Self-Trust

I keep thinking, especially now with all that swirls around us, that the world as it is pinches in on us, trying to get you and me to pull in our shoulders, to keep our arms close to our sides and our heads slightly bowed. That world demands that we make ourselves small and quiet our voices. Conform to what is happening. Concede to the terms set for how they, whomever they may be, want us to live our lives.

Of course, Ralph Waldo Emerson warned us of the dangers of the blindman’s bluff that is the game of conformity. He insisted that we trust ourselves – trust our voice and what we feel in our gut. If we are not to be shackled by the order of things, we must be nonconformists and for that, Emerson said, “the world whips you with its displeasure.”

This is particularly true for those of us who must bear the brunt of the current fever dream. We have to admit, and say it with full conviction, that the malaise that has engulfed the country is rooted in an old, insidious idea about white people that requires a certain view of Black people. They desperately need, and want, their “niggers.” Self-reliance, at least here, involves, as it always has, a struggle with the reality of racism that colors any sense of individuality: that these white people come to understand themselves in relation to those who are not white and who must remain at the bottom of the well (in their imaginations, at least). They need us fixed in a certain position to be them.

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Commerce and markets make such a reality all the more complex as we are cajoled and convinced to live on the surface of things and to find meaning in superficialities driven by algorithms aimed at our minds, hearts, and wallets. No wonder an epidemic of loneliness shadows (or enables) the cruelty of our times.

Emerson was clear. “Let a man know his worth, and keep things under his feet,” he said. “Let him not peep or steal, or skulk up and down with the air of a charity-boy, a bastard, or an interloper, in the world which exists for him.” Self-reliance rightly understood, urges us to become self-relying souls. These words hit at a different register across the railroad tracks among those darker souls who must endure the country’s hubris.

We must never concede the terms of our self-imagining to a world that requires that we remain, symbolically at least, at the bottom of the well and beneath them. No bowing and bending. No self-censure. We must embrace a kind of self-reliance that refuses the crass individualism of our days. We must insist on an expression of individuality that breaks free from conformity with the desires of those who need a bottom as a measure of where not to fall.

Frederick Douglass put it this way: “I believe in individuality, but individuals are, to the mass, like waves to the ocean. The highest order of genius is as dependent as the lowest. It, like the loftiest waves of the sea, derives its power…from the grandeur and vastness of the ocean of which it forms a part. We differ as waves, but are one as the sea.” We become fully ourselves as individuals in communion with others. But this requires, and the irony is evident, that we be not conformed.

As I travel and speak around the country, I find myself saying repeatedly something that I must remember. The world conspires to make us small and the question each of us must answer, especially as that world cracks wide open, is will we be complicit. If we refuse, and we must if we are to survive the whip and whirlwind, then, like John Coltrane, we must take “giant steps.”

Refuse to twist and mangle yourself in order to fit into small spaces with small-minded people. No matter who demands it. Refuse to allow others to crumple your feathers. Self-trust is required, if we are to make it to the other side of this dangerous storm.

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