During my junior year of high school, I possessed particularly pointed opinions on a few rather philosophic topics. The following is an article I wrote in response to (one of my favorite authors) Emerson’s Self Reliance.

 

“It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude…” -R.W. Emerson

… Who of those among us, those with whom we hold in high regard, are the independent thinkers bound within society? If an answer does not buffet us immediately, why then do we placate our conscience by conforming to the lead of those legions that enlighten neither society nor themselves? It is unanswerable to a slave of an unenlightened legion; only by a lone few independent minds capable of understanding can it be truly addressed…

All of us are born into the exquisite beauty of the world as untouched clay, genius in its purest form. Our journey to the center of society throughout life tampers and poisons our formerly independent genius capacities, which were molded by nature’s perfected mechanisms of evolution. This contamination leads us to believe that blind belief is the only belief. Thus, we are victims to a public that teaches postmortem treachery for all those who truly think. We are the insentient drones that drive our own progress in reverse.

Yet, independence is scattered among us still. In the minds of those who take not what is assimilated into the weak, but that which is rejected by shepherds leading the public, there exists a questioning nature behind all that is taught. This curiosity inspired temptation leads these minds to a place towering far above the others. A state of individual creativity is wrought from our roots in the beginning of mankind; the truest thoughts stifled since birth are reawakened, and brought into being. The immaculate knowledge originally beset into us upon our awakening into this world is sewn again. But those once great are easily ejected from society. This forged greatness can only be balanced with a societal membership using extreme precision. And so, within the solitude of loneliness dwells the onslaught of individualists who have failed to fulfill the former. It is only the singular minds possessing the wealth of individual thought, yet those that are still bound to the fabric of society, that loom greatly…

Why are the independent so quickly left to this solitude of loneliness? A quick retort would blame societal ignorance, and perhaps even go so far as to stem this from the roots of education. But no! Blame must not be cast into the only tool of redemption. Education is powerful, and casting it aside exercises one’s right to simply let continue the ongoing flow of vast societal ignorance around and through independent thought. Those once great, and those great, and those not yet great will be forgotten, and free thought will crumble.