Self-Reliance

Before I read Emerson’s essay, “Self-Reliance,” I thought again about my daughter, Kathy’s, thought that one must understand the man to understand what he is saying in his essays. Effective communication also requires that the reader and/or listener at a lecture must also think about why he/she is reading the essay and/or listening to a lecture.

I have spent the last 25 years developing Experiential Modeling Science and The Market Value System to show people how to use their own mind to literally become a market of the future so that they can create successful new products and services today. If this isn't self-reliance, I don’t know what is. Despite numerous successes, I am disappointed that the science that I have developed is still in its infancy and many people are not even willing to try to use their own judgment to create knowledge blocks that they can use to accurately envision the future today.

Therefore, I am going to study Emerson’s essay, “Self-Reliance,” to not only find out what he said but to also adapt his thoughts to help me with my current challenges.

Human beings have the capability to access tacit[1] information and understanding that is stored in their brains and use rudimentary structures to mentally integrate this stored information and understanding to reveal new insights based on what has been previously learned. The structures that our brains use to solve complex puzzles can be greatly improved such that experienced people can advance to new plateaus of understanding and thus reach new frontiers of markets, technologies and businesses. This is the breakthrough that can be achieved with the Market Value System.

The following quotes tell us what Emerson thought about self-reliance. I agree with all of these principles; however, these principles don’t teach people how to improve their ability to be self-reliant. I believe that Experiential Modeling Science can be used to solve most puzzles.

“To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, -- that is genius.”

“There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is, which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.”

“Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. Great men have always done so, and confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age, betraying their perception that the absolutely trustworthy was seated at their heart, working through their hands, predominating in all their being.”

“These are the voices which we hear in solitude, but they grow faint and inaudible as we enter into the world. Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.”

“What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder, because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”

“I hope in these days we have heard the last of conformity and consistency.”

“Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; he dares not say `I think,' `I am,' but quotes some saint or sage. He is ashamed before the blade of grass or the blowing rose.”

“It is easy to see that a greater self-reliance must work a revolution in all the offices and relations of men; in their religion; in their education; in their pursuits; their modes of living; their association; in their property; in their speculative views.”

“Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift, you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life's cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another, you have only an extemporaneous, half possession. That which each can do best, none but his Maker can teach him. No man yet knows what it is, nor can, till that person has exhibited it.”

“And so the reliance on Property, including the reliance on governments which protect it, is the want of self-reliance. Men have looked away from themselves and at things so long, that they have come to esteem the religious, learned, and civil institutions as guards of property, and they deprecate assaults on these, because they feel them to be assaults on property. They measure their esteem of each other by what each has, and not by what each is. But a cultivated man becomes ashamed of his property, out of new respect for his nature. Especially he hates what he has, if he see that it is accidental, -- came to him by inheritance, or gift, or crime; then he feels that it is not having; it does not belong to him, has no root in him, and merely lies there, because no revolution or no robber takes it away. But that which a man is does always by necessity acquire, and what the man acquires is living property, which does not wait the beck of rulers, or mobs, or revolutions, or fire, or storm, or bankruptcies, but perpetually renews itself wherever the man breathes.”

[1] Michael Polanyi, 1966, The Tacit Dimension – Doubleday Books