Employing Interdependence Quotes

Nature’s ultimate goal is to foster the growth of the individual from absolute dependence to independence — or, more exactly, to the interdependence of mature adults living in community. Development is a process of moving from complete external regulation to self-regulation, as far as our genetic programming allows. Well-self-regulated people are the most capable of interacting fruitfully with others in a community and of nurturing children who will also grow into self-regulated adults. Anything that interferes with that natural agenda threatens the organism’s chances for long-term survival. Almost from the beginning of life we see a tension between the complementary needs for security and for autonomy. Development requires a gradual and ageappropriate shift from security needs toward the drive for autonomy, from attachment to individuation. Neither is ever completely lost, and neither is meant to predominate at the expense of the other. With an increased capacity for self-regulation in adulthood comes also a heightened need for autonomy — for the freedom to make genuine choices. Whatever undermines autonomy will be experienced as a source of stress. Stress is magnified whenever the power to respond effectively to the social or physical environment is lacking or when the tested animal or human being feels helpless, without meaningful choices — in other words, when autonomy is undermined. Autonomy, however, needs to be exercised in a way that does not disrupt the social relationships on which survival also depends, whether with emotional intimates or with important others—employers, fellow workers, social authority figures. The less the emotional capacity for self-regulation develops during infancy and childhood, the more the adult depends on relationships to maintain homeostasis. The greater the dependence, the greater the threat when those relationships are lost or become insecure. Thus, the vulnerability to subjective and physiological stress will be proportionate to the degree of emotional dependence. To minimize the stress from threatened relationships, a person may give up some part of his autonomy. However, this is not a formula for health, since the loss of autonomy is itself a cause of stress. The surrender of autonomy raises the stress level, even if on the surface it appears to be necessary for the sake of “security” in a relationship, and even if we subjectively feel relief when we gain “security” in this manner. If I chronically repress my emotional needs in order to make myself “acceptable” to other people, I increase my risks of having to pay the price in the form of illness. The other way of protecting oneself from the stress of threatened relationships is emotional shutdown. To feel safe, the vulnerable person withdraws from others and closes against intimacy. This coping style may avoid anxiety and block the subjective experience of stress but not the physiology of it. Emotional intimacy is a psychological and biological necessity. Those who build walls against intimacy are not self-regulated, just emotionally frozen. Their stress from having unmet needs will be high.

TZEDAKAH is a Hebrew word commonly translated as “charity.” One Jewish leader described tzedakah as having eight levels of charitable giving. The eighth and highest level of giving is described like this: “The highest form of charity is to help sustain a person before they become impoverished by offering a substantial gift in a dignified manner, or by extending a suitable loan, or by helping them find employment or establish themselves in business so as to make it unnecessary for them to become dependent on others.” Serve others in a way that helps them become self-reliant (or interdependent) and watch miracles happen for both you and them.

There are other noteworthy characteristics of this rock art style: Anthropomorphs without headdresses instead sport horns, or antennae, or a series of concentric circles. Also prominent in many of the figures' hands are scepters--each one an expression of something significant in the natural world. Some look like lightning bolts, some like snakes; other burst from the fingers like stalks of ricegrass. Colorado Plateau rock-art expert Polly Schaafsma has interpreted these figures as otherworldly--drawn by shamans in isolated and special locations, seemingly as part of a ceremonial retreat. Schaafsma and others believe that the style reflects a spirituality common to all hunter-gatherer societies across the globe--a way of life that appreciates the natural world and employs the use of visions to gain understanding and appreciation of the human relationship to the earth. Typically, Schaafsma says, it is a spirituality that identifies strongly with animals and other aspects of nature--and one that does so with an interdependent rather than dominant perspective. To underscore the importance of art in such a culture, Schaafsma points to Aboriginal Australians, noting how, in a so-called primitive society, where forms of written and oral communication are considered (at least by our standards) to be limited, making art is "one means of defining the mystic tenets of one's faith.

But perhaps a compromise lies where Augustine’s checklists leave you, when you do have room to maneuver. You lean, bend, or tilt in a certain direction when choosing between order and justice, war and peace, Caesar and God. You’re aligning aspirations with capabilities, for in Augustine’s thinking justice, peace, and God fit the first category, while order, war, and Caesar inhabit the second. Alignment, in turn, implies interdependence. Justice is unattainable in the absence of order, peace may require the fighting of wars, Caesar must be propitiated—perhaps even, like Constantine, converted—if man is to reach God. Each capability brings an aspiration within reach, much as Sun Tzu’s practices tether his principles, but what’s the nature of the tether? I think it’s proportionality: the means employed must be appropriate to—or at least not corrupt—the end envisaged. This, then, is Augustine’s tilt: toward a logic of strategy transcending time, place, culture, circumstance, and the differences between saints and sinners.

