My idea of an ideal individual

According to Mr. Waldo Emerson CONFORMITY is the number one enemy of the self-reliant individual also known as the ideal individual.

Conformity is simply going with the flow or following the trend.

Conformity avoids any person in making unique contribution to the society. How? When an individual conforms, he just follows and when he follows he just adopt what his idol is doing. In other words, originality will not exist.

But in opposition to Mr. Emerson’s idea of conformity, I do believe that conformity is necessary.

But I do agree that somehow conformity do avoid an individual to make unique contribution. But uniqueness is present in every individual that is why I do believe that even when a person conforms to its society his nature is to share a unique idea to it.

Most of the time a person needs to conform. Here’s an example,

Ana is a college student and she is staying in a dormitory together with five more students of the same school. Three of the students she’s living with sleep at two or three in the morning because they chat all night long. Because they chat at night, they make noise and the lights are not off till they decide to sleep. But Ana and the two more students can’t sleep with lights on, so they decided to talk to the three students about the lights off schedule and the noise. The three students said that they would lessen their noise and that lights will be turned off before one but it lasted only for two days, so Ana reminded them again about the agreement. Again it lasted for a while and then back to what it used to be, so Ana and the two other decided to conform instead of reminding and reminding them every time.

See, there are a lot of incidents where conformity is present. I do not believe that conformity is wrong, sometimes a just need to conform for the better.

An ideal person is not afraid to speak out his mind and to do what he feels like doing even if he knows that it is wrong for others. An ideal person believes that what is true in his private heart is true for all men.

I know someone that has all the characteristic of that of an ideal person (characteristic of an ideal individual according to Mr. Emerson). She speaks whatever she feels like saying without thinking of the consequences it may have. She has this motto, “what Bessie wants Bessie gets” (the name is not my friends’ name). And she does everything she wanted without considering her colleagues.

Now I have this conclusion in my mind, I believe that the true ideal person must know when to conform and when to speak his mind.