Radical Responsibility = Exquisite Interdependence
Radical personal responsibility is NOT independence.
Radical personal responsibility is the gateway to radically intimate relationships in thriving human networks.
Independence isn’t “real.”
In this world, interdependence is a simple fact. I am constantly put at advantage by the labors of others around me. I depend upon others in every moment of my day.
Interdependence makes radical personal responsibility available to me. It seems paradoxical, but truly, the needs of any human are beyond the doings of any human.
Interdependence is the result of labor stacked and distributed, labors which are more efficient at scale by qualified individuals.
That means that radical personal responsibility goes beyond the personal—or, to say it another way, that the community is an inextricable part of the personal.
Each day I benefit from the labors of others who did things for me that I don’t know how to do. They did this so that I can specialize in offering the world the things I know how to do for more than just myself. Because they did this, it is easy for me to reach for the benefits of their labors in my efforts to take responsibility for myself, including for being who I want to be in the community.
When I want to take responsibility for my inner world, I hire someone who has spent years investigating the relationships within humans and how they work.
When I want to take responsibility for my leaky roof, I hire a roofer.
When I want to take responsibility for my sick friend, I cook a recipe my great grandmother taught me to make—I benefit not just from the recipe, but from her patience with a clumsy young child that has cooking associated to a warm and simple joy in my system.
I drive it in a pot someone else made in a car someone else built over roads someone else installed to a house my friend did not have to build herself and put it on the stove someone else built and someone else delivered and someone else installed.
As I take advantage of all this human labor, it only makes sense to contribute my own to the pot. I see that that is THE POINT of participating at all.
The point is to be in loving relationships. They aren’t sources of nourishment, though I find a kind of nourishment there—relationships are THE POINT of remaining nourished and sticking around, of staying alive and bearing the horrors of existence.
With radical personal responsibility, this becomes abundantly clear. The more I see what it is to be responsible for myself, the more that flows to resource the people I’ve chosen to surround myself with. The more I own my own responsibility for myself, the more it seems I am receiving massive gifts from the world at large, gifts of infrastructure and ease that magnify the impact I might have on this world.
Radical responsibility is personal empowerment. It helps me curate how I participate in the inevitable interdependence of being human. It helps me take advantage of the gifts of the world, and helps put me to the good use of others.
If what we want is exquisite interdependence, the now-moment thing to do is cultivate empowerment, claim radical responsibility, and do exactly and only what is within our locus of control.
