No one stands alone

It bothers me that there are a large number of successful people who seem to lack gratitude for their success.  They think they did it "on their own".  No one stands alone.  We are all interdependent whether we like it or not.

Now I like to talk about how I have worked all my life as do many others.  Well, I have worked fairly hard, but I haven't achieved my small measure of success all by myself.  To start with my success is with computers and I certainly would be clueless about building my own chip factory and designing a computer from scratch.  My success is directly related to many thousands of people who have helped create a computer industry.


I grow a little food in my back yard.  My skills at this are pretty poor and I am happy that I can buy food at grocery stores.  Without them I would have to learn a lot or starve.  All of us (except for a few) eat food produced by others.  This is a highly efficient system.

I can sew a little bit, but I would be hard pressed to produce clothing for myself.  It is far cheaper for me to work at my own job and buy clothes produced by others.  I would hate to think of living where I might have to weave my own cloth and make all my clothes.

I do a little woodworking and a few repairs on my house, but this is hardly self-sufficiency.  I buy lumber and plywood from Lowes, Home Depot and Big Red (a local place in Petal, MS).  Self-sufficiency would mean cutting trees and making my own lumber.  Even if I decided to do that, I would buy some machinery to make the work easier.

I could go on and on about the things I do that, while creative and useful, are highly dependent upon the work of others.  I will simply conclude that I do nothing "on my own".

Now some people are quite wealthy.  I do not wish to judge whether they should be wealthy or not.  Instead I want to focus on the aspect of being a "self-made" millionaire.  I think this is basically impossible.  For me it is impossible to do anything entirely on my own.  So if you ignore the "entirely" business, you can still think about how one becomes wealthy.  Fundamentally one does not become wealthy by your work.  This is a limit to how much money and individual can make working alone.  Now some surgeons might make quite a lot from their own work, but the really wealthy people make money from the work of others.  They start or run large corporations which employ large numbers of people.  Another possibility for gaining wealth is by "playing" the stock market.  Here again the individual may make very wise decisions, but the wealth is certainly not created by work.

I do not wish to imply that entrepreneurs are not needed or that wealth is bad.  I think a healthy society has a need for all kinds of people.  What I feel is missing in our society is some compassion for others.  It has become popular to bash labor unions and try to blame them for the sorry state of our economy.  I know from the experience of my step-father that without a labor union he might have continued working in cotton fields at dirt cheap wages until he was replaced by machinery which could do the work for even less money.  Labor unions were a large cause of the rise of the middle class in America.  Without them businesses could hire and fire at will.  They would pay as little as they could get away with in order to maximize profits.  A highly technological society will result in high unemployment without some effort by the government to boost employment.  This means that worker would be competing against starving, unemployed people for meager wages.  I hope we don't come to that point.

The businesses and people who think they have made it on their own need a bit of humility.  Even the surgeon who does excellent work for high wages is dependent upon a history of improvements in medicine and large amount of technology for success.  We are all in it together.  No one stands alone.