Harper\'s Magazine - 03.2020

46 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / MARCH 2020

with a mission to bring slaves back to
the New World; he was an unapologetic
murderer of the is-
land’s cannibals; he
imposed his lan-
guage and religion
on his young slave,
Friday. Crusoe reap-
peared by other
names in later fic-
tions: in the stories
about the historical
figures Daniel Boone
and Davy Crockett,
who both became
elevated to legend through folklore; in
James Fenimore Cooper’s Leather-
stocking Tales, returning as Natty
Bumppo, aka Hawkeye, aka Leather-
stocking, aka Deerslayer. Bumppo was
also called La Longue Carabine—
being a manly man, of course his
rifle had to be enormous. Out of the
West came an equivalently vio-
lent gunslinger: a type that was
taciturn, competent, and living
beyond the scope of social systems.
John Wayne; Cormac McCarthy’s
characters. In these pages in Sep-
tember 1968, Larry McMurtry
wrote: “Cowboys are romantics, ex-
treme romantics, and ninety-nine out
of a hundred of them are sentimental
to the core.” (This tracks with the
preppers at camp. Although ostensibly
preparing for the future, they were
mostly concerned with the monsters of
former eras—nuclear war or the loss of
the electrical grid—not the far more
monstrous contemporary threat of cli-
mate change ending all human life.)
In non-fiction form, this romantic
strain metamorphosed into the pe-
culiar, homegrown utopian philoso-
phy of transcendentalism, which
gave flesh-and-blood Americans a
codification of the laws of man-
hood. A notable inspiration for
preppers, and a foundational text for
the kind of libertarians who read, is
Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1841 essay
“Self-Reliance.”
In my tent, I pulled the work up
on my phone and slowly reread it.
Emerson was still a relatively young
man of thirty- eight when he published
the essay, and it’s so full of passionate
disdain that I have a hard time reading
it in anything but a Holden Caulfield
voice. But this is unfair. “Self- Reliance”

is a profoundly poetic work, strange

and circuitous, full of startling imagery

and chockablock

with aphorisms so

constantly recycled

in American daily

life that a reader

can feel déjà vu in

encountering the

full text for the first

time. Emerson’s es-

say holds up the self

as the bedrock from

which all other au-

thority rises. Those

who view Emerson as a libertarian

prototype cite his glorification of the

individual, as when he says, “The

only right is what is after my constitu-

tion, the only wrong what is against

it”; his opposition to institutions like

government and religion; and his idea

that community is a distraction. But I

think this distills Emerson’s argument

into something far smaller than its

actual, and truly gigantic, oddness.

Emerson’s argument is less libertar-

ian than it is anarchic. He is not

after the deification

of the self—self as

sun around which

the planets of other

people must orbit —

but rather the radi-

cal de- emphasis of

the institutions that

bind and constrict

an individual’s true

use and purpose.

Emerson’s philoso-

phy is the opposite of

the libertarian cele-

bration of greed and selfishness and

social Darwinism, the ideology’s fixa-

tion on personal freedom to the detri-

ment of social security or collective

advancement: Emerson posits a sort of

Buddhist attention to the moment and

awareness so deep it calls into question

the structures that inhibit social

change, the very things that lead to

inequality. Self-reliance is not the

same thing as self-interest.

7.

Society everywhere is in conspiracy

against the manhood of every one of

its members.

I

was bleary from sleeplessness,

smelly from not wanting to go into

the showers used by a few hundred

other souls. I ate with glum slowness;

I had not talked to anyone for longer

than a few minutes in over forty-eight

hours, and my solitude was wearing.

The day before, I had been so glad-

dened by John Moody that I nearly

ran to the first class of the day—his

discussion of elderberries. He quot-

ed Pliny the Elder, Hippocrates,

and Hans Christian Andersen. He

explained that the Count from

Sesame Street had a historical basis:

in medieval times vampires were

thought to have OCD, and if you

put elderberries on your window-

sills, any vampires would be so en-

tranced by counting them that

they wouldn’t come into your house.

He so beautifully extolled the endless

medical and diet- related benefits of el-

derberries that I was seduced into be-

lieving that all people with even ten

square feet of soil should be growing

them. (I bought his book, and back at

home, I ordered elderberry plants.)

Then I went on a

“Wild Edible Sur-

vival” foraging walk

with Richard Cleve-

land of the Earth

School in nearby

Hendersonville: we

moved a few feet

down the road as a

mass of sixty or sev-

enty people and

plucked and sampled

sassafras, plantain

(nature’s Benadr yl),

dandelion, sour grass, and violet.

At “Concealed Carry and Defen-

sive Shooting,” the instructor, Da-

vid Stutts, talked about “playing

with guns,” and showed a video in

which a child who looked to be un-

der the age of twelve shot at a sil-

houette, from a table, as though he

IT’S EASY TO BE INTOXICATED

BY ROBINSON CRUSOE;

HE IS THE PINNACLE OF

SELF-RELIANCE