Emerson Conformity

As a member of the Transcendentalist school of thought, Ralph Waldo Emerson believed in the inherent good of humanity and that society and societal institutions could only serve to corrupt that inherent good (Independence Hall Association). In one of Emerson’s most iconic essays, Self Reliance, Emerson further took that idea and espoused that the only way for a man to live was through non-conformity and remaining true only to ones nature- for good or ill. Beginning work on the essay as early as 1832, published for the first time in 1841, then revised and published again in 1847, Self Reliance was a work continuously updated based on the current cultural climate. The essay was written and influenced during the early mobilization of the Industrial
“Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist…Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.” (Emerson 271). Emerson was a passionate person, feverously preaching the potential of the everyday person if they were to simply look within themselves and chase their inner desires, a revolutionary opinion of his time (Woodlief). For truly at the time there was a homogenizing of the American people, they were losing themselves slowly to the mechanical age of the Industrial Revolution. The rise of the factory meant also the loss of the craftsman, the loss of the human touch. Every piece made was the same, no matter who worked the machines. This capability was both a blessing in productivity as well as a great defeat as it also celebrated, even promoted, conformity. This celebration did not reach only to the products; the culture of the time lost its sense of individuality, and the American people suffered a great identity crisis (Woodlief). In Self Reliance Emerson promoted a freedom of the mind, where the greatest good was to follow individual personal desires, to reject the ideals of common society. Nonconformity made you a man in his eyes, a person worth being, and a person destined for greatness. According to Emerson, to be misunderstood meant nonconformity, “To be great is to be misunderstood” (Emerson 274). It was up to the
This is especially interesting considering this was during a time when small children, no older than seven, were expected to contribute to the whole family. Deadly jobs were readily taken on in factories to help the good of all. Self-sacrifice for the good of the whole was simply expected. People were interchangeable pieces to a bigger puzzle. To many the idea that we should follow what suits the individual best was unthinkable. Self Reliance wholeheartedly espoused this ideal that if being true to one’s self means following devilish desires then that is what will lead you to success and beyond. Emerson writes, “…if I am the Devil's child, I will live then from the Devil. No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution, the only wrong what is against it” (Emerson 271). The idea that to follow even the evil desire was to be the right path, that ‘bad’ was simply a concept, was very against the ideals of the time. It was not only in a religious sense that people of the times tied to duty and ‘right’. As a family unit, people were expected to pull their own weight – to contribute to the good of all, if not in the factories then on the farm. Even parts of the population that were not expected to work to help the family in a monetary