The Age of Dependency: How We Lost Our Personal Sovereignty

We’re living through an unprecedented moment of dependency—one where, with each day, we become more reliant on everyone else but ourselves.

Over the last 500 years, capitalism hasn’t just reorganized economies. It has hollowed out sovereignty. It has steadily pulled knowledge out of people’s hands; and at best placed it into systems - markets, supply chains, professional guilds, credential regimes, corporate infrastructures, and state bureaucracies - and at worst simply lost it. The result is a strange historical inversion: this generation has the most access to information ever—and yet we are among the least capable of caring for ourselves without the market. (This is the “loss of competence” problem that Ivan Illich named—how institutions can produce dependence by deskilling ordinary life.)

Look at how fragile ordinary life has become. In war zones and crisis zones, entire cities can lose heat, electricity, and water in a matter of hours. And I understand the obvious reply: that’s war. But the deeper question is: how quickly can “normal life” become war? How quickly can geopolitics or climate shocks or economic collapse turn your everyday dependencies into your emergency? (This is also the “risk society” insight—modernity doesn’t just face risks; it manufactures new, cascading, system-wide vulnerabilities; see also Giddens on “manufactured risk”.)

What’s terrifying isn’t simply violence—it’s the architecture of vulnerability we’ve built around ourselves. We’ve moved into apartment buildings stacked like rabbit cages. We’ve created lifestyles with no land, no buffer, no redundancy: no space to grow food, no capacity to forage, no ability to repair, no knowledge of basic materials, no community infrastructure for survival outside consumption. We’re reliant on supermarkets that can be disrupted in a moment. We’re reliant on systems that concentrate wealth into small pockets while pushing the rest of society closer to the edge—one job loss, one illness, one supply disruption away from panic. (This is the “just-in-time” fragility problem: efficiency for profit replaces redundancy for survival; see also recent supply-chain scholarship on adapting JIT under turbulence.)

Manufactured Consent and the Slow Surrender of Sovereignty

And the irony is brutal: we've gone down this road voluntarily. But “voluntary” isn’t the as simple as it sounds. It’s voluntary inside a system that manufactures consent. Capitalism doesn’t usually seize sovereignty in one dramatic moment—it dangles shiny lives in front of you: jobs, wages, stability, upgrades, phones, vacations, comfort, status. It makes refusal feel irrational, even irresponsible. So yes, we chose it—but we chose it inside a slow, structural seduction that trained us to confuse convenience with security, and consumption with freedom.

We chose convenience, variety, comfort, and speed—more clothes, more options, more devices, more “security”—and traded away the skills and capacities that once made ordinary people resilient. We can’t build our own homes anymore. Many of us don’t know the materials, the processes, the maintenance. We’ve outsourced care, outsourced food, outsourced repair, outsourced medicine, outsourced community, outsourced governance. We’re not sovereign. We’re not autonomous. We’re functionally dependent on a system designed to create billionaires—people with more money than they could ever meaningfully use—while hundreds of millions live in desperation, paycheck to paycheck, without the ability to feed themselves if the markets or global systems stutter. (Polanyi’s old point still lands: when “life” gets disembedded and reorganized around markets, society pays the price.)

Some would call this resource slavery. The label doesn’t even matter. What matters is the lived condition: dependency without control.

And then, when people try to live differently—when they try to go off-grid or re-skill or step outside the sanctioned script—they’re often treated as a threat, or as deviant, or as unfit. The state will say it’s protecting health and safety. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it isn’t. But the deeper contradiction remains: if a state can intervene in people’s lives in the name of safety, doesn’t it also carry responsibility for the systemic conditions that make people unsafe in the first place? (This is the “legibility” problem James C. Scott describes: systems that govern by simplification often fail to recognize practical, local know-how—metis—and then punish what they can’t easily administer.)

Rebuilding Capability: Food Sovereignty, Redundancy, and Resilience

Because what happens if supply systems collapse? What happens if energy grids falter? What happens if a larger conflict spreads? What happens if climate disruption accelerates? What happens when the “normal” dependencies snap?

A hundred years ago, many communities could have absorbed shocks differently—not because life was romantic or easy, but because more people had retained everyday knowledge: how to grow, how to preserve, how to repair, how to heat, how to forage, how to survive with less. And they had the capacity, the space, the land, the community even the commons. Now, most of us don’t. We have information, but not capability, not capacity. We have “access” (at a price), but not sovereignty.

So the core realization isn’t that we need to scare people into some apocalyptic fantasy. It’s simpler, and more unsettling:

We no longer know how to take care of ourselves.

And we should let that sink in—not with panic, but with clarity. Because the point isn’t to glorify rugged individualism or lone-wolf survival. The point is to rebuild sovereignty at the level that actually matters: life. Food. Water. Heat. Shelter. Repair. Care. Community. (This is where “food sovereignty” discourse is actually useful—sovereignty as a collective right to define and build the systems that feed you, not just a private lifestyle choice.)

Sovereignty doesn’t mean “do everything alone.” It means you’re not one disruption away from collapse. It means capacities live with people, not only in systems above them. It means having redundancy—skills, networks, local knowledge, shared infrastructures—so that the future can’t be taken away at a moment’s notice.

Right now, too much of our world is someone else’s: someone else’s supply chain, someone else’s expertise, someone else’s platform, someone else’s electricity, someone else’s permissions. (And the logistics literature is blunt about this: modern life is organized around keeping goods circulating—through choke points, borders, and infrastructures—often with hidden coercion and violence.)

What kind of life is that?

If there’s an answer, it isn’t a bunker. It isn’t a fantasy. It’s a collective return to capability: re-learning what we’ve been trained to forget, rebuilding local infrastructures, reducing dependency where it’s dangerous, and creating forms of everyday life that are resilient by design. (And to be clear: “resilience” has two lives—one as liberation through capability, and one as a political demand to simply adapt to danger rather than transform its causes. That critique matters here; see Evans & Reid and Jonathan Joseph.)

Not because we want to exit the world.

Because we want a world we can actually live in.