Pros and Cons of Emerson's Self-Reliance

“Character is higher than intellect. 

Thinking is the function.  Living is the functionary […]

A great soul will be strong to live, as well as strong to think.”

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance

The advantage of self-reliance in its purest form is obviously that you can have pride in yourself because all that you are is due to your efforts and no one else. You are certain that all your thoughts, emotions, and opinions are your own and not due to the influence of others.

This is also a disadvantage, since every flaw is due to your self-reliance. “You have no one to blame but yourself,” to use a cliché in a completely correct context. Emerson doesn’t take into account that humans are naturally interdependent, social people. Especially in our modern, global community, avoiding society is difficult…much more difficult than Emerson could have imagined in his time, when isolation was easier to obtain.

In fact, Emerson wanted people to give up travel, opining that it was an unnecessary factor of one’s “education.” Of course it’s possible to assume that if one is well-traveled one is also well-educated—hence the stereotype of ignorant, annoying tourists. Yet in order to be “strong to live,” one must be willing to go out of your comfort zone, to experience different cultures and use them to reevaluated the ideas you’ve been raised to accept. This isn’t to say that you should immediately drop your childhood values just because you visit Tibet. That would be the opposite of self-reliance. You would be, as James in the Bible says “like a wave of the sea, driven and tossed by the wind.” 

Forces which inhibit scholars from learning self-reliance are the various media forms, increased globalization, and institutions that indoctrinate under the guise of open-mindedness and tolerance.  Each of these has its set of requirements in order for the individual to be considered a success—like the Oscars, which is basically Hollywood elites telling everyone else what they should consider a great film (regardless if the winners were actually seen by average theater-goers). In the same way social mediums influence our personal tastes, globalization tells Americans their cultural identity, schools broadly define intelligence, and government dictates our moral compass.