A speaker in our ward this past Sunday talked about self-reliance, reading the Church’s definition of this term as “The ability, commitment, and effort to provide the spiritual and temporal necessities of life for self and family.” The best part of this definition is that it includes both “spiritual” and “temporal” necessities. These two ideas, spiritual and temporal, are usually thought of as a conceptual divide, a way of categorizing everything into either one or the other. But our doctrine also pushes back against this binary in a way, teaching that everything is ultimately spiritual from God’s perspective.

Does this mean that culture is spiritual? When we are creative, are we also being spiritual?

I’m not sure that there is a direct relationship between these concepts. I’m sure that we can be creative and evil, and that culture can lead us astray. But I also believe that culture is vital and pervasive—we often don’t realize its effects, much like David Foster Wallace’s famous “This is Water” address—our culture is so pervasive we don’t even realize that it is there. It may be that the greatest evils of our day are those that are so embedded in our culture that we don’t even see them.

So, if culture is this important and so unnoticed, is it possible and desirable to be culturally self-reliant? And if so, what does that mean?

One problem with the idea of self-reliance is that it is so individual—we somehow think that being self-reliant means that you are so independent of others that you don’t need them. The idea often gets translated into a family in their castle with years of food storage and enough arms to fight off an army. Even more moderate views of self-reliance focus on independence from others. But this focus on independence is very problematic. Living independent of others is neither healthy nor really possible. We all need others, and we live in societies of people, increasingly societies that involve hundreds of thousands and millions of people. Those that try to live without others inevitably have emotional and mental difficulties. We need others in our lives, including our families, extended families, friends, acquaintances AND STRANGERS. We cannot be truly independent.

In this light, the Church’s definition is important, because it is not about being isolated from others, but rather about our relationships with others. Self-reliance isn’t about being independent, but about our contributions to society. I think of it more along the lines of “am I contributing more than I am taking from society?” Am I helping the group, or am I using its resources?

Even this definition has its problems. We all have times in our lives when we take more than we contribute. We were all infants once, requiring others to feed and clothe us. Many of us will have temporary, or even permanent times in our lives when we are recipients of the help of others. Disease and infirmities as well as economic failures mean we take from others. A few of us are even born with deficiencies, physical or mental, that mean we will never contribute to society. They literally cannot be ‘self-sufficient.’

So, given this understanding of self-reliance, what about culture and creativity?

Like it or not, we all need culture. Culture arises from the interactions in groups of people. We develop customs and norms for how we work together and how we teach and entertain one another. Culture is everything from how we greet each other, to how we structure our societies, to how we spend time together and how we communicate deep concepts to each other. There is no such thing as not having culture. As I alluded to above, its the water we swim in, and I don’t believe we can survive without some kind of culture.

So what do I mean by ‘cultural self-reliance’? Its simple: are we contributing more to society than we are consuming?

We often reduce culture to entertainment, and we assume that contributions to society come from those who are “talented”. We assume there is a class of person who is “creative”, and that we are not in that class. A large influence on this thinking is due to the development of entertainment over the last 200 years. Where entertainment was once based in the home, with members of a family and friends sitting around the kitchen table telling stories, or singing, we now have “professionals” who are “creative people” providing that entertainment through a variety of technologies, from books to records to television to the internet and streaming services. We have switched form participating in entertainment to consuming entertainment. While in general the quality of the entertainment has improved, our expectations of quality have also increased, and our personal participation has broadly decreased. And as a result, we are consumers, not providers. We receive culturally more than we give. We are not self-reliant.

Why is this a problem?

We teach that we are children of Heavenly Parents, who are creators. And we teach that our purpose here on this earth is to become like them. Therefore, we are destined to be creators—we are meant to be creative!  When the teacher in a lesson at church yesterday said that they were “not a creative person,” I wanted to interrupt and say, “No, you are creative. We are all creative by nature. Our destiny is to be creative.” If we are meant to become like our Heavenly Parents, how could we not be, by nature, creative?

Our business-influenced culture in the West applies the ideas of the Industrial Revolution, which have, admittedly, led to huge improvements in the quality of our lives, to every part of our lives, leading to specialization, mass production and society-wide assumptions about what constitutes “quality” and what is “good”, which, when it comes to cultural goods, aren’t necessarily so. And in terms of entertainment, it has alienated most of us from participating in our own entertainment and culture. We are suffering from too much of a good thing. What has succeeded in other areas of life is impoverishing us individually. We are worse for it.

So, what do we need to do to become culturally and creatively self-reliant?

We need to participate. We need to find ways in our lives to be creative, to learn what we need to know to become creative like our Heavenly Parents. We can start by removing from our brains the idea that we are “not creative people.”

And perhaps we can start by making sure we are creating and participating as much as we are consuming our culture.