Independence Day
Can be celebrated by
Being dependent

My senior year of college, I took an ethnology course to help finish some core curriculum requirements. What started out as a “have to” course more than a “want to” became one of the most interesting and influential classes of my life.

During one session, my professor discussed different ways that cultures around the world honor deities. In Hinduism, depending on who you talk to, there are somewhere between 33 and 330 million different gods. One of the 330 million is a god of words and reading. There is an area in India that honors this god by disallowing reading for one day. If you see a sign, you must look away. You can’t check the newspaper, or your smartphone. You can’t read a menu at a restaurant, or a letter from your mom.

Apparently, long ago someone discovered that a fantastic way of recognizing the importance of something is to remove it from your life. Think about how much someone lost in the desert values water.

(Before going on, I must apologize. I tried and failed to find a link with information about what I just wrote, which might mean, and probably does mean, it’s all nonsense. But it’s fun to think about anyway, so on we go.)

This Independence Day, Americans can apply the above apocryphal Hindu technique above to independence.

If we’re going to pull this off, we first have to agree on what independence actually is. There are few definitions of “independent” in the dictionary. According to Miriam-Webster’s Dictionary, one of them is:

“Not requiring or relying on something else”. I believe that’s what most Americans think of when independence comes to mind. But is that an honest representation of what it means to be an American these days, or human at all?

On July 4th, while you’re grilling food with your neighbors and enjoying a break from the daily bloodbath in the stock market, take a moment to notice the incredibly complex web of dependence that makes our lives possible.

From a financial standpoint, breaking down the economy into its constituent parts is a great place to start.

The economy can be broken down into 16 sectors. These include oils and energy, basic materials, transportation, industrial products, finance, medical, utilities, computer and technology, aerospace, etc.

These sectors are interdependent. For example, in order to build the technology represented in the computer and technology sector, you will need electricity (utilities), which relies on power generation (oils and energy). You’ll need minerals to build batteries, screens, transistors, and so on (basic materials). You’ll need to transport goods (transportation) using trucks (auto, tires, and trucks), and planes (aerospace) to stores (retail and wholesale). Hopefully you get the idea.

But it doesn’t end there. 266 industries weave through the sectors of the economy. These include electric construction, oil and gas drilling, fertilizers, semiconductors-power, semiconductors-discretes, electronics measuring instruments, etc. Each of these industries has its own layers of interdependence with other industries.

So, when you wake up in bed on July 4th, imagine what a truly independent life would look like. Unless you personally know how to make a memory foam mattress, or a sleep number bed, that wouldn’t be there. When you turn on the bathroom light, you’re relying on fuel supplied to a powerplant, and infrastructure to carry that power to your home, and electrical systems in your home to safely delivery that power to a light in your ceiling, and regulators that ensure all of this doesn’t end with you looking like charcoal.

The light you turn on had to be created from materials mined from the earth, then delivered to a factory somewhere far, far away. That factory then used enormous machines to churn out a huge number of lights at scale. Those lights were then packaged and shipped overseas to a warehouse. With a few taps on the screen of the miraculous rectangle in your pocket, that light can then be shipped to your front door. Blanketing all of this is a network of international regulations governing global trade. Latched on like barnacles to global trade are financial industries managing the valuation, exchange, storage, and ownership of currency.

The point is, dependence is everywhere, and is inescapable. In fact, being able to create incredibly complex interdependent communities is what has allowed humans to endure calamity after calamity for thousands of years. Within my children’s lifetimes, a system of cooperative dependence will bring humans to Mars.

When we celebrate Independence Day, it’s commemorating a moment in time when America declared itself free from dependence on English rule, and the taxes and regulations that came with it. But that merely left America free to create its own systems of dependence.

On the 4th of July, imagine what it might be like if you were truly independent. Imagine turning on a light that doesn’t work, using a switch that isn’t there. Taking a shower, only no water comes out of the showerhead, which isn’t there either. You go to an empty store hoping to find hot dogs, which don’t exist. And to get there you have to walk, because the car you don’t have won’t work anyway. And you’d be walking on bare feet, unless you know how to make your own shoes.

Every time you notice an example of yourself depending on someone or something else, say “thanks” that all of this is here, and that it mostly works.

Happy Independence Day!