"“Conformity” is a dirty word to Ralph Waldo Emerson. It is the death of the individual, he says, the enemy of originality. Indeed, the development of the individual self is one side of the human experience. But to reject conformity offhand is to forfeit the other side of that experience – the individual’s participation in the community. Self-awareness may be a uniquely human faculty among all of Earth’s animals, but so, too, is the formation of complex society. Total sacrifice of the self in the name of societal submission would be a horrifying perversion of human nature. On the same lines, however, the total rejection of conformity in the pursuit of self-reliance is not only impossible, it is a devastating sacrifice of the human experience."
- A random essay on the internet
jiLL divulged at 2:40 PM 0 Comments