Have you thought about all the people who saved your life today?

No? Perhaps you should then. Let me explain.

We start off with this marvelous article from the Onion about how we all trust thousands of people with our lives all the time without even thinking about it.

It is a simple but rarely recognized truth about modern life that, at all times, we are surrounded by things other people made. Our lives quite literally depend on those people having done their jobs properly and on the government officials who enforce the standards that keep said people honest and keep them from cutting corners to save a few bucks and increase their own personal wealth at the expense of our health and our lives. (And you just know they would if they could, don’t you?)

Now such is the efficiency of modern society that all this takes places well behind the scenes. The government regulates, the factory operates, the airline pilot navigates, and all we consciously experience if stores full of products that won’t kill us and a world that is, on all levels, far far safer for our lives and our health than any point in history before us.

We take this for granted, despite what a miracle it is. We act as though that is simply the way the world works, that everything is naturally safe and clean and well made. And, in the ultimate act of decadent ingratitude, we even begin to forget that our modern life comes from anywhere at all, and like spoiled children begin to chafe at the very rules which keep us safe and secure.

So hear this, Republicans, Libertarians, and all other anarchists : you are alive right now because some government regulator did their job and prevented the crime – whether corporate or personal – that would have ended your life.

Anything might have done it. A defective car part, either on your vehicle or someone else’s. Someone flying a plane who really shouldn’t, but hey, with no government to issue licenses, anyone can fly a plane into the side of your house killing you and your children without having to take a single lesson. All they need is the money to buy (or even rent) a plane.

Or maybe the house itself would be faulty, and one night, the ceiling on your charming split level bungalow would have caved in due to some small but vitally important fault that only a professional building inspector would have noticed, and you and your parents and your dog would all have died.

But hey, at least nobody had to follow those mean old regulations, huh?

But anyhow, back to the article : what I love the most of it is how post-consumerist it is. The way modern society works is to conceal the machinery that makes modernity work from the population, and the article lays it bare again. It makes us realize that the things we buy don’t come from the store, they come from the labour of hundreds of individuals, all who have lives and families and worries and bosses and none of whom we will ever meet or even know their names.

We have no choice but to simply trust that the enormous gang of strangers who have a part in our lives all do their jobs right and we don’t die.

And they do, and we don’t, and we never wonder why. Such thoughts are incompatible with a consumerist upbringing that says the important thing is buying the right things at the store and never thinking about all the people it took to make this simple and everyday thing happen.

We are taught to think of ourselves as independent self-creating entities unto ourselves, autonomous and beholden to none, with no duty to anything but out own self-interest.

But the truth is, we have never been more dependent on others. In a previous era, you relied mostly on your family and its farm, with a little reliance on the village lord and his knights. At most, your safety depended on perhaps a dozen people doing their jobs right and not getting you killed.

Today, we have no way to rightly measure just how many people have touched our lives. Everything in your environment right this second is the product of the labour and diligence of thousands of people, from the guy who pushed the button to make the industrial press work, to that guy’s foreman who made sure nobody was too sleepy or drunk or inattentive to do their job right, to the quality control people at the plant who make sure no defective products go out, to the government inspectors that keep that whole system honest…. all these people for just one simple inexpensive object.

Why do we hold doctors, policemen, firemen, and soldiers in such high esteem?

Because if someone saves your life, it doesn’t matter if they got paid to do it.

Now think about all the people who saved yours today.