If you were to take a goldfish out of its fish bowl and place it on the table, it may, if it survives the original shock, wonder what happened to the water. This goldfish had always assumed its environment until it discovered that its assumed view of the world was suddenly shattered. Is it so with humans? Is the view that humans are architects of their own lives of limited value and accuracy?

The view of the self-contained, atomistic view of the individual is cultivated in American life, particularly in the economic sphere, where success and failure are viewed as individual in origin, where one’s place on the social and economic pyramid are traced to possessing or lacking the proper character traits, where individuals failed to take the opportunity to sculpt their own existence.

But every so often we are reminded that we are laced together into larger systems that reveal the interrelatedness of things, our wholesale dependence on others and the limitations of an exaggerated view of individual free will and personal responsibility for what happens to us.

The recent coronavirus crisis serves as a powerful reminder that we are inextricably laced together and not the free-floating, self-contained, self-governing atoms who are at the helm of our ship navigating it to a harbor of our own choosing. Collective identity begins to surface. Does anyone today seriously question the truth and universality of the phrase “No man is an island”?

Charles Scontras

Cape Elizabeth

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