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I must be myself.

I cannot break myself any longer for you. If you can love me for what I am,

we shall be the happier. If you cannot, I will still seek to deserve that you should.

The great 19th century American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson believed that to flourish,

we must be a nonconformist.

If we just think as others think and do as others do, we limit our potential and place our

health or sickness at the mercy of social forces beyond our control.

In this video we are going to explore the dangers of conformity, what nonconformity meant

for Emerson and how the nonconformist acts as a force of good in a society gone mad.

Who so would be a man must be a nonconformist, wrote Emerson.

To be a conformist is to orient our life around the dominant norms, values, and ideals of our society.

It is to allow the boundaries and templates of our culture to shape our sense of self.

Most of us become conformists without reflecting on what we are doing.

We see everyone around us conforming, and so it feels natural to do the same.

But conformity comes at a price, or as Emerson stated in a lecture given in 1844,

I pay a destructive tax in my conformity.

In any society only certain character traits are favored by the trends of conformity,

while many others, which may be healthy in their own right, are looked

upon with indifference or disdain. In our day, for example, extroversion is favored over

...