THIS SECTION IS ILLUSTRATIVE ONLY

Our destinies are shared. Together we thrive, alone we survive.

This section explores one of the most basic foundations of society, the economic structure of "Mutual Dependence". It looks at how it works to provide for all our material needs and the ways in which it fails us when we allow basic respect for one another to dissipate.


Self-substitence

"Self-subsistence" is the state of existence where each individual or family unit provides for all its own needs. On the plus side, it allows us to choose exactly when we work and how much work we do. It allows us to decide exactly how we spend our time - on which food to grow, or what to build and when to take a holiday. But the minus side is overwhelming. When we try to grow things, how do we learn what to do? We are not particularly good at building when we have no tools or materials other than those we have produced ourselves. When we are sick, nothing gets done and there is no-one to look after us. There are no medicines other than those we have picked ourselves - if we know what to pick. In winter, we spend most of our time scavenging for scarce food and trying desperately to keep warm. There are no roads to speak of, no provisions when there is a drought or flood. There is no electricity and absolutely no entertainment.

In the absence of any other way of living, we survive. But it is not a lifestyle many of us would choose.


Mutual Dependence

"Mutual Dependence" is the model for society that most of us prefer. It provides vastly more for the billions of us that embrace it. Mutual Dependence works like this. Each person does something at which they become especially skilled. We achieve our skills by becoming hugely specialised or by having a natural talent or both. Instead of scraping an existence providing all our own food and all our own security and all our own health, we do just a little bit fantastically well. Individually, what we do is no great shakes. But when we combine with hundreds or thousands or millions of others doing their own thing, we produce a range, quality and quantity of goods and services that is almost incomprehensible to the self-sufficient farmer. Alone, we are just far too unskilled and inefficient for self-sufficiency to be any real competition to Mutual Dependence.

But there is one aspect of Mutual Dependence which is fundamental to its workability - trust. When we are self-sufficient, we work to provide for all our needs. The minute we specialise, we forgo providing for most of what we need. A teacher, for example, does not provide cancer care. A farmer does not produce petrol. A coal miner provides neither teaching nor food for his/her family. Specialising clearly benefits everyone. There is only one way we can be persuaded to specialise, to forgo provision of the majority of our needs. We have to trust that all our needs will be provided by a conglomerate of others in exchange for our doing our part to help provide for all theirs. We are happy to become dependent on each other, but only where it is in our interest to do so. As soon as our own needs fail to be provided for, we have to pull back at least a little from providing for others. That pulling back means someone else's needs are not provided for quite as well, which means they, too, will pull back at least a little, and so on.

In short, if we fail to respect the rights of parts of our society, our society fails to live up to its potential.


The importance of respecting rights

It is important to distinguish the extent of our specialisation from the reward for what we do. Some specialising is simply unpaid. Mothers rearing children, for example, carry out a specialist activity and certainly forgo much. Child rearing is about as essential a part of the success of society as it is possible to imagine. Yet society is structured to provide no financial reward for this activity. Conversely, a private brain surgeon or successful entrepreneur can earn a thousand times more than the average earnings for not much more forbearance of personal needs. What impacts on the workings of society is that everyone believes their needs will be better served by specialising than by self-sufficiency.

Respecting the rights of others means respecting their property and respecting their right to live as they choose to live - providing, of course, our own rights are not trampelled as a result. A key element of respecting rights is the legal system. In the enormously complex society in which we live, it is difficult to provide for the rights of everyone equally fairly. Humans do not possess the wisdom or capacity to get it right for everyone, every time in every situation. The legal system is probably the best we can achieve to set out clear rights and to apply those rights objectively. But no legal system will ever be able to provide for every eventuality. If it even tried to, imagine how much inefficiency would be introduced to society.

There is an additional system that provides and protects our rights - basic morality. Every society and culture has a wealth of behaviour that is deemed acceptable by the majority and that which is deemed unacceptable. Acceptable behaviour requires each of us to follow the rules to a greater or lesser degree. When any one individual deviates, it might cause outrage but is unlikely to impact on society as a whole to any great extent. But when large numbers of us choose to turn a blind eye to "bad" behaviour, particularly where we also turn a blind eye to our own "bad" behaviour, it impacts on the rights of others which in turn weakens the trust, not just of the victim but also of the perpetrator. It even impacts on those who just hear about it. It may not be easily visible, but the less we respect the rights of others, the less society provides - which means the less society has to provide for us.

Mutual Dependence provides us all with a standard of living that was unimaginable even 100 years ago. But it comes with this simple basic rule - the more we accommodate abuse of the rights of others, the less society produces for us.