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Self Reliance
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Themes
Relocating Authority From Institutions to Individuals
Inherent in Emerson’s philosophy outlined in “Self-Reliance” is the belief that mankind is morally good by nature. This framework places trust in each individual to govern himself according to a personal set of principles. Emerson particularly mentions the “authority of the soul.” He presents the soul as the potential within each man for greatness and does not consider a man’s soul wholly corruptible. Every soul should execute just authority over one’s actions, if one only starts living as a self-reliant creature in nature and under God.
Emerson generally denounces societal institutions that bear social weight and influence over the population. He says early in the essay, “I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions.” He views this automatic submission as a weakness of the human will and a waste of human potential. Institutions are built off of tradition, compromise, and consistency—these are all deplorable facets of society in Emerson’s view, as they discourage rather than foster individualism.
In particular, Emerson presents the general population as dangerously dependent on their property. He laments the fact that people uphold the institutions and authorities that aim to protect property. Such a pronounced focus on material possessions keeps a person intimately tied to things rather than thoughts. Emerson explains, “And so the reliance on Property, including the reliance on governments which protect it, is the want of self-reliance.” Breaking dependence on property and institutions that protect it enables a man to break free of societal constructions and materialism and move toward reliance only on himself. Slavish devotion to property forfeits control over one’s life and takes away the natural authority of the inner self/soul. When a man embraces self-reliance, he is free to “obey no law less than the eternal law.” A liberated soul will be in communion with this divine sense of lawfulness.
Prioritizing the Personal Over the Interpersonal
Self-reliance as a practice entails the shifting of energy and perspective from the outward to the inward. Such a shift necessarily means a renegotiation of a person’s familial and social relationships. Emerson declares, “I shun father and mother and wife and brother, when my genius calls me.” In his view, the role of a man as a self-sufficient thinker and actor is more important than the conventional roles of father, husband, or son. At another moment in the text, Emerson also includes friends in his list of “deceived and deceiving people with whom we converse.” No man has sacred obligations to anyone other than himself.
Self-reliance also involves relieving one’s self of the burden of humility and rejection that fellow members of society might project onto a man acting in his own interest and not in the group’s. Emerson holds, “What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think.” He admits that it is easy to “live after the world’s opinion,” or, reiterate social norms and popular viewpoints, but he insists that “the great man” does not bend his will to the crowd’s when he is among peers. Emerson recognizes how easily children pass judgments, speak their minds, and behave according to their own desires, and he champions these instincts. It is only over time that humans lose this capacity for imagination and intuition, and that diminution of character comes from social pressure and constructs.
Emerson asserts that when a man does not fall victim to belonging to the people around him, he instead belongs to himself and to truth. Prioritizing and embracing the self is the only genuine path to peace, happiness, and godliness: “Nothing,” he insists, “can bring you peace but yourself.”
The Virtue of Originality Over the Sin of Imitation
Emerson values originality, or nonconformity, over most other personal traits. He upholds originality as the marker of greatness in esteemed men and casts it in sharp contrast with its opposite, imitation (a tendency he likens to suicide).
Emerson states, “Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.” Here, he directly equates manhood with nonconformity, suggesting that conformity and imitation reduces a person to being unworthy of the prestige normally associated with adulthood, and in this case, status as patriarch. The societal mob he alludes to are anonymous group-thinkers, not individuals with agency and creativity. Originality/nonconformity is a requisite for manhood and self-reliance. It is therefore foundational in Emerson’s ideology on multiple fronts.
Conformity renders men “not false in a few particulars, authors of a few lies, but false in all particulars. Their every truth is not quite true.” Emerson sees conformity as a holistically damning quality. Its impact is absolute, for a man, in his view, has either harnessed the ability to challenge social norms and embrace his inner genius or remains totally at the will and whim of the artificial systems around him.
Emerson also riles against consistency. Next to conformity, he calls it “the other terror that scares us from self-trust.” He defines consistency as “a reverence for our past act or word,” probably something carefully constructed and determined to be socially acceptable. He prescribes living in the moment and embracing present perspectives, espousing them openly, even though they may not hold true in the future. In one of the most famous lines of the essay, Emerson calls “foolish consistency […] the hobgoblin of little minds,” likening it to childish mischief.
With this perspective on nonconformity and inconsistency, Emerson does not view contradiction as a hinderance in self-expression or in the development of personal genius. Contradiction is merely the result of honest, in-the-moment self-expression, a welcomed byproduct of self-reliant thinking that in itself is useful for its originality.
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By Ralph Waldo Emerson
