Self-realization, the path to a collective Independence!

The word “Independence” is comprised of the two words ‘In’ and ‘Dependence’. ‘In’ represents inner which means self and ‘dependence’ means dependency. Our all actions are dependent on (inner) Self-realization. Self-realization means realizing the true nature of Self. Our all actions are dependent on (inner) Self-realization.

Independence, or self reliance is the virtue by which you are self-supporting in the sense that you consume nothing that you haven’t earned.

Society is highly specialized and inter-dependent, so that few of us would know how to survive without running water, electricity, and a supermarket. We’re also dependent upon our personal relationships. Human brains aren’t fully developed for 18 years, and psychological and financial independence from our parents takes even longer. Moreover, as adults we depend upon others to fill sexual, social, and emotional needs, such as friendship, communication, nurturing, appreciation, learning, love, and touch. The closer a relationship, the more we’re inter-connected.

In a market economy, everyone lives by trade. This does not make independence impracticable. The virtue of independence is to provide one’s own means of subsistence. This means either producing it directly, or indirectly by creating something that someone else wants. Dependence, in this case, would mean relying on charity or favors from friends or family. Or worse, theft in the form of direct stealing from others, or indirect theft through benefits by government.

The most important is the independence of one’s mind.

Independence is not only applicable to production, though. In fact, production isn’t even the most important place where this virtue should be practiced. Life requires man to act in order to achieve his values. This requires the proper use of judgment to not only pick the right values, but to understand the best way of achieving them. To substitute another’s thoughts for yours makes it impossible to judge the accuracy of them. It makes it impossible to build off of them to achieve better understanding. This is the area where independence is most critical. To default on one’s responsibilities is to default on one’s life. The degree to which one abandons his intellectual independence is the degree to which he is helpless to act. The degree to which he cannot pursue his own life and values.

Another area where independence is most useful, is in social interaction.

Many claim that because we’re wired for dependency, “codependency” is normal and shouldn’t be considered a problem. They claim it’s not only natural, but healthy and beneficial to be dependent upon an intimate relationship. They blame the codependency movement for breaking up marriages and people’s loneliness.

We all have dependency needs and healthy relationships can meet those needs and greatly benefit us.

However, codependency’s detractors don’t understand — probably from lack of personal experience — that codependents don’t reap those relationship benefits. Often they’re in unhealthy relationships, and they relate to others in unhealthy ways with patterns of obsession, self-sacrifice, dysfunctional communication, and control, which are both self-destructive and hurtful to others. They’re often abusive or allow themselves to be abused.

‘When dealing with friends or strangers, one needs to earn the benefit of the interaction. To default on this is to accept a reward without cause. Nothing is ever free, though. By accepting the unearned, a man loses his grasp of what it means to earn something. He loses his assurance of his own self-efficacy. Every independent act is a reaffirmation of one’s ability to deal with reality. Every unearned gift is a blow to one’s confidence.’ – by Jeff Landauer and Joseph Rowlands

In social science, a social relation or social interaction is any relationship between two or more individuals. Social relations derived from individual agency form the basis of social structure and the basic object for analysis by social scientists.

Social interactions refer to particular forms of externalities, in which the actions of a reference group affect an individual’s preferences. In the presence of strategic complementarities, social interactions help reconcile the observation of large differences in outcomes in the absence of commensurate differences in fundamentals.

Did selfishness — or sharing — drive human evolution?

Evolutionary theorists have traditionally focused on competition and the ruthlessness of natural selection, but often they have failed to consider a critical fact: that humans could not have survived in nature without the charity and social reciprocity of a group.

Forms of relation and interaction in sociology and anthropology may be described as follows: first and most basic are animal-like behaviors, i.e. various physical movements of the body. Then there are actions – movements with a meaning and purpose.

Then there are social behaviors, or social actions, which address (directly or indirectly) other people, which solicit a response from another agent. Next are social contacts, a pair of social actions, which form the beginning of social interactions.

