As the holiday season, gift-giving and pleas for assistance for the needy come to a climax, it is instructive to reflect on self-sufficiency.

One of the appeals of helping others out is the sense that you are helping them to become self-sufficient. On one side are the dependent. On the other are the self-sufficient. By giving a hand up, you are helping people from one side to the other.

This is a widely accepted national myth. No matter what our income is, none of us is self-sufficient. What enables each of us to pursue life, liberty and happiness is mutual interdependence.

Think about it: We benefit from the accumulation of wisdom, inventions and achievements of our parents and grandparents, in science, technology, business, culture and, most importantly, democracy.

Every day, we rely on the great network of our civil society to pursue our own personal dreams. Government provides a platform for opportunity and security for all of us. We are dependent on others for our roads, the delivery of our health care, the security of our public health and the education of our children.

More than 1 million children learn the fundamentals of education in our public K-12 system. Statewide outside of Seattle, the public school system provides education to 19 out of 20 children. That’s an investment of more than $7,500 per student.

Some of us get more direct benefits than others, such as those families with students at our state’s public universities. Our state government pays more than $8,000 per student per year for public four-year college. If you are going to a community college, the state is subsidizing your education by $4,000 a year. This is on top of tuition paid for by students or gained through financial aid.

The state’s investment in higher education is a benefit for all students, no matter what his or her family income is. Forty-six percent of the students at Western Washington University are from families making more than $75,000. Less than a quarter are from families with incomes less than $50,000, while not even one out of 10 students are from families making less than $30,000.

A career as a doctor combines social responsibility, personal commitment, drive, ambition and economic opportunity. We recognize that in our public spending. Even if medical students pay full in-state tuition, our state subsidizes their education to the tune of more than $18,000 for each of four years of medical school.

That’s as it should be. We depend on these folks. In fact, no matter how you calculate it, we are all dependent on each other.

The everyday details of our lives create a story about our interconnectedness. My father-in-law is an 85-year-old retired military officer. My wife and I trade off taking him to the doctor. He is dependent. My son has a chronic disease. We make sure he gets good medical care. He is dependent.

I work for a small nonprofit organization. We are certainly not self-sufficient! My wife works for a large health cooperative. I have several friends who work for Microsoft, Boeing and the State of Washington. They create the software, build the airplanes and provide the public safety for our society. We are dependent on them, and they are dependent on us.

We rely on the trust and caring of strangers, sales clerks, nurses, doctors, teachers, firefighters. We rely on the endowment of wealth, knowledge and democracy that has been built up over the centuries. And we rely on our government to secure and deliver the public goods and services that we all need.

So rather than posit ourselves as self-sufficient and the needy as dependent, let’s just say that we are all dependent on one another.

One month or one year for a single mom with an infant on welfare may enable her to survive and get back into the work force, just as two years of state-subsidized community college or four years of medical school paid for by the taxpayers enables our children and colleagues to gain economic security, opportunity, health and wealth.

Indeed, the quality of our lives and our work, for all of us, is possible through the interconnectedness of our market system, our civil society, our friends, our government and our fellowship. These are the ties that bind us together.

Happy holidays!

John Burbank, executive director of the Economic Opportunity Institute (www.eoionline.org), writes every other Wednesday. Write to him in care of the institute at 1900 Northlake Way, Suite 237, Seattle, WA 98103. His e-mail address is john@eoionline.org.