[HN Gopher] Self-Reliance (1841)
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Self-Reliance (1841)
Author : rhaksw
Score : 48 points
Date : 2022-08-07 12:59 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (archive.vcu.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (archive.vcu.edu)
| [deleted]
| danaris wrote:
| "Self-Reliance, by The Man Whose Mother Did His Laundry And
| Brought Him Sandwiches Every Day On Walden Pond."
| adregan wrote:
| I believe you are thinking of Henry David Thoreau, the author
| of _Walden_ and a friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the author of
| the linked "Self Reliance."
| danaris wrote:
| Hoooly crap, whoops! I always get those two mixed up.
|
| My apologies.
| j4pe wrote:
| You may enjoy HN darling(?) Pinboard's 2013 talk on Thoreau
| and his phoniness:
| (https://idlewords.com/talks/thoreau_2.0.htm)
| meany wrote:
| I think you maybe confusing Emerson and Thoreau?
| ezekiel68 wrote:
| This essay was definitely instrumental in my life, helping me to
| adopt a worldview where I could define my own destiny (yes, in
| privileged America) despite some very serious headwinds: growing
| up in an alcoholic, single-parent mobile home. I barely graduated
| HS despite ability and floundered without college for several
| years. But later put myself through public college for CS and
| have had a great career (and life) for many years thereafter.
| This worldview gave me the courage to not care that life is
| "unfair" and that I hadn't been granted many opportunities
| available to my peers. If I hadn't believed it were possible, I
| never would have tried.
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _Self-Reliance by Ralph Waldo Emerson (1841) [pdf]_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10071252 - Aug 2015 (19
| comments)
|
| Also related:
|
| _The Myth of Self-Reliance: An encounter with Emerson's essays_
| - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22128651 - Jan 2020 (112
| comments)
|
| I feel like there have been other threads about this essay but I
| can't find them. Anyone?
| j4pe wrote:
| It's an incredible essay for anyone who feels stifled by the
| society they're living in, the organizations they're a part of;
| anyone who wants to create and to do something original; anyone
| who wants to understand their compulsion to carve their own niche
| in the world and perhaps feel less alone in harboring that
| compulsion. Because, of course, Emerson thinks we're all this way
| inside.
|
| Transcendentalism is the MMA of philosophy, or maybe the Jeet Kun
| Do. It finds its influences everywhere, and it's interested in
| being applicable to real life. You read this essay and you'll see
| its influence everywhere from hustle culture to the Unabomber.
|
| You want philosophical underpinnings? It's got the Stoics' and
| Buddhists' serene indifference to circumstance - "No man can come
| near me but through my act .. nothing is at last sacred but your
| own mind .. Nothing can bring you peace but yourself."
|
| It's got premodern traditions' reverence of nature, colored by
| the semi-recent invention of science - "The civilized man has
| built a coach, but has lost the use of his feet." (With, yes,
| charming old-timey digressions into how aboriginals are immune to
| e.g. axe blows.)
|
| It's got Leibniz' and Nietzsche's perspectivism, this idea that
| while theology can no longer claim your cells and atoms are
| somehow sacred, it's more interesting to consider the uniqueness
| of your mind as the holy thing you bring to the world.
|
| You want applicability? Entrepreneurship? Failing fast? "If the
| young merchant fails, men say he is ruined .. A sturdy lad from
| New Hampshire or Vermont, who in turn tries all the professions
| .. does not postpone his life, but lives already. He has not one
| chance, but a hundred chances."
|
| Instagram? "I do not wish to expiate, but to live. My life is for
| itself and not for a spectacle."
|
| Mob politics, as employed by people like Jackson: "When the
| unintelligent brute force that lies at the bottom of society is
| made to growl and mow, it needs the habit of magnanimity and
| religion to treat it godlike as a trifle of no concernment."
|
| The tendency for good progressive causes to be co-opted by jerks:
| "If an angry bigot assumes this bountiful cause of Abolition ..
| why should I not say to him .. never varnish your hard,
| uncharitable ambition with this incredible tenderness for black
| folk a thousand miles off. Thy love afar is spite at home."
| (Emerson was a famous Abolitionist.)
|
| "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." What would the guy who
| wrote that say about gay or trans people?
|
| Emerson and his pals might have loved Sapiens and evolutionary
| psychology and Tumblr, and hated Instagram and Doordash and
| Communism. But their Puritan minds would have been blown by the
| idea that people could be better. They thought the best you could
| do was to live according to your nature, because your nature is
| divine: "I suppose no man can violate his nature .. if I am the
| Devil's child, I will live then from the Devil."
|
| And here in this corner of the world, one of the most powerful
| popular philosophical undercurrents is that idea of self-
| improvement taken far past "rationalism" and self-optimization to
| the final degrees of utopian transhumanism. Our most successful
| entrepreneurs, the most wealthy people in our society, are all
| tinkering in some form of bringing about a future where people
| are freed from work, from the natural world, and from their
| bodies as imagined by Iain M Banks and Charlie Stross [1]. Hardly
| living according to your nature.
|
| But Emerson and his contemporaries were writing these things in
| response to the creation of industrial society. Their philosophy
| was tailored to a time where people, in their view didn't
| sufficiently respect their own nature. Seeing the subsequent
| century of industrialized war and the postindustrial society, how
| would they apply the idea of "affront[ing] and reprimand[ing] the
| smooth mediocrity and squalid contentment of the times" to a
| world of indulging your nature, pressing buttons and looking at
| screens and, probably, trying to get rich? Who is thinking about
| this today? Honestly, I'm asking.
|
| [1] Though in Crimes against Transhumanity Stross argues they're
| missing the point (https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-
| static/2022/07/crimes-...)
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