Social interactions in turn form the basis of social relations. Symbols define social relationships. Without symbols, our social life would be no more sophisticated than that of animals. For example, without symbols we would have no aunts or uncles, employers or teachers-or even brothers and sisters.

In sum, symbolic integrationists analyze how social life depends on the ways we define ourselves and others. They study face-to-face interaction, examining how people make sense out of life, how they determine their relationships.

Can Altruism contribute to Independence?

French philosopher Auguste Comte coined the word altruisme in 1851, and two years later it entered the English language as altruism. Many considered his ethical system – in which the only moral acts were those intended to promote the happiness of others – rather extreme, so meaning 1 evolved. Now universal in evolutionary theory, meaning 2 was coined by scientists exploring how unselfish behaviour could have evolved. It is applied not only to people (psychological altruism), but also to animals and even plants.

Altruists choose to align their well-being with others – so they are happy when others thrive, sad when others are suffering. Essential in establishing strong relationships, most societies acknowledge the importance of altruism within the family. By motivating co-operation rather than conflict, it promotes harmony within communities of any size. Of course, peace within communities does not necessarily herald peace between communities, and the two may even be inversely related.

Altruists broaden their perspectives in an effort to overcome the artificial categories that break up the complex web of life. Altruism is the abdication of claims of power over others. To state that “None of us are worth more and none are worth less than anyone else” is almost a truism, but modern technology has given a new urgency to all such appeals for altruism.

Life on earth is being destroyed at an alarming rate, and evidence is mounting of impending disasters such ecological collapse and climate change that threaten us all. Until a fundamental shift of consciousness occurs, such disasters can only get worse.

Communications technology is boosting altruism and establishing a global consciousness. It is encouraging to see how easily individual acts of altruism can have a global impact (e.g. Wikipedia, free software, or give away websites). In spite of massive investment by the corporate world, a mentality shift in the IT sphere is well underway from scarcity to abundance.

The most effective counter to the spread of altruism is the modern money system, since it is responsible for an unnatural transactional mentality. The inherent conflict in conventional money establishes zero-sum (competitive) relationships between people and organizations – so that those who help others necessarily disadvantage themselves. Such a system places a destructive overemphasis on self which erodes true society, fuelling consumerism and accompanying depression.

Our main project is therefore to help develop an alternative to centralized money. If resistant to selfish attack, an internet-wide gift economy will act as a breeding ground for altruism. Many people would love a chance to ignore money and concentrate instead on helping others.

A decentralized global gift economy system would do just that.

Everything that makes it possible and enjoyable to live is a free gift. For almost all of history, humans never saw the need to buy and sell things, or even to barter. Altruism is its own reward. Positive relationships with others have always been a more natural basis for self-esteem than either material objects or illusions about money or power over others.

The evidence for altruism as a critical part of human nature isn’t limited to anthropology. Studies of 18-month-old toddlers show that they will almost always try to help an adult who is visibly struggling with a task, without being asked to do so: if the adult is reaching for something, the toddler will try to hand it to them, or if they see an adult drop something accidentally, they will pick it up.

However, if the same adult forcefully throws something to the ground, toddlers won’t try to retrieve it: they understand that the action was deliberate and that the object is unwanted. These very young children will even assist (or refrain from helping) with a book-stacking task depending on what they perceive to be the adult’s intention. If the adult clumsily knocks the last book off the top of the stack, the toddler will try to put it back; if the adult deliberately takes the last book off, however, toddlers won’t intervene. Even before kids are taught to chip in — perhaps especially before they are told it’s an obligation — children are less selfish than often presumed.

By uniting altruists everywhere, co-ordinating local acts of altruism in a coherent fashion, the world could finally understand the power of getting back to our altruistic roots and escaping from ‘Win-Lose’, ‘Better-Less than’ thinking.

Is LOVE the Answer?

Plato’s Symposium explains the origins of love by means of a fable: once upon a time all human beings were spherical, and since we’ve split we have always been looking for our ‘other half’.

