Emerson and the Stranger in the Mirror

Self-Reliance was published in 1841. Ralph Waldo Emerson was thirty-eight years old, a former Unitarian minister who had walked away from the pulpit because he could not in good conscience continue to administer the Eucharist. The essay was an attempt to articulate, in his own terms, what it would mean to live as a free intellectual being in a republic still figuring out what its own citizens were supposed to think.

The essay is full of lines that have outlived their original context. Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. To be great is to be misunderstood. A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. These have become quotations on coffee mugs and ironic motivational posters. The actual essay is more rigorous and more difficult than the quotations suggest.

The argument is this. Society conspires, often without intending to, to make each member think and feel and act in roughly the same way. This pressure is exerted by parents, schools, churches, employers, friends, fashions, public opinions, and the general atmosphere of an age. The pressure is mostly invisible, because we have grown up inside it. We mistake the shape it has given our minds for the natural shape of our minds.

The work of self-reliance is, first, to notice this. Second, to take responsibility for what one actually thinks, as distinct from what one has been trained to think. Third, to live according to the result, even when it is socially expensive.

Emerson does not promise that this is comfortable. He thinks most people, faced with the discomfort, will retreat. He is hard on what he calls the timorous and ashamed conformist, who knows what he believes and never quite says it, because saying it might cost him standing among people whose standing he secretly does not respect.

The famous line about consistency has been frequently misread. Emerson is not against consistency as such. He is against the kind of consistency that prevents you from learning. The example he gives is a man who said one thing yesterday and finds today that he believes its opposite. The man who is committed to looking consistent will say yesterday's thing again. The man who is committed to being honest will say today's thing, and trust that his life, taken as a whole, will be more coherent than any single statement of his views.

Modern social media is, in some ways, the perfect anti-Emersonian environment. It rewards visible consistency. Old posts can be excavated and used as evidence against changes of mind. The pressure is to settle one's positions early, signal them clearly, and never publicly update. Emerson would have found this culture instantly recognizable as a particularly aggressive form of the conformity he was warning against. Conformity has always existed. The only thing new is the efficiency of its enforcement.

There is a strange thing that happens to people who actually try to live this essay. They become, in some respects, less interested in being agreed with. They become more interested in the question of whether they themselves currently agree with what they currently believe. The stranger in the mirror is the future version of yourself, who will look back at your current opinions with the same mixture of fondness and embarrassment that you now extend to your own opinions of ten years ago. Self-reliance is partly a matter of trusting that stranger enough to give him room to disagree with you.

This is harder than it sounds, which is why the essay, almost two centuries later, still surprises people who read it carefully. Most people did not, the first time. Emerson predicted that too.