Thomas Merton and Interdependence

I have lately begun perusing Thomas Merton's Seven Storey Mountain once again. I've been interested in him for some time, at least since I first moved to Kentucky five years ago and saw his name on a list of famous people who had lived here. I purchased his famous autobiography over a year ago, but it has unfortunately just joined the seemingly bottomless stack of unread books on my floor and shelves. Earlier this evening I had just read a passage in H.H. The Dalai Lama's book The Power of Compassion on the topic of interdependence. Funnily enough, shortly after I picked up SSM and flipped it to a random page. This is what I read:

“You cannot live for your own pleasure and your own convenience without inevitably hurting and injuring the feelings and interests of practically everybody you meet. But, as a matter of fact, in the natural order no matter what ideals may be theoretically possible, most people more or less live for themselves and for their own interests and pleasures or for those of their own family or group, and therefore they are constantly interfering with one another’s aims and hurting one another and injuring one another, whether they mean it or not.”

I seem to encounter coincidences like these almost every day. Perhaps it has something to do with reading the same types of writers all of the time, but nevertheless, this intrigued me. I am no longer near my books, so I cannot track down the specific passage from the Dalai Lama that I read earlier, but he apparently echoes Merton's sentiments regularly:

A young child's affection does not come through faith; it is naturally very strong. I think the mistake we make is that when we're grown up, we start to think we're independent. We think that in order to be successful we don't need others—except maybe to exploit them! This is the source of all sorts of problems, scandals, and corruption. But if we had more respect for other people's lives—a greater sense of concern and awareness—it would be a very different world. We have to introduce the reality of interdependence. Then people would discover that, according to that reality, affection and compassion are essential if anything is ever going to change.

It is no secret that America, perhaps more than any other nation on earth, falls victim to the myth of independence to which both Merton and the Dalai Lama reference. Whether we are discussing financial productivity and success, or, on the other hand, the search for spiritual fulfillment like that which Merton documents from his own life in SSM, we find that society's subtle emphasis is on independence and narcissism. We see this in politics, where wealthy business owners extoll the virtues of the free market and limited government without taking into consideration that the government--which is to say the society as a whole--is in large part responsible for establishing the rules of the road that make it possible to be a successful businessman to begin with! We are reared in this country, by and large, to believe in the virtues of fierce independence.

And yet--as we see, it is only through recognition of our precious interdependence that we will find happiness and compassion.