We Are Dependent on Everything Around Us

Buddhism's concept of dependent origination is dialectical and can be applied to socioeconomics, he says. Everything we value from schools to hospitals to roads are the products of countless people working over huge swaths of time stretching back generations. The billionaire is not a rugged individualist who built his empire through grit and hard work but an utterly dependent on scores of working and poor people in order to generate even a single dollar. There is no me in a vacuum, and there is no you in a void. We are literally the entire cosmos waking up here and now in this form from this standpoint.