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Daily · Philosophy

Self-Reliance

Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1841·published 1841 in Essays: First Series in the original·original at Project Gutenberg
The 30‑second versionpublished 1841 in Essays: First Series → the source of 'a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,' among the most quoted lines in American letters
  • Trust your own thought before it's validated. "To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, that is genius," since the highest praise given to Moses, Plato, and Milton is that they set aside books and tradition and spoke only what they themselves thought.
  • Society is organized against your individuality. "Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members," trading each person's culture and liberty for the promise of collective security; "the virtue in most request is conformity."
  • Consistency with your past self is not a virtue. The essay's most quoted line: "a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds," arguing that even Pythagoras, Socrates, Jesus, Luther, Galileo, and Newton were misunderstood, so being misunderstood is the price of genuine thought, not evidence against it.
  • Travel does not fix what is wrong with you. Emerson calls travel "a fool's paradise": you can sail to Naples and Rome, but "there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. My giant goes with me wherever I go."
  • Society does not actually improve, it only trades. "For every thing that is given something is taken. Society acquires new arts and loses old instincts," illustrated by the fact that a broad-axe wound heals on a savage but can kill a civilized man who has lost his aboriginal strength.
  • Property and institutions are what weak people lean on. "The reliance on Property...is the want of self-reliance," since what a person actually is will always reacquire what they need, while what they merely own can be taken by revolution, fire, or a change in the law.
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•Why it earns a slot

The founding text of American individualism, quoted (and misquoted) more than almost any other essay in the language, and the direct intellectual ancestor of everything from Thoreau's Walden to Silicon Valley's founder mythology.

Emerson's Self-Reliance argues that conformity is the great enemy of the soul: society is 'a joint-stock company' in which members trade their liberty for security, and genius is nothing more than trusting the thought that flashes across your own mind instead of waiting for someone else to say it first and admiring it only then.

This distillation is written from the freely available original, which is always the better read when you have the time: Project Gutenberg.

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