Interdependence is Deeply Political

Ethan Nichtern’s book, One City: A Declaration of Interdependence, is a collection of extraordinary insights into the experience and practice of interdependence from a Buddhist perspective. The following is his take on the politics of interdependence in the very last chapter, ‘Appendix II: Post-meditation Practice of Interdependence’

“While we can only discuss general principles as guidelines, the actual practice of interdependence involves making very specific choices throughout the day. It is inherently a practice of being political—not only in the conventional sense of the word (although it certainly involves participating in the political process.) Practicing interdependence involves requires constantly examining our lifestyle and making some decisions about what habits to cultivate and what to avoid.

Any time we make a decision with interdependence in mind, we are living a political choice. Voting for someone to represent us is merely an indirect (and often skewed and perverted) extension of the political choices implied by our way of living day in and day out. This type of interdependent politics is far more direct than voting for representatives once every few years. It even transcends the idea of voting with our feet and voting with our dollars. Moment by moment, we are each voting with our minds, casting ballots for the way we would like our community to manifest. This thing called Earth is just the democratic tally of the results of billions of mental votes. Of course, it’s interesting in democratic societies how some people’s votes seem to count much more than others. [ ! ] But awareness consistently empowers individuals to put our moment-by-moment mental votes to work in many more ways than we ever thought possible by just stepping into a voting booth.” (Ethan Nichtern, One City: A Declaration of Interdependence, p. 166-167.)

As much as I loved Nichtern’s book, One City, it consistently presents two flawed views: 1) it is almost entirely focused on individual action and experience, and overlooks the impact of the collective; and 2) it fails to address imbalances of power in the global economy, treating all individual actions as having roughly equal impact. In the paragraph above, I added an exclamation point to point to one of the few places in the book where he addresses the inequality of power: “some people’s votes seem to count more than others.” In other chapters of the book, especially Ch. 8 ‘Gotta Get Paid’, he admits the overwhelming power of corporations under capitalism, but then decides that we can’t do anything about it because as much as we object to them, we’re also dependent on them (paraphrasing).

From Ch. 8, ‘Gotta Get Paid’:
“When we take time to investigate our livelihood, it might become apparent that our hard work supports certain (un)ethical structures that we wouldn’t support in our personal lives. That can require a lot of guilt and denial to make it through each day. Maybe we feel it is impossible to use our work to make a positive difference . . . However as my friend’s realization about the NGOs demonstrates, the existence of that which we consider saintly labour is so deeply intertwined with whatever we consider the devil’s work that any attempt to segregate them eventually falls apart in laughter.” (Ethan Nichtern, One City: A Declaration of Interdependence, p. 126). Again, paraphrasing, ‘we are so deeply embedded in this system of global capitalism that we can’t resist it without whopping amounts of guilt and denial, and it’s a joke to even try.’

Where Nichtern’s analysis falls short is that he misses the power of collective action and reorganization of our ways of life that could reduce our over-dependence on systems of global inequality and exploitation. We can collectively organize work that produces not only resilience in the face problems caused by such systems, but moral resistance to those same systems. Social movements like Transition Towns propose the collective reorganization of our productive lives at the local level, creating ways of life in which we are more locally and directly interdependent with each other.