Self-Reliance

"Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can present every
moment with the cumulative force of a whole life's cultivation; but of
the adopted talent of another you have only extemporaneous half possession.
That which each can do best, none but his Maker can teach
him ... Where is the master who could have instructed Franklin, or
Washington, or Bacon, or Newton? ... Do that which is assigned to you,
and you cannot hope too much or dare too much."
"We lie in the lap of immense intelligence, which makes us receivers of
its truth and organs of its activity. When we discern justice, when we discern
truth, we do nothing of ourselves, but allow a passage to its beams."
"Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the
better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty
and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Selfreliance
is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and
customs. Who would be a man, must be a nonconformist."

At only 30 pages, Self-Reliance is the shortest text covered in this
book. It has the qualities of a concentrate, perhaps the very
essence of personal development, and its ideas have had immeasurable
influence. Self-Reliance was one of the key pieces of writing
that helped carve the ethic of American individualism, and forms part
of the intellectual bedrock of today's self-help writers.
As one of the great philosopher-sages of western culture, Emerson
still matters; in fact, he has never been more relevant. The yearning to
fulfill our potential has always been human nature; now, however, we
are likely to see it as a right rather than a starry wish. Emerson called
his philosophy idealism, but it was not romantic, unrealistic, or fuzzy.
Rather, as Geldard says in The Vision of Emerson: "It has a touch of
granite in it."
For Emerson, self-reliance was more than the image of a family
carving out a life on the frontier. Though he admired the do-it-yourself
attitude and reveled in nature, Emerson's frontier, the place of real freedom
and opportunity, was a mental landscape free of mediocrity and
conformity.
Unique and free
Like his friend and protégé Henry David Thoreau (see Walden),
Emerson thought it silly to run around reforming and bettering the
world, even giving to "good causes," before we had found our place in
it. He famously observed:
"All men plume themselves on the improvement of society, and no man
improves."
If we could not examine ourselves and identify our calling, we would
be of little use. Lack of awareness would see us quickly molded into
shape by a society that cared little for the beauty and freedom of the
individual.
This is the path most of us take, happy to go along with society's
program in exchange for a level of status and reasonable material
circumstances. Though we profess to break away from limitations, the
reality is comfort in conformity.
But why should we bother breaking out? Why risk the insecurity?
Just as an ant cannot appreciate the level of living that a human can
enjoy, so most of us do not know what we are missing if we never look
beyond our little worlds. We tend to rely on things like sex, work success,
eating, and shopping for that feeling of aliveness. Emerson saw
though the veil of the external, knowing that it is the inner domains
that reveal true riches, peace, and power. The only proper defense
against numbing conformity is to find and walk the trail of uniqueness.
In Self-Reliance there are many calls to that end:
"We but half express ourselves, and are ashamed of that divine idea
which each of us represents."
In expressing this divine idea that is ourselves, the apparently strong
and necessary bonds to society and other people fall away; we no
longer need their approval to function. We stand in the same position
as Martin Luther, who said: "Here I stand—I can do no other"; this is
me, this is what I'm about.
Our primary duty is not ultimately to our family, to our job, to our
country, but only that which calls us to do or to be. Too often "duty"
hides a lack of responsibility in taking up a unique path. We can push
aside a calling for some years, choosing obvious sources of money or
satisfaction or a more comfortable situation, but it will eventually
make its claims.
For Emerson, genius was not owned by the great artists and
scientists. The genuine things we do, those that don't refer to what others
are likely to think, are fragments of genius that must be expanded
to form all the days of our life. Only by finding and expressing this
essence is a person's true nature revealed, whereas "Your conformity
explains nothing."
Clarity and knowledge
Emerson was heavily influenced by the ancient eastern religious texts
(Upanishads, Vedas, The Bhagavad-Gita). Their philosophy is a revelation
of the oneness of all things; life is full of illusions and false ties
that prevent us from being reunited with what is eternal and unchanging.
Through awareness of our own thought processes we might hope
to clear the fog of self-deception and illusion, what we now call the
"scripting" of our lives by society. To be self-reliant is not to take anyone's
word for anything. Emerson did not disagree with Thoreau's contention
that Harvard, which they both attended, taught many
disciplines, but the roots of none of them.
Emerson was aware that conventional education was not really up
to this job of lifting the veil, as it mainly dealt in intellectual categorization.
We would achieve real awareness in meditative thought that,
instead of closing down knowledge into compartments, involved opening
up to receive whole, changeless wisdom. This primary knowing
Emerson called intuition, while all later teaching was merely tuition.
He tried to make us think twice about depending on the strength of our
will alone. Meditative thought, because it puts us in tune with universal
forces and laws, leads us to ways of being and doing that are inherently
right and "successful."
Inner treasure
The people of his time saw Emerson as a sage or a prophet, with fewer
of the faults of human nature than anyone they knew. But Emerson
had, as does anyone, the hopes, the highs, the setbacks of which life
seems to consist. What made him stand out was a belief that we did
not have to have a seesawing emotional life reacting to good or bad
events. These are the final lines of Self-Reliance:
"A political victory, a rise of rents, the recovery of your sick or the
return of your absent friend, or some other favorable event raises your
spirits, and you think good days are preparing for you. Do not believe
it. Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you
peace but the triumph of principles."
This speaks to the very heart of the human condition and the ideas
about fortune by which we live. Yet Emerson believed that all
happiness was ultimately self-generated. It was not human nature to be
permanently hostage to events—we are quite capable of detachment or
transcendence.
Final comments
The reader may find no better writer than Emerson to help make the
leap into self-reliant freedom. It is difficult to read Self-Reliance simply
as a historical work, because you are easily pulled into Emerson's orbit
of pure responsibility and self-awareness, a world in which there are no
excuses, only opportunities.
His message is that the wish to succeed is not about our steely will
against the universe. Rather, by becoming more fully aware of the patterns
and flow of nature, time, and space, by working with the grain of
the universe, we are part of an infinitely greater power. The principles
he talked of in the quote above are not restrictive, but our creative,
conscious response to the world; our lives should reflect this perfect
universe, rather than being shaped by the crooked turns and boxes of
culture. The self-reliant individual should be able to live in the world
and improve it, not be merely another product of it.