anbuend wrote:
No.
But none of you who said you do live independently either. It's impossible.
The line between independent and dependent in most people's minds, isn't based on who is independent and who is dependent, it is based on whether the person needs certain kinds of help that are commonplace and unremarked upon, or whether the person also needs kinds of help that are not commonplace.
In other words, an illusion. Everyone is dependent/interdependent, not independent. Independence is a societal lie.
Sure, in the strict sense of the word nobody's 100% independent. That would amount to being completely alone all the time, with complete self-sufficiency, growing your own food, generating your own power, etc. But here, "are you independent" means "do you need significantly more help than most people would, for your general living tasks?" There are degrees of independence.
That said, it's amazing how people can imagine themselves to be totally independent when a moment's reflection would tell them that nobody is. Perhaps that's why so many people think that competition is the solution to our economic woes rather than the problem....dependency expresses itself through co-operation, not through competition, or so I would have thought.
"The human being is in the most literal sense a political animal not merely a gregarious animal, but an animal which can individuate itself only in the midst of society. Production by an isolated individual outside society ... is as much of an absurdity as is the development of language without individuals living together and talking to each other."