Nothing within the cosmos contains the ground of its own being. To use an old terminology, every finite thing is the union of an essence (its “what it is”) with a unique existence (its “that it is”), each of which is utterly impotent to explain the other, or to explain itself for that matter, and neither of which can ever be wholly or permanently possessed by anything. One knows of oneself, for instance, that every instant of one’s existence is only a partial realization of what one is, achieved by surrendering the past to the future in the vanishing and infinitesimal interval of the present. Both one’s essence and one’s existence come from elsewhere—from the past and the future, from the surrounding universe and whatever it may depend upon, in a chain of causal dependencies reaching backward and forward and upward and downward—and one receives them both not as possessions secured within some absolute state of being but as evanescent gifts only briefly grasped within the ontological indigence of becoming. Everything that one is is a dynamic and perilously contingent synthesis of identity and change, wavering between existence and nonexistence. To employ another very old formula, one’s “potential” is always being reduced or collapsed into the finitely “actual” (always foreclosing forever all other possibilities for one’s existence), and only in this way can one be liberated into the living uncertainty of the future. Thus one lives and moves and has one’s being only at the sufferance of an endless number of enabling conditions, and becomes what one will be only by taking leave of what one has been. Simply said, one is contingent through and through, partaking of being rather than generating it out of some source within oneself; and the same is true of the whole intricate web of interdependencies that constitutes nature.

In his book-length review of the executive functions, Dr. Russell Barkley (2012) explored the reasons that these skills evolved in humans in the first place. He makes the compelling case that it was the selection pressures associated with humans living in larger groups of genetically unrelated individuals, which made it selectively advantageous to have good self-regulation skills. That is, these abilities became more important to survival as humans became more interdependent with and reliant on dealings with people who were not family. Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and executive dysfunction continue to have effects on the myriad relationships and social interactions in daily life. These connections include romantic and committed relationships/marriage, relationships with parents, siblings, children, and other relatives, friendships, and interactions with employers, coworkers, and customers. The executive functions in relationships also figure in the capacity for empathy and tracking social debt, that is, the balance of favors you owe others and favors owed to you. The ability to effectively organize behavior across time in goal-directed activities gains you “social collateral.” That is, the more you deliver on promises and projects, the more that you will be sought out by others and maintain bonds with them. Some of the common manifestations of ADHD and executive dysfunction that may create problems in relationships include: • Distractibility during conversations • Forgetfulness about matters relevant to another person • Verbal impulsivity—talking over someone else • Verbal impulsivity—saying the “wrong thing” • Breaking promises (acts of commission, e.g., making an expensive purchase despite agreeing to stay within a household budget) • Poor follow-through on promises (acts of omission, e.g., forget to pick up dry cleaning) • Disregarding the effects of one’s behavior on others (e.g., building up excessive debt on a shared credit card account) • Poor frustration tolerance, anger (e.g., overreacting to children’s behavior) • Lying to cover up mistakes • Impulsive behaviors that reduce trust (e.g., romantic infidelity)

Within the framework of bourgeois society (and the capitalist regime) work is lived and undergone by the worker as an alien and oppressive power. Not only do the technical division and the social division of labour overlap and impose themselves on him without his knowing the reasons why, but also he knows that he is not working for himself, either directly or indirectly. Moreover the fragmented character of individual labour is in fact interdependent with the increasingly complete socialization of productive labour. Fragmentation and socialization are the dialectically contradictory aspects of the labour process wherever the productive forces are highly developed. Fragmented labour can only be meaningful and productive within global or total labour. Thus for the worker a dual need develops in respect of his own labour. "On the one hand, the worker aspires to a knowledge of the system in which he plays an integral part: a firm, and also a global society. And this is already a means of not submitting, a freeing himself from imposed constraints, of mastering necessity. In capitalist firms this confused but real aspiration is answered in a mystifying way by 'human relations' and 'public relations'. Marxists who have criticized these recent, originally American, institutions have made the mistake of merely seeing the ideology they embody, and of ignoring the fact that they correspond to a real social need, born precisely from the socialization of labour. They have disregarded this socialization of labour, imagining that it happens only in socialist regimes, whereas it is in fact also a function of the development of the productive forces. They have not understood that in socialism knowledge satisfies a need which under capitalism is answered by an ideology. Reciprocally, the mistake of the non-Marxist industrial sociologists has been that they have not always shown that these innovations (human relations, etc.) were responding to needs purely in order to harness them, twist them, deflect them from their meaning, by reducing them to the dimensions of the firm and to cooperation with the employers. "Moreover, the worker craves a sharp break with his work, a compensation He looks for this in leisure seen as entertainment or distraction. "In this way leisure appears as the non-everyday in the everyday. (61-2)

From uncertainty one doesn’t become any more uncertain. It’s like hitting rock bottom--and from rock bottom, the only place left to go is up. So, what exists with both certainty and uncertainty is an interdependent system; a world, situation or whatever you want to call it that only occurs based on the evolution and existence of the other. No matter what system you employ to defeat the other, there are certain principles that govern certitude in human nature. For instance, you can’t have trust without honesty. Likewise, there can be no learning without humility, no selflessness without service, no innovation without disruption, no leadership without followership, and no fitness without “fatness” (kidding, but you get my point). What I’m trying to say is that each element depends on its reciprocal for two things: Its existence Its solution