Self-Reliance (1841)

Related:

Self-Reliance by Ralph Waldo Emerson (1841) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10071252 - Aug 2015 (19 comments)

Also related:

The Myth of Self-Reliance: An encounter with Emerson’s essays - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22128651 - Jan 2020 (112 comments)

I feel like there have been other threads about this essay but I can't find them. Anyone?

This essay was definitely instrumental in my life, helping me to adopt a worldview where I could define my own destiny (yes, in privileged America) despite some very serious headwinds: growing up in an alcoholic, single-parent mobile home. I barely graduated HS despite ability and floundered without college for several years. But later put myself through public college for CS and have had a great career (and life) for many years thereafter. This worldview gave me the courage to not care that life is "unfair" and that I hadn't been granted many opportunities available to my peers. If I hadn't believed it were possible, I never would have tried.

It's an incredible essay for anyone who feels stifled by the society they're living in, the organizations they're a part of; anyone who wants to create and to do something original; anyone who wants to understand their compulsion to carve their own niche in the world and perhaps feel less alone in harboring that compulsion. Because, of course, Emerson thinks we're all this way inside.

Transcendentalism is the MMA of philosophy, or maybe the Jeet Kun Do. It finds its influences everywhere, and it's interested in being applicable to real life. You read this essay and you'll see its influence everywhere from hustle culture to the Unabomber.

You want philosophical underpinnings? It's got the Stoics' and Buddhists' serene indifference to circumstance - "No man can come near me but through my act .. nothing is at last sacred but your own mind .. Nothing can bring you peace but yourself."

It's got premodern traditions' reverence of nature, colored by the semi-recent invention of science - "The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet." (With, yes, charming old-timey digressions into how aboriginals are immune to e.g. axe blows.)

It's got Leibniz' and Nietzsche's perspectivism, this idea that while theology can no longer claim your cells and atoms are somehow sacred, it's more interesting to consider the uniqueness of your mind as the holy thing you bring to the world.

You want applicability? Entrepreneurship? Failing fast? "If the young merchant fails, men say he is ruined .. A sturdy lad from New Hampshire or Vermont, who in turn tries all the professions .. does not postpone his life, but lives already. He has not one chance, but a hundred chances."

Instagram? "I do not wish to expiate, but to live. My life is for itself and not for a spectacle."

Mob politics, as employed by people like Jackson: "When the unintelligent brute force that lies at the bottom of society is made to growl and mow, it needs the habit of magnanimity and religion to treat it godlike as a trifle of no concernment."

The tendency for good progressive causes to be co-opted by jerks: "If an angry bigot assumes this bountiful cause of Abolition .. why should I not say to him .. never varnish your hard, uncharitable ambition with this incredible tenderness for black folk a thousand miles off. Thy love afar is spite at home." (Emerson was a famous Abolitionist.)

"I must be myself. I cannot break myself any longer for you, or you. If you can love me for what I am, we shall be the happier. If you cannot, I will still seek to deserve that you should. I will not hide my tastes or aversions." What would the guy who wrote that say about gay or trans people?

Emerson and his pals might have loved Sapiens and evolutionary psychology and Tumblr, and hated Instagram and Doordash and Communism. But their Puritan minds would have been blown by the idea that people could be better. They thought the best you could do was to live according to your nature, because your nature is divine: "I suppose no man can violate his nature .. if I am the Devil's child, I will live then from the Devil."

And here in this corner of the world, one of the most powerful popular philosophical undercurrents is that idea of self-improvement taken far past "rationalism" and self-optimization to the final degrees of utopian transhumanism. Our most successful entrepreneurs, the most wealthy people in our society, are all tinkering in some form of bringing about a future where people are freed from work, from the natural world, and from their bodies as imagined by Iain M Banks and Charlie Stross [1]. Hardly living according to your nature.

But Emerson and his contemporaries were writing these things in response to the creation of industrial society. Their philosophy was tailored to a time where people, in their view didn't sufficiently respect their own nature. Seeing the subsequent century of industrialized war and the postindustrial society, how would they apply the idea of "affront[ing] and reprimand[ing] the smooth mediocrity and squalid contentment of the times" to a world of indulging your nature, pressing buttons and looking at screens and, probably, trying to get rich? Who is thinking about this today? Honestly, I'm asking.

[1] Though in Crimes against Transhumanity Stross argues they're missing the point (https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2022/07/crimes-...)

"Self-Reliance, by The Man Whose Mother Did His Laundry And Brought Him Sandwiches Every Day On Walden Pond."