Reliance vs. Dependency: How Communities Either Build or Diminish Agency

A critical distinction separates dependency from reliance, and conflating the two causes genuine harm. Dependency, in the pejorative sense, diminishes agency — it renders a person less capable outside the group, more enmeshed in structures that substitute for selfhood rather than strengthening it. Reliance, by contrast, names something fundamentally different: a form of mutual belonging rooted in the recognition that human beings are inherently porous, that we participate in one another, and that this participation — when it enhances rather than erodes agency — is constitutive of Personhood rather than a threat to it.

This distinction defines the razor's edge that any serious community of practice must walk. The Buddha, the Dharma, the Sangha: the sangha is always necessary. But the decisive question is whether the sangha cultivates one's capacity to live well in the world or substitutes for it. A cult collapses reliance into dependency, making the container indispensable. A genuine community of practice — a dojo, a temple, a school at its best — does the opposite, forming bonds and practices that sustain people across a lifetime, including in contexts far beyond the original container.

Planned obsolescence, rightly understood, emerges as the proper telos of such communities. It is not abandonment but the deliberate cultivation of capacities — muscles, skills, habits of attention — such that the Scaffolding can eventually be released. The community succeeds precisely to the degree that its members can carry its gifts into the wider world without needing to remain inside it. The goal is not self-sufficiency as isolation, but agency enriched by belonging.