4 ideas
Your own spontaneous perception is a private access to general truth; what you feel is true in your own heart is likely true for all people. Conforming to society's expectations means suppressing that perception, and you forfeit it: you later hear your rejected thoughts spoken back by someone else with 'a certain alienated majesty.' Self-trust is therefore an epistemic duty to report what you actually see, not a form of egoism.
Fidelity to your own past statements is a false loyalty. It binds today's perception to yesterday's, merely to avoid looking contradictory. Emerson's rule is to speak what you think now in hard words and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks, even if it contradicts today. A life lived honestly will show an underlying coherence anyway, the way a zigzag voyage still shows its overall direction from a distance.
Any achieved truth, institution, or self-understanding is a circle that a wider generalization will eventually enclose and relativize. Nothing is fixed. Each new thought reorganizes all the old ones, so today's foundation is tomorrow's partial case. Seen this way, stability is only a pause between expansions, and growth means being willing to be surpassed, even by your own later thinking.
Every advantage carries a hidden cost, and every wrong carries its own penalty inside the act itself rather than in some later reckoning. Examples include power bringing exposure, a theft impoverishing the thief's character, and a calamity forcing growth. Because the ledger balances automatically in the nature of things, a person can neither truly cheat nor be cheated in the long run. What matters is the kind of person each transaction makes you.