"Never Imitate"

"Insist on yourself; never imitate" ( Emerson, 21)
Ralph Waldo Emerson Writes in his essay, Self-Reliance, of his idea that people should not follow each other. He believes that we should "never imitate" each other. I, personally, have a hard time agreeing with him, here. We all must "imitate" at certain points in our lives, like when we are young children learning how to talk, walk, and eat without the help of another person. To do so, we have to imitate each other. A toddler learns to talk by listening to other people communicating verbally. We are taught to set examples for those who are of a younger age and who are less experienced than ourselves. Our society thrives off of imitation and for any single person to derive from the normal ways of our society would, without a doubt, put them on the outside, casting them as an non-conformist.

I am baffled as to why Self-Reliance is looked at as an amazing, inspiring peice of literature when we are living our lives and teaching each other to live their lives in a completely different way than Emerson believes that we should. I will take the pragmatic approach, here, and say that I do not think that there is any possible way that we could change our society or become non-conformists without struggling for the rest of our lives.

I also must point upon the fact that Ralph Waldo Emerson is promoting nonconformity and not imitating other people while, in the picture above, he is dressed in the typical costume of a male of his day and age. Maybe this is becasue Emerson is aware that he will be considered an outsider if he were to dress in a non-conformist way. I believe that he wrote this essay in the hope that someone in the future would have the courage and the ability to create a new society, in we do not win the game of life by playing follow-the-leader.