Isolate

No one makes it past birth without a community or village to care for them. Care meaning more than providing survival basics—Care, including physical caress. None of us are truly individuals.

Selfishness is a big lie. When independence becomes the watchword of a nation, you can bet it is on a downward path that eventually pits each against all.

Survivalists are isolationists, even if there is an economy-of-scale to stockpile resources as a group. The mentality is the-last-one-standing wins. Essentially survivalists will have to face the threat of cannibalism—eat or be eaten.

To isolate is different from quarantine in that it is a way of life, not a provisional response to a specific situation. Isolate comes to us from the Latin for “island”—isola. This is not an attractive vacation isle, but a self-imposed, marooned-by-a-pirate, deserted island.

By dint of luck and hard work, the fantasy of a Swill Family Robinson can work, but it does so because it is a family (even if it were a family of happenstance and convenience).

With an election nearing, we are facing a glut of isolationist wavers of a Don’t-Tread-on-Me flag. It is fascinating if disturbingly so, to see how tied to one another these lovers-of-independence are.

Ordinarily, cult and independence would be considered an oxymoron should they come anywhere close to one another. Now that pride is then in having a tribal leader deemed more infallible than the Pope, the cutely named figure-of-speech has morphed into a trance dance by those hypnotized by their leader.

Usually, this impetus to self-destructive independence is cared for by waiting for the leader to die. Since this is an election, electoral defeat doesn’t function in the same way. Defeat becomes martyrdom that attracts even more. Once “independence” trumps “general welfare”, it is next to impossible to right the ship. The only option is to creatively become reliant upon one another—something we don’t have any experience in sustaining, for we so easily forget how liable we are to falsely envision independence as a primary virtue.