The Possibility of Self-Reliance

Self-reliance is a novel con­cept that expresses the impor­tance of lis­ten­ing to one­self. To be self reliant would be to act only as your mind tells you to act and not as oth­ers tell you to, to cre­ate morals for one­self, to act as to only bet­ter one­self as a whole and not other, and to not con­form to the soci­ety in which one lives.

How­ever, to be able to rely on the self solely is far from the grasps of man. To not be a con­formist in a soci­ety that tries to push its morals and val­ues on each of its mem­bers. A man could not sur­vive in soci­ety if he relied on what his mind told him and cared not what other peo­ple placed as laws, foun­da­tions, taboos, social oblig­a­tions, etc. The soci­ety would not let him live. For at some points, at at least one key deci­sion in his life, he would have to go against what that soci­ety told him to do. Many peo­ple must face these deci­sions in the form of their eth­i­cal val­ues. Yet if he was to do this act, as a man who is self reliant he would not seek to keep the knowl­edge of this doing from his fel­low man, nor would he flaunt it, he would sim­ply live and let live. On the other hand, if he was a man ruled by soci­ety, he would do all in his power to keep any oth­ers from know­ing that he had gone against soci­ety and he was to be dis­cov­ered it would be the end of the world for him. In both sit­u­a­tions, if the man com­mit­ting this crime against soci­ety was to be caught, he would be shunned, ostra­cized, mur­dered, no good could come of his actions being exposed. Unless, that is, if the soci­ety was all the same man, they all thought the same way, they all were exactly the same and so they would under­stand what this man did for they are that man.

Even Ralph Waldo Emer­son, one of the great­est thinkers on self reliance, must have made some con­ces­sions to soci­ety in order to be a part of a soci­ety. Soci­ety is all con­for­mity and for any man to stay self reliant he can­not stay in another man’s soci­ety. The soci­ety we live in today, we like to con­sider as “our soci­ety” when really soci­ety is really “another man’s soci­ety” because it is the grouped think­ing of many men that cre­ate a soci­ety. Soci­ety can never allow for self reliance and still con­sider itself a soci­ety for soci­ety is the grouped think­ing and if one per­son, one insignif­i­cant part of that soci­ety is not keen to all the ideas of the soci­ety then is he really a part of that soci­ety. The peo­ple, as it is human nature to be cruel, would cast him from soci­ety because of his dif­fer­ent ideals. Soci­ety does not allow for diver­sity. Not in the sense that it is diver­sity or big­otry that rules the soci­ety, but in its morals and ideals. For society’s com­pi­la­tion of morals and ideals is what makes it a great soci­ety, how­ever, those morals and ideals begin to mesh into uni­ver­sal ones is what makes it a true soci­ety. The best exam­ples can always be observed on a small scale. If no one likes a child on the play­ground, he will not have friends, and he does not have friends because his ideas are dif­fer­ent than those of his classmates.

The only pos­si­ble way to remain entirely self reliant to cre­ate “one’s own soci­ety”. The com­pi­la­tion of the ideals and morals that are defined in the soci­ety are defined by one mind and not many so that the only ideas in play are ones that man believes. Author­ity frowns on the ideas of the sin­gle man and if the only author­ity is one­self then you can­not frown upon your own actions because they are all choices you have made. The phrase, “stick to your deci­sions” is most essen­tial to the idea of self reliance for it is the epit­ome of the philo­soph­i­cal idea of self reliance. So truly, self-reliance is pos­si­ble, how­ever, it is impos­si­ble to achieve as a func­tion­ing mem­ber of society.

• Photo by Tom Giebel / Used with Per­mis­sion