Embracing Universal Individualism

But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another. Never allow yourself to be made a victim. Accept no one's definition of your life, but define yourself. Some people will love you for you. Most will love you for what you can do for them, and some won't like you at all.

Poverty, income inequality, and substandard housing touch not only the health of lower income individuals, but make entire communities less healthy compared to communities with better measures on these variables. When persons are disadvantaged in their social, economic, and cultural spaces, this profoundly impacts their health and their ability to contribute to the common good of their communities. We believe enough in community to require emergency departments to treat all persons regardless of their ability to pay.

We fail, however, to realize that their care is paid by for the entire community through taxes and higher premiums on insured persons. Public hospitals and not-for-profit, faith-based health facilities treat a disproportionate share of lower income patients unable to pay for their care. These facilities depend on community support in the form of tax exemptions and Medicaid spending. Since all health facilities need a positive bottom line in order to survive, unreimbursed expenses incurred treating the uninsured are partially made up by higher prices paid by insured persons, which in turn generate higher premiums for their insurance.

Although Americans tend to see it in terms of individual benefit, health insurance is essentially communal.

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The essence of fire insurance, for example, is that many people pay relatively small amounts so that the few people with fire losses are covered for large amounts. Why should I have to buy an insurance policy that covers pregnancy? Why should my policy have to cover prostate treatment? The essence of health insurance is that the healthy at a given time subsidize the sick. The young subsidize the old. Males subsidize females for some diseases, and vice versa.

Shared risk is not only the definition of insurance, but also one of the purposes of community. Medical research is a cooperative endeavor. When research study participants sign up for clinical trials, they affirm that the research may not benefit them personally, but potentially improves the future health of the community. Similarly, medical knowledge is held in community. Medicine as a communal enterprise stewards this knowledge in trust for the health and human flourishing of the community. Stewardship of personal resources is the flip side of community benefit. Containing the costs of health care and keeping them in balance with other community needs requires attention to the impact of personal decisions on the good of the community, whether one is a patient consuming or a practitioner allocating medical resources.

For example, the latest chemotherapy drug may cost hundreds of thousands of dollars but provide limited benefits over existing drugs. Care for the common good should give patients and physicians pause about beginning such treatment. This notion fails to recognize that, while the insurance pool is indeed common, it is neither unlimited, nor does it necessarily have higher priority than other common resources, such as education, infrastructure, and clean air. Dollars unreasonably sucked into health care are not available for other community needs.

Embracing this view of individualism, he asserts, can revolutionize society, not through a sweeping mass movement, but through the transformation of one life at a time and through the creation of leaders capable of greatness. Grade CCR complexity band. For more information on text complexity see these resources from achievethecore.

In the Text Analysis section, Tier 2 vocabulary words are defined in pop-ups, and Tier 3 words are explained in brackets. Click here for standards and skills for this lesson. This lesson offers a thorough exploration of the essay. The first interactive exercise addresses vocabulary challenges.

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The second, well-suited for individual or small group work, presents some of his more famous aphorisms as tweets from Dr. Ralph, a nineteenth-century self-help guru, and asks students to interpret and paraphrase them.

The third invites students to consider whether they would embrace Dr. It explores paragraph 7, the most well-developed in the essay and the only one that shows Emerson interacting with other people to any substantial degree. This lesson is divided into two parts, both accessible below. Ralph Waldo Emerson died in , but he is still very much with us. When you hear people assert their individualism, perhaps in rejecting help from the government or anyone else, you hear the voice of Emerson. When you hear a self-help guru on TV tell people that if they change their way of thinking, they will change reality, you hear the voice of Emerson.

By the s many in New England, especially the young, felt that the religion they had inherited from their Puritan ancestors had become cold and impersonal. In their view it lacked emotion and failed to foster that sense of connectedness to the divine which they sought in religion. To them it seemed that the church had taken its eyes off heaven and fixed them on the material world, which under the probings, measurements, and observations of science seemed less and less to offer assurance of divine presence in the world.

Taking direction from ancient Greek philosophy and European thinking, a small group of New England intellectuals embraced the idea that men and women did not need churches to connect with divinity and that nature, far from being without spiritual meaning, was, in fact, a realm of symbols that pointed to divine truths. According to these preachers and writers, we could connect with divinity and understand those symbols — that is to say, transcend or rise above the material world — simply by accepting our own intuitions about God, nature, and experience.

These insights, they argued, needed no external verification; the mere fact that they flashed across the mind proved they were true. This self defines not a particular, individual identity but a universal, human identity. When our insights derive from it, they are valid not only for us but for all humankind. Emerson says we must have the self-trust to believe that they do and follow them as if they do.

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Daguerrotype of Ralph Waldo Emerson. It appeared in , just four years after President Andrew Jackson left office.

In the election of Jackson forged an alliance among the woodsmen and farmers of the western frontier and the laborers of eastern cities. But he objected to them on broader grounds as well.

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Many people like Emerson, who despite his noncomformist thought still held many of the political views of the old New England elite from which he sprang, feared that the rise of the Jacksonian electorate would turn American democracy into mob rule. Instead, think of what we today would call mass society, a society whose culture and politics are shaped not by the tastes and opinions of a small, narrow elite but rather by those of a broad, diverse population.

Emerson opposed mass-party politics because it was based on nothing more than numbers and majority rule, and he was hostile to mass culture because it was based on manufactured entertainments. Both, he believed, distracted people from the real questions of spiritual health and social justice. Like some critics today, he believed that mass society breeds intellectual mediocrity and conformity.

He argued that it produces soft, weak men and women, more prone to whine and whimper than to embrace great challenges. Emerson took as his mission the task of lifting people out of the mass and turning them into robust, sturdy individuals who could face life with confidence. While he held out the possibility of such transcendence to all Americans, he knew that not all would respond.

His uncompromising embrace of nonconformity and intellectual integrity can breed a chilly arrogance, a lack of compassion, and a lonely isolation. A word about our presentation. Ralph, a twenty-first-century self-help guru. In the end we ask if you would embrace his approach to life and sign up for his tweets. What is important about the verses written by the painter in sentence 1? He suggests that we should read it with our souls.