Some months after leaving the IMT, I bought a collection of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s writings. I’ve flipped through it only a few times, and it has been lying on my bookshelf, pregnant with dormant wisdom, for the last couple of years. For some reason, I never read his most famous essay, ‘Self-Reliance’ (1841), until just this morning. (I had only read one other essay he wrote on the state and the individual, ‘Politics’, which was written in 1844). I am blown away. So much of it applies well to my own experience, so I thought I would share with you some wonderful quotes from this fantastic essay. Nietzsche loved Emerson, and he remains a treasure-store of insight even today.
If I know your sect I anticipate your argument. I hear a preacher announce for his text and topic the expediency of one of the institutions of his church. Do I not know beforehand that not possibly can he say a new and spontaneous word? Do I not know that with all this ostentation of examining the grounds of the institution he will do no such thing? Do I not know that he is pledged to himself not to look but at one side, the permitted side, not as a man, but as a parish minister? He is a retained attorney, and these airs of the bench are the emptiest affectation. Well, most men have bound their eyes with or another handkerchief, and attached themselves to some one of these communities of opinion. This conformity makes them not false in a few particulars, authors of a few lies, but false in all particulars. Their every truth is not quite true. Their two is not the real two, their four not the real four; so that every word they say chagrins us and we know not where to begin to set them right. Meantime nature is not slow to equip us in the prison-uniform of the party to which we adhere. We come to wear one cut of face and figure, and acquire by degrees the gentlest asinine expression.
What a wonderful description of ‘lead-offs’ and the banalities and preposterous self-congratulation I would hear in IMT meetings, and how we found them all so inspiring simply because everyone around us did. The observation that ‘Their every truth is not quite true’ applies so well to the banal cliches I would hear in the IMT like ‘Things are always changing’, things which, despite their superficial truth, were turned from truth into falsehood by the way in which the organisation abused such commonplace wisdom to justify its dogmatic and unfounded belief that the world was heading towards socialism and that only their sect could bring it about.
Here is a beautiful description of bounded choice in the same essay, and our fear of breaking from a cult because we have publicly declared our adherence to the doctrine and are afraid of being painted as hypocritical or dishonest:
The other terror that scares us from self-trust is our consistency: a reverence for our past act or word because the eyes of others have no other data for computing our orbit than our past acts, and we are loth to disappoint them.
But why should you keep your head over your shoulder? Why drag about this corpse of your memory, lest you contradict some what you have stated in this or that public space? Suppose you should contradict yourself; what then? It seems to be a rule of wisdom never to rely on your memory alone, scarcely even in acts of pure memory, but to bring the past for judgment into the thousand-eyed present, and live ever in a new day. In your metaphysics you have denied personality to the Deity, yet when the devout motions of the soul come, yield to them heart and life, though they should clothe God with shape and color. Leave your theory, as Joseph his coat in the hand of the harlot, and flee.
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do.
Here is the a moving passage which illustrates how difficult it is to break from those close to us and seek our own path:
Live no longer to the expectation of these deceived and deceiving people with whom we converse. Say to them, ‘O father, O mother, O wife, O brother, O friend, I have lived with you after appearances hitherto. Henceforward I am the truth’s. Be it known unto you that henceforward I obey no law less than the eternal law. I will have no covenants but proximities. I shall endeavor to nourish my parents, to support my family, to be the chaste husband of one wife – but these relations I must fill after a new and unprecedented way. I appeal from your customs. 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. I will so trust that what is deep is holy, that I will do strongly before the sun and moon, whatever inly rejoices me and the heart appoints. If you are noble, I will love you; if you are not, I will not hurt you and myself by hypocritical attentions. If you are true, but not in the same truth with me, cleave to your companions; I will seek my own. I o this not selfishly but humbly and truly. It is alike your interest, and mine, and all men’s, however long we have dwelt in lies, to live in truth. Does this sound harsh to-day? You will soon love what is dictated by your nature as well as mine, and if we follow the truth it will bring us out safe at last.’-But so may you give these friends pain. Yes, but I cannot sell my liberty and my power, to save their sensibility. Besides, all persons have their moments of reason, when they look out into the region of absolute truth; then will they justify me and do the same thing.
And here is a wonderful description of the mindset of a cult member who believes that only they have the truth, and that their every insight is unique to their groupuscule:
The pupil takes the same delight in subordinating every thing to the new terminology as a girl who has just learned botany in seeing a new earth and new seasons thereby. It will happen for a time that the pupil will find his intellectual power has grown by the study of his master’s mind. But in all unbalanced minds the classification is idolized, passes for the end and not for a speedily exhaustible means, so that the walls of the system blend to their eye in the remote horizon with the walls of the universe; the luminaries of heaven seem to them hung on the arch their master built. They cannot imagine how you alien have any right to see – how you can see; ‘It must be somehow that you stole the light from us.’ They do not yet perceive that light, unsystematic, indomitable, will break into any cabin, even into theirs. Let them chirp awhile and call it their own. If they are honest and do well, presently their neat new pinfold will be too strait and low, will crack, will lean, will rot and vanish, and the immortal light, all young and joyful, million-orbed, million-colored, will beam over the universe as on the first morning.