Need for Independent Thought

Have you noticed? Politicians and media trippingly embrace extremes and urge us to as well. They demand we accept politically charged assumptions and ungrounded conclusions. We are told the sky is falling, the world is ending, the government is right, and half of us are the enemy. You have to be “all in,” or you are out, love this, hate that, follow the crowd, or you are a chump. Well, here is to chumps – those who think for themselves!

Ralph Waldo Emerson, in his courageous 19th-century writings, including Nature, The American Scholar, and Essays on Self Reliance, made a pitch for you being you, for you being authentic, real, seeking truth on your own terms, all of us conducting inquiries as if we alone decided, not accepting what others tell us.

He argued for rejecting what the media – in his day and in future days – push, instead using our individual discernment and life experience to arrive at an understanding, tapping our creative side, ignoring what society insists we must think, must say, must do and be, in favor of being a non-conformist, an individual.

Emerson wrote: “To believe our own thought…is genius. A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the luster of the firmament of bards and sages…In every work of genius, we recognize majesty [and] great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this…They teach us to abide by our spontaneous impression with good-humored inflexibility, most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side.”

He famously wrote, “Trust thyself: Every heart vibrates to that iron string” and “Whoso would be a man must be a non-conformist,” by which he meant should search for truth on his own, be uncowed by the crowd.

He wrote in greater depth about how integrity is best preserved, along with self-respect, and how greatness comes from the courage to think and act for oneself, the gumption to be uncompelled by the crowd. 

“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.”

He continued: “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, as it is easy in solitude to live after your own – but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd, keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”

Having recently re-read his Essays on Self-Reliance, Emerson refreshingly tells us what we ought to know and ought to embrace, but somehow, what gets soft over time and what we fail to say to ourselves.

“For non-conformity, the world whips you with its displeasure…the sour faces of the multitude, like their sweet faces, have no deep cause, disguise no God, but are put on and off as the wind blows and a newspaper directs.”

He also cautions against becoming content in an unexamined or easily repeated view, which over time may best be reexamined, given context, or remade to fit a new reality. “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers, and divines.”

Like our founding fathers at the Constitutional Convention, who often changed their minds in pursuit of the right answer or right wording for one of the Articles or Amendments, we must be unafraid to examine what we think we know and think about it again.

As Emerson reminds us, “The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks…See the line from a sufficient distance and it straightens itself to the average tendency; your genuine action will explain your other genuine actions, your conformity explains nothing.”

Finally, he reminds us – as what they called a transcendental or spiritual thinker – to seek light, not darkness. “Time and space are but physiological colors which the eye maketh, but the soul is light, where it is, is day; where it was is night.”

Arguing for life in the present, fully engaged, welcoming independent thought and action, he notes that “Man is timid and apologetic…He dares not say ‘I think, ‘I am,’ but quotes some saint or sage. He is ashamed before the blade of grass or blowing rose…He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time.”

What these essays really say, at times controversial yet powerful, is that we are each given the power to examine life and to see – for lack of a better summing phrase – common sense or truth. We are obligated, by life itself, to seek truth independent-mindedly.

In his speech, The American Scholar, Emerson argued a truly free and independent man must grow up – and he urged America to grow up – “not parrot other men’s thinking,” but look at the world around him and “settle its value in his mind.” 

Fellow scholar Oliver Wendal Holmes Sr. called that specific speech “America’s intellectual Declaration of Independence,” a clarion call for all time to independent thought and action in a harried, cluttered world. If that call was relevant a hundred and fifty years ago, it is only more relevant now, have you noticed?

Robert Charles is a former Assistant Secretary of State under Colin Powell, former Reagan and Bush 41 White House staffer, attorney, and naval intelligence officer (USNR). He wrote “Narcotics and Terrorism” (2003), “Eagles and Evergreens” (2018), and is National Spokesman for AMAC.