When Communities Are Self-Reliant They Do Not Need Giant Remote Bureaucracies to Survive.

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The Teton Dam disaster produced something Randall considers a genuinely beautiful example of a principle he holds deeply. When the dam failed, people came spontaneously from far and wide to help with relief and rescue efforts - not because a government agency organized them, not because a bureaucracy directed them, but because the situation demanded a response and communities responded. That spontaneous mobilization is, Randall argues, the American spirit made visible.

The word he reaches for to define that spirit is self-reliance - and he applies it at every level simultaneously. Individual self-reliance. Community self-reliance. State level self-reliance. The more that capacity exists at each of those levels, the less any of them need to depend on what Randall describes as giant, outsized, remote bureaucracies that are structurally removed from the communities they are supposed to serve. The Teton Dam response demonstrated what happens when the capacity for self-reliance is present and activated - people show up, communities function, and the work gets done without waiting for distant institutions to authorize it.