control to outside influences.

Looking at this argument from a rational perspective of self interest, it makes sense that by providing for ourselves to the highest extent possible we will also lift what others might feel be the moral obligations to provide for any of our needs and thus improve the quality of the symbiotic relationships we may have with other people, or, just as easily argued: the environment as well. It makes sense on the one hand to say that part of the reason we see people trying so hard to find ways to sustain themselves today is because it’s incentivized but we also know: it just makes reasonable sense and should be the way that things are naturally.

And, for the things that are left over that you have not been able to provide for your own needs, we have the rationality of trade with our neighbors and friends at hand. Human beings have been doing this since the time that there have been human beings.

So what do people need to actually be self sufficient?

Believe it or not, it is not necessarily a very simple answer. Some would argue that true “independence” or even “freedom” itself becomes a little meaningless in the grand scope of all the different material constraints that we have placed on us by our pre-existing conditions we find ourselves born into: our socioeconomic status, our level of education, things like that. To some degree, certainly I would have to agree that this is true. On the other hand, we also know that if people are given the proper tools and trained to deal with different scenarios beforehand, they can be conditioned against making bad choices.

Most importantly, when we are talking about independence: when people learn HOW they are conditioned, they can appropriately recondition themselves by conscious action.

This is something I’ve come to understand by looking at cognitive behavioral theory very thoroughly as a psychology major. On top of understanding the mechanisms of what allows us to respond via our behaviors to various stimuli, though, it might also help if we are equipped with different tools of reasoning that would allow us to make decisions that make good sense. Epistemology comes to mind, for example, where we must give people knowledge of the scientific method, logic, rationality, empiricism, and other important methodologies for discerning what we might call the “functional truth.”

By the way, these things that we’re talking about, these mental systems that allow people to sort of push forward to a more pragmatic method of obtaining better well being and, with evidence, make conclusions about life are things I like to call mental technologies. There are both good and bad mental technologies. In my opinion at present, I would argue that one example of a “good” mental technology might be cognitive-behavior theory in psychology while another “bad” example might be that of the Law of Attraction, commonly known from popular culture.

Science is a funny thing. On the one hand, it allows us to develop some things that work with beautiful consistency but at the same time we also have this weird philosophical problem of that consistency always facing the possibility of coming under challenge or existing with some sort of presupposed deceptive element in how we interpret our data. For the purposes of the self-sufficient, “independent” type of individual, we should understand that we really need to be leaning more toward the first idea I mentioned: science can show us how things work with consistency and we should trust what is there before us when it is consistent. Or, in other words, we should trust what is empirical and we can observe. You might also see my response to one reader about the potential of limitations of science in searching for truth.

Without tools of proper reasoning, the individual can potentially be deemed powerless. We also know that a host of other factors can affect both your perceptions and your ability to reason well. A wide array of drugs effectively limit your ability to reason, for instance, as does food! Your brain, along with your identity of course, are about as good as your brain physically is. So, if your brain is damaged, so are you! And, notably, so is your ability to reason. All the same, if you have something that is “out of balance” that affects what conclusions you might make in response to certain stimuli, such as high levels of dopamine or serotonin (able to be manipulated by both drugs and food), then your reasoning could again be as good as mush.

Another thing you might need for self-sufficiency after you have the tools of reasoning would be physical materials. So, if you want to generate your own electricity, you might need solar panels or the actual mechanical components that comprise a wind turbine. Or if you want to make your own clothes, you might need your own cotton or fabric, along with the machine to actually produce the garments.

This is a big one: people need free, cheap access to a giant wealth of information on how to provide for their own needs. I do not think that people necessarily need to learn how to perform their own brain surgery or something else equally as absurd but I do think that people should really have a working knowledge of different tools and how they are used to construct very useful devices or structures. We should all know, for example, how to build a basic chair or table when given some planks of wood, some nails, and a hammer. I’ll go a step further, too, and say that we should also all know some basics on how to place plant seeds into the ground and nurture them to the point where they flourish and grow.

In society, the very idea that information is restricted equates to your freedom and ability to be self sufficient being restricted as well.

Imagine a world in which we reorganized the whole of society to function on the grounds of self sustainability. We would probably see a very different sort of world where, instead of fast food chains everywhere we would see small food markets that were supplied with food from local farm sources. Instead of apartment complexes sprinkled throughout suburbia we would probably see many more small neighborhoods in which people were just a tad more spread out and on each person’s land we would see small collections of crops and sustainable energy sources. People, when in need, would be able to provide for each other by means of rational exchange, since we also know from Long Term Survival and other evidence that helping those close to you is often functionally equivalent to helping yourself. Instead of public institutions holding the gatekeeping authority of scientific journals we would see a lot more individuals becoming their own competent scientists.

Think of all the outside influences that want you to believe things on the basis of their credibility and their “centralized” authority. The World Health Organization, for example, would have you believe that hypersexuality is a form of mental disorder but you are forced to believe it on the grounds of their evidence. An important scientific question: can you replicate their data on your own? What would it require for you to gain the credentials and knowledge needed to conduct such study? (On a side note: the APA does not consider hypersexuality a disorder but there has been a push for sometime to have it included in the DSM, or Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Psychiatric Disorders.) The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention makes biological claims all the time but how many of us are getting out the microscopes? …How many of us have even purchased or own microscopes?g out the microscopes? …How many of us have even purchased or own microscopes? How many of us regularly even crack open a basic biology textbook?!

Now, I’ll leave you with one last proposition. Imagine your individual power with the proper knowledge and methods that would allow you to not be forced to rely on outside sources for your needs. Would you need as much money? Probably not! Would you need social validation? Certainly not. Would you enjoy life more? Probably so. Consider how your life might be different if you’re willing to take the subsistence and self sustainability challenge: how many things would, after the initial difficulty, become easier after you had learned how to provide them for yourself? Imagine having light and air conditioning in your home without having to pay an electric company. Imagine food in your own backyard without having to pay for any groceries at the super market. There are beautiful and delightful possibilities for those of us that will go one step beyond what society has given us and give it to ourselves.

So I hope you will now go, begin your journey toward harnessing the power of your own individual capability. Get off the bad food, invest in your own electricity, plant some edible plants, and most of all: learn how to survive in this modern world without the modern world giving it to you, even in the midst of all its convenient splendor.

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