No One Saves Themselves Alone

The four previous parts followed the fracture from the isolated person to bodies exposed. This one changes scale. It no longer asks what a society does with its members, but what territories do with one another.

Three terrains suffice for the demonstration: a mining region where the wealth of the subsoil produces poverty, seas where security stops at borders that ships cross, and skills trained here that serve elsewhere. In all three cases, interdependence is not a generous idea: it is a geographical, economic and security fact, which can be governed or endured.

I. The resource that impoverishes

33. Armed groups and mining plunder in eastern DRC

Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo remains marked by the presence of numerous armed groups, both local and foreign. Security monitoring records frequent incidents and regular civilian casualties. Control of territories and of mineral resources is among the factors that sustain this violence.¹

The paradox is striking: a region endowed with globally strategic resources becomes a space of poverty, displacement and insecurity. The wealth of the subsoil does not automatically convert into collective wealth. It can even produce the opposite, when the value of a deposit makes seizing it more profitable than working it regularly, and war more profitable than peace.

This is where Part 4 and this one meet. Children in the mines, sexual violence used to empty a territory, and forced displacement are not dramas running parallel to the mining conflict: they are instruments of it.

The We-ism response. The Great Lakes basin is a concrete illustration of the Knot of Destinies. Political borders abolish neither shared rivers, nor shared ecosystems, nor economic networks, nor the consequences of violence. Insecurity sustained on one side of a border is paid for on the other, with a lag of a few years at most.

The doctrine therefore proposes to turn the incentive to seize into an incentive to cooperate. A resource that can only be secured by war must become an object of shared governance, with mechanisms for transparency, oversight and local benefit.

Interdependence does not automatically produce peace — that is an illusion to be set aside. It can just as easily produce predation. It must therefore be institutionalised, monitored and made equitable in order to become peaceful.

34. Maritime piracy

The International Maritime Bureau records incidents of piracy and armed robbery against ships each year, with persistent risk hotspots, notably in the Gulf of Guinea and off the Somali coast.²

Piracy thrives where coastal states have limited means, where populations are deprived of economic opportunity and where regional cooperation remains weak. Like land-based resources, the sea becomes a space of capture when responsibility over it is fragmented. A pirate does not exploit a lawless sea: he exploits a sea where the law stops at lines his boat crosses in an hour.

The We-ism response. No sea can be protected by a single actor. Maritime security presupposes joint arrangements, shared surveillance, cooperative judicial mechanisms — because a pirate arrested by one state and triable by none returns to sea — and economic policies that reduce the incentive to violent capture.

The Knot of Destinies applies here to a space that admits no boundary markers. The sea connects economies, ports, fishermen, trade routes and coastal populations. The security of some visibly depends on the stability of others.

II. The skill that leaves

35. The African brain drain

For several decades, many doctors, engineers, researchers and qualified professionals have been leaving the African continent. Numerical estimates of this movement must be interpreted with caution: calculation methods vary by profession, country and period, and some frequently cited data are old.³

Mobility is not in itself a problem. A person must be able to study, work, travel and choose where to live. The difficulty appears when the societies that fund the training durably lose the skills necessary to their own development, while host countries benefit from an educational investment they did not bear.

This finding brings the series to a significant close. It describes neither a violence, nor a predation, nor a crime — only an asymmetry. And yet the mechanism is the same as in the thirty-four preceding findings: a value produced collectively is captured elsewhere.

The We-ism response. We-ism does not condemn individual mobility. It recalls that no talent is formed alone.

A training is made possible by teachers, families, infrastructure, public policy and collective resources. The freedom to leave can therefore be accompanied by a responsibility to contribute: temporary return, remote mentoring, transfer of skills, local investment, the training of new professionals, participation in transnational networks.

The debt owed to the community must not become a prison. It can become a lasting relationship — and that is precisely what Co-Genesis designates: societies that learn to build themselves together rather than at one another's expense.

Conclusion of the series

The five parts have shown that loneliness, hatred, predation, impunity, violence against women and children, the plundering of resources and the abandonment of territories are not isolated crises. They proceed from one same rupture: that of the human bond when it ceases to be a responsibility and becomes an instrument of domination, of fear or of accumulation.

The movement of the series runs from the nearest to the widest, and the same operation repeats itself at every scale. A person who disappears without anyone noticing. A group that exists only by designating an enemy. A common good treated as private property. A body treated as a resource. A territory whose neighbour one believes one can ignore. Five scales, a single logic: the other ceases to be a partner and becomes a means, a threat or an absence.

We-ism does not claim to resolve all these fractures on its own. It offers a compass. Useful-Existence recalls that every person carries a capacity to contribute. The Knot of Destinies recognises that peoples do not durably save themselves against one another. Awakened Service turns that conviction into a daily practice of presence, speech, mediation and sharing.

These three pillars promise no automatic result. They designate a direction, and that direction is verified in gestures:

• noticing the one who is disappearing;
• listening before condemning;
• speaking without dehumanising;
• intervening before conflict becomes irreversible;
• sharing resources and skills;
• protecting the most vulnerable;
• holding to account those who exercise power;
• turning individual success into collective capacity.

Repairing the human fabric does not mean returning to an idealised past: older societies knew domination and exclusion too. Nor is it a matter of abolishing disagreement, borders or differences. It is a matter of building a world where difference does not automatically become a threat, where freedom does not turn into indifference, where wealth does not rest on the exhaustion of others, and where power remains tied to a verifiable responsibility.

The repair will be long. It will never be the work of a single leader, a single institution or a single generation. But it does not begin with an immense promise. It begins with one bond that we refuse to let break.

I am useful, therefore We are.
We are, therefore I exist.