The phrase “liabilities of success” describes the price that human beings pay for their previous successes. The successes we enjoy work to convince us of our own superiority and erode our ability to learn from others.
Alertness is required to overcome the negative effects of success. Transcending one’s ego, fanning the embers of constructive self-doubt and questioning one’s superiority are necessary for growth.
At a global level, experts on the rise and fall of civilizations sound a dire warning. The gaze of superiority that the so-called developed nations cast upon the “third world” places the developed world at risk of self-sabotage from pompous complacency.
As one example, despite being a technologically advanced society, COVID’s toll was far greater on America than it was on many of the so-called less-developed countries.
What if we were to ask: What can be learned from cultures that we dismiss as primitive? Those who have traveled globally will recognize that a striking feature of American society is the degree of fierce individualism.
In stark contrast is the spirit of interdependence, collectivism, mutual care and reciprocity visible in so many resilient cultures that are dismissed as “third world.”
In the United States, with the decline in social and economic indicators of wellbeing and rising levels of inequality, even basic services like childcare, nutritious food, health care and quality education are becoming elusive.
There is a growing sense of disappointment with the ways in which formal institutions of both the private and public sector have failed to adequately address human needs. In response, mutual aid networks have emerged around the country to meet the needs of marginalized communities, as this Bloomberg article by Ariel Eberg-Rieger beautifully documents.
Such networks, for the most part, are largely confined to marginalized communities. But mainstream America could benefit from following their example.
We have much to learn from the spirit of communal interdependence in the so-called “third world.” As the Indian mystic Osho stated, human consciousness progresses from dependence to independence, but reaches its ultimate flowering only in the fine art of interdependence.
Despite a recent growth in mutual aid networks, the American middle class appears to be trapped inside the box of formal institutional mechanisms, overwhelmed by the pressures of everyday living and by high levels of insecurity from the absence of safety nets.
We need to be dreaming up newer forms of self-organizing powered not by individualism, but by network-based thinking.
An illustration of an emerging mutual aid network in mainstream society is an initiative bubbling up among my colleagues at Baldwin Wallace University. A group of faculty and staff are convening a “mutual caring consortium” to address emergencies arising out of accidents and medical events.
A campuswide email inviting people to join this voluntary group immediately elicited over 60 expressions of interest.
The vision is that members can communicate a need in the event of an accident or a healthcare emergency, and colleagues who are available can respond and assist with picking up prescriptions, bringing meals, fetching groceries, running errands, arranging logistics and transportation, and providing emotional support.
Such mutual caregiving consortiums could well become a national prototype for employees in business and government organizations where the more conventional, bureaucratic, salaried, individualistic, middle-class mindset exists.
Projects in self-organizing are a viable method of restoring a spirit of community in mainstream American life, cementing social bonds and helping heal the crisis in mental and emotional wellbeing.