2,400 years ago, have philosophers got any further on the subject of love?

Philosophical discussions often distinguish between three types of love: eros (sexual love), agape (the love of God for man and man for God, the ‘charity’ of I Corinthians 13), and philia, which rolls up care and companionship and disinterested concern – among other things. But are there really as many as even these three?

The nature of God’s love for man is a theological not a philosophical question, and even if philosophers were competent to pronounce upon it, surely the nature of God’s love can have little to teach us about the psychology of imperfect humans, so let’s set agape on one side. That leaves eros and philia.

Freud was suspicious of the distinction: he thought that not only a couple’s love for one another, but the parent’s love for the child and the child’s for the parent were basically of the same kind, because ‘really’ sexual. But to make this come out true, he expanded the notion of the sexual so broadly as to empty it of any meaning. Nonetheless he was on to something. How can a little girl and her mother be rivals for the father’s love if there isn’t one thing – plain love – that they’re competing for?

What developmental psychologists call the attachment system is part of the biological endowment which human beings, as a species, possess as a result of natural selection. We have all heard of the unignorable pitch of a baby’s screams, but don’t forget the unignorable charm of a baby’s smile: via their attachment to a very small number of special others, vulnerable human infants enlist those others’ care, and this helps them to survive to maturity. (It kicks in later in human than in primate young, perhaps because – historically – human mothers were more likely to die in childbirth, so attachment to that special other at too young an age was a bad bet.)

The rootedness of human love in the biology of attachment helps to solve some other puzzles about love which trouble philosophers. One is the relationship between love and reasons. Lovers are expected to have something to say in answer to the question ‘Why do you love me?’. But even when we believe the answers fully as we say them – which we don’t always: ‘the most beautiful baby in the world’ – the answers we provide (‘your sense of humour’, ‘your sparkling brown eyes’) are often highly generic, features shared by countless other people. And yet we wouldn’t swap our loved ones for anyone else. (At this point philosophers often say ‘not even for an exact replica’, but surely losing a loved one and getting a replica would make things a whole lot worse.)

Attachment theory helps to explain why the reasons we give for our loves are so unhelpfully general compared to the absolute non-substitutability of our loved ones: before reason even gets a look in, nature does the work, via our attachment system, of hooking us up with just that person, and only a few times over in any human life.

Attachment also helps to dig the philosophy of love out of one more hole. This is the question whether love by definition involves respect, or care, or constancy, or intimacy, or various other good things. It looks like it might, until we remember lovers (and loved ones) who are overpowering, or possessive, or dependent, or neglectful – the list of the ways love can trap or diminish lives as well as fulfil them goes on and on. But didn’t Shakespeare himself say ‘Love is not love that alters when it alteration finds’? He did, but that isn’t Shakespeare’s attempt at a definition of love – why would a poet be in the business of giving definitions? – but his expression of an ideal of love, something love lives up to when it’s at its best.

Now according to attachment theory, our primitive disposition to form attachments comes in different styles – secure (warm and accepting of the other’s independence), insecure-avoidant (respectful but remote), and so on. So it helps to explain how the variously imperfect forms taken by human love – respectful of differences or not, caring or neglectful, cool or warm or clingy – can nonetheless be elaborations of a single basic phenomenon. Could ‘attachment’ be a top ten search term in 2015?

Thanks to: Edward Harcourt, Faculty of Philosophy, University of Oxford, and Keble College, Oxford University

“There is a power in love that our world has not discovered yet. Jesus discovered it centuries ago. Mahatma Gandhi of India discovered it a few years ago, but most men and most women never discover it. For they believe in hitting for hitting; they believe in an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth; they believe in hating for hating; but Jesus comes to us and says, “This isn’t the way.” And this morning, I think of the fact that our world is in transition now. Our whole world is facing a revolution.” Martin Luther King, Jr.

The Lost Meaning of Independence – GREAT READ