Self-Reliance

5 ideas

1. Rejected thoughts return with alienated majesty

   In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. People dismiss their own insights because they are their own, so tomorrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense what they thought all along, and they will be forced to take their own opinion from another. The cost of not trusting a private perception is not only losing it but later receiving it secondhand as someone else's authority.

2. Foolish consistency is the hobgoblin

   The urge to stay consistent with your past words and acts is a second force of conformity, alongside social pressure, because it makes a previous self the authority over present judgment. Emerson argues you should speak what you think today in hard words and contradict it tomorrow if you then think otherwise, since a true character's varied actions will harmonize when seen from far enough away. To be great is to be misunderstood, and fear of apparent inconsistency is what keeps small minds small.

3. Society as a joint-stock company

   Society is a conspiracy against the manhood of each of its members, like a joint-stock company in which members give up the liberty and culture of the eater to better secure bread for each shareholder. Seen this way, conformity is a trade in which you exchange your own perception for safety and approval. The virtue in most request is conformity, and self-reliance is its aversion, so every social pressure can be read as a demand to surrender judgment in exchange for security.

4. The sturdy lad from New Hampshire

   Emerson contrasts a city-bred college graduate who loses heart when he is not installed in an office within a year with a sturdy lad from New Hampshire or Vermont. The lad tries all professions in turn: he teams it, farms it, peddles, keeps a school, preaches, edits a newspaper, goes to Congress, and buys a township. Like a cat he always lands on his feet, and he is worth a hundred of the city dolls because he does not postpone his life and does not depend on a single expected path.

5. If I am the Devil's child

   When Emerson was young, a valued adviser warned him against trusting his inner impulses by saying they might be from below, not from above. Emerson replied that they did not seem so to him, but if he was the Devil's child he would live then from the Devil. He used the exchange to argue that no law can be sacred except that of one's own nature, and that good and bad are only names readily transferable from one thing to another.

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