Is it possible to be self-sufficient? No, and that’s ok.

Manu Sharma

Aaron, I see that the term “self-sufficiency” seems to have become someone’s pet peeve. 🙂 But I can assure you that it’s based on a notion of the term that needs to be better informed.

Self-sufficiency does not mean the proverbial man on island who must survive using only the material at his disposal. It does not mean abandonment of everything produced by society, even tools, rejection of community, all organisation and all social institutions.

What you’re referring to is total self-sufficiency, an extreme end of the spectrum of what it means to become self-sufficient. Nobody wants that and nobody means total and absolute self sufficiency when they use that term today.

There are degrees to which one be self-sufficient just as the degrees to which one can be dependent on others. Someone who can fix flat tire of her bicycle is self sufficient in that regard compared to a rider who has never done it and has no clue.

Here’s how Google defines the term (with added emphasis): “needing no outside help in satisfying one’s basic needs, especially with regard to the production of food.” If you regard self sufficiency this way you will see no harm in the way permaculture community uses the term.

Let’s say a family decides to live off grid at a farm. They produce much of their food and prevent rainwater from running off the farm. They are self sufficient in energy, food and water. That’s a wonderful thing regardless of the fact that they may have a couple of cars, a multitude of mobile devices and other industrial goods.

“If our aim is to make the world better…”

Personally, my aim is only to live according to my values. I’m done trying to make the world better. I’m done trying to educate someone or even become an example for others to follow. All are invited to my life and I’ll be happy to explain to those who are curious about it. But I’m not spending one more minute to try to convince those who do not wish to be convinced.

“Knowledge of the truth lies not in proclaiming it but in living it.”
– Book 2

Back to self-sufficiency. I hold it as a fine aspiration and as E F Schumacher writes below in his forward to John Seymour’s “Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency”, self-sufficiency is needed to exercise our inborn creativity.

We can do things for ourselves or we can pay others to do them for us. These are the two “systems” that support us; we might call them the “self-reliance system” and the “organization system”. The former tends to breed self-reliant men and women; the latter tends to produce organization men and women. All existing societies support themselves by a mixture of the two systems; but the proportions Vary.

In the modern world, during the last hundred years or so, there has been an enormous and historically unique shift: away from self-reliance and towards organization. As a result people are becoming less self-reliant and more dependent than has ever been seen in history. They may claim to be more highly educated than any generation before them; but the fact remains that they cannot really do anything for themselves. They depend utterly on vastly complex organizations, on fantastic machinery, on larger and larger money incomes. What if there is a hold-up, a breakdown, a strike, or unemployment? Does the state provide all that is needed? In some cases, yes; in other cases, no. Many people fall through the meshes of the safety net; and what then? They suffer; they become dispirited, even despondent. Why can’t they help themselves? Generally, the answer is only too obvious: they would not know how to; they have never done it before and would not even know where to begin.

John Seymour can tell us how to help ourselves, and in this book he does tell us. He is one of the great pioneers of self-sufficiency. Pioneers are not for imitation but for learning from. Should we all do what John Seymour has done and is doing? Of course not. Total self-sufficiency is as unbalanced and ultimately stultifying as total organization. The pioneers show us what can be done, and it is for every one of us to decide what should be done, that is to say, what we should do to restore some kind of balance to our existence.

Should I try to grow all the food my family and I require? If I tried to do so, I probably could do little else. And what about all the other things we need? Should I try to become a Jack of all trades? At most of these trades I would be pretty incompetent and horribly inefficient. But to grow or make some things by myself, for myself: what fun, what exhilaration, what liberation from any feelings of utter dependence on organizations! What is perhaps even more: what an education of the real person! To be in touch with actual processes of creation. The inborn creativity of people is no mean or accidental thing; neglect or disregard it, and it becomes an inner source of poison. It can destroy you and all your human relationships; on a mass scale, it can – nay, it inevitably will – destroy society.

Contrariwise, nothing can stop the flowering of a society that manages to give free rein to the creativity of its people – all its people. This cannot be ordered and organized from the top. We cannot look to government, but only to ourselves, to bring about such a state of affairs. […]