Guest post by our good friend Jack Danger from Hawaii

Plato, Moses, Kant, Kierkegaard. We hold the names in esteem but they were just men as we are men and they simply wrote what they thought. Their thoughts came from within them exactly as ours do, yet we often reject ours in favor of theirs.

Every man encounters, in moments of conviction, the absolute truth that his plot of land in this life is his for better or worse to make what he will in proportion to his toil. And he will not know what could become of him until he has tried.

Every man is relieved when he has put his utmost to his task and likewise cannot experience peace when he does not.

Every man has heard these truths manifesting from within him and, in fact, there was a time when this was all he knew.

Remember your youth when you did not hesitate to give the verdict. You did not bemoan where your food was coming from. You did not prolong lamentation but quickly assumed pursuit of the next adventure. You accepted your temperament without question. You flew from venture to venture drinking each one dry until it ceased to entertain and interest you. You observed with innocence and spoke opinions freely.

In those days, you did not mute the ‘iron string’, rather it was your constant guide.

You can still hear this voice in solitude but when you entered manhood, you also entered the world and the iron string grew faint and inaudible. Society in every corner of the world is in conspiracy against manhood and every man.

Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. Virtue is conformity. Self-reliance is aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but rather titles and numbers.

The world is full of people who think they know what is your duty better than you do. It is easy to live after their opinions and most of the world does. It is equally easy to shut yourself off completely and only live after your own, some follow this path as well. But the greatness of man is in he who stands in the midst but keeps himself whole with the independence of solitude.

Society has assigned you a place along with constant urging to conform to the role. But in actuality it is the world which awaits your verdict, as it did before in your youth, as it should be again.

Do not run from this truth: Trust yourself. ‘Every heart vibrates to that iron string.’

Remember the magnificent voice from within that strips you naked of your defense and reminds you who you are – and what you must do.

The popular fable of the drunk who is taken from the street into the palace, washed, dressed, and laid in the king’s bed, and upon waking told that he had been temporarily insane, owes it’s popularity to the fact that it represents perfectly the state of man. Having been drunk, he wakes up, once again listens to the voice which guides him, and finds himself a true prince.

Man is his own star; and the soul that can render an honest and perfect man commands all light, all influence, all fate. Nothing to him falls early or too late. Our acts our angels are, or good or ill, our fatal shadows that walk by us still. – Epilogue to Beaumont and Fletcher’s Honest Man’s Fortune

Quotes: Emerson, Self-Reliance