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Every human being is born with extraordinary potential.
The capacity to learn, to create, to solve problems, and to contribute—these are universal human traits. They don't belong only to the privileged or the lucky. They're part of what makes us human.
Yet we have built systems that systematically prevent this potential from developing.
How Potential Develops
Human potential doesn't develop automatically. It requires:
Challenge: We grow when we face problems slightly beyond our current capability. Without challenge, we stagnate.
Feedback: We need to know whether our efforts succeed or fail. Without feedback, we can't improve.
Consequences: Our choices must matter. Without consequences, we have no reason to choose wisely.
Responsibility: We must own our outcomes. Without responsibility, we don't fully engage.
This is how humans have developed potential for thousands of years. Challenge, feedback, consequences, and responsibility—remove any one, and growth stops.
How Dependency Systems Block Development
Now consider what dependency systems do:
They remove the challenge: If someone else solves your problems, you never develop problem-solving skills.
They obscure feedback: When outcomes are collective rather than individual, you can't tell whether your efforts made any difference.
They eliminate consequences: When bad choices are subsidized and good choices are penalized, consequences disappear.
They transfer responsibility: When you're told that your outcomes are society's responsibility, you stop owning them.
Dependency systems don't fail to develop human potential by accident. They fail by design. The very features that make them "compassionate"—removing hardship, guaranteeing outcomes, transferring responsibility—are precisely what prevent human growth.
The Tragedy of Unrealized Potential
Walk through any community trapped in generational dependency and you'll see it: human potential that was never allowed to develop.
Young people who could have built businesses never learned entrepreneurship because the system provided just enough to survive on. Adults who could have mastered trades never developed skills because there was no pressing need. Elders who could have passed down wisdom, but whose wisdom was overwritten by institutional rules.
This is the real tragedy of collectivism—not that it fails to deliver promised outcomes (though it does), but that it destroys the human capacity that might have produced better outcomes than anyone promised.
The Self-Reliance Alternative
Self-reliance doesn't guarantee success. It guarantees something more important: the conditions under which human potential develops.
When you must solve your own problems, you become a problem-solver. When you experience consequences, you learn from them. When you own your outcomes, you fully engage with them. When you face challenges, you grow to meet them.
The self-reliant person may sometimes fail. But in the process of trying, they develop capabilities they never would have developed otherwise. Their potential actualizes rather than atrophies.
The Compassion Illusion
Defenders of dependency systems claim compassion as their motivation. They want to help people, to reduce suffering, and to provide security.
But what's compassionate about preventing human beings from becoming what they're capable of becoming?
What's kind about ensuring that someone's potential never develops?
What's loving about a system that trades lifelong development for temporary relief?
True compassion gives people what they need to grow—which is often challenge, feedback, consequences, and responsibility. False compassion removes these things in the name of "help," ensuring that growth never occurs.
The Path Forward
Developing human potential at scale requires:
Teaching capability rather than providing outcomes
- Allowing natural consequences rather than subsidizing all failures
- Expecting responsibility rather than accepting excuses
- Presenting challenges rather than smoothing all paths
This is harder than writing checks. It's more demanding than running programs. It requires faith that human beings, when given the opportunity and necessity, will rise to meet challenges.
But it works. It's worked for all of human history. And it's the only approach that treats human beings as what they are: potential waiting to be developed, not problems waiting to be managed.
Read the book: The Talent of Self-Reliance: The Case for the Republic over the Misery of the Collective
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