Self-reliance

Temmi Adeyeni
AP English 3
M. Brown
“Self-Reliance”
If I change myself to become you, am I me or am I you ? If I am you, then who I am ? The big question that we have to ask ourselves when we are teenagers. Who do we want to become in life and how do we want people to perceive us? It may seem like something trivial, but this is where a lot of teenagers experience their downfalls. If they do not look into themselves and see what they are really about and nipping this problem at the root, it can possibly affect them in their adult life. This is the problem that Ralph Waldo Emerson addresses in his series of essays titled Self-Reliance. Emerson believes that self trust and self-reliance not only goes for people as individuals, but it affects the government as well. Emerson reveals his perspective through a variety of ways, but mostly through his diction.
“ To-morrow a stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to take with shame our own opinion from another”(Self-Reliance). If you lose the sense of who you are, then you do not know what to think and soon you will have to look to others for what to think and how to behave. Therefore you will become those people. If everyone is looking to each other, there is no sense of peculiarity. Nothing would change or evolve whatsoever. Nobody would get along. As the saying goes, opposites attract. Well, if there are no opposites and everybody is exactly alike , there would be a myriad of unresolved conflicts. Everything would be discombobulated and nothing would get done. This leads nowhere. This relates to the government, because you will be easier to brainwash. You would listen to everything you heard on the news and would not do your research to make sure what you just heard made sense. You would not even know what trouble you may have just gotten yourself into by taking action to everything you heard in the media. When Emerson uses the phrase “ masterly good sense” he is referring to the government . It will appear to be smarter and much more wiser, but in reality it really is not. It is just using psychological tricks to make someone less educated buy into whatever they are trying to sell. If the individual is not standing strong and steady, they can fall into the traps set up by the government and eventually lose themselves. “ That imitation is suicide”(Self-Reliance). Emerson is stating that if you continue to try your hardest at being someone else, the person that you were born to be will no longer live. It will perish forever. You will be killing yourself. By the time that you come back and realize the mistake you made, it will be too late. Same applies to the government. If the government and nation as a whole is looking at other nations and is consistently trying to be like them, it will eventually fall into pieces. There will be no sense of control and everyone will go bonkers. No one will have priorities, and as it is known now to be, the nation will fall apart.
In conclusion, Emerson’s message to the readers of this essay is to just live the life you were born with and fulfill the what you were destined to be. Don’t look to others on what you should do in any moment in time, but to trust yourself in whatever decisions you make. If more people were willing to live their lives like this, some of the trouble that exist in this world today would have no place to grow.