"Independence"... [is] middle-class blasphemy. We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth.

Shaw’s remark attacks the bourgeois ideal of the self-made, self-sufficient individual. Calling “independence” a kind of “blasphemy” reframes it as a moral error: a denial of the social reality that human life is sustained by networks of care, labor, and mutual obligation. The line fits Shaw’s broader socialist critique of Victorian and Edwardian capitalism, where “independence” often functioned as a justification for neglecting the poor (“they should fend for themselves”) and for masking how the comfortable rely on invisible workers and institutions. The insistence that “every soul” depends on others universalizes the point, turning it from a class polemic into an ethical claim about human interdependence.