A World With No Laws, By John Jerger

In “A World with No Laws”, John Jerger refutes Ralph Emerson’s thesis on self-reliance, by stating that “it would be disastrous if not impossible to base a society solely on such principles (self-reliance).” Granted, sometimes people need the constraints of laws and morality to prevent crime and harm. Nevertheless, it will also be a stagnant world if everyone in the society is a conformist.

As Emerson says, “Every true man is a cause, a country and an age”, it is always people’s nonconformity that stimulates innovation and ushers in a new age. Even if those nonconformists’ causes are not accomplished only by themselves, the nonconformity to the rotten society is the prerequisite of the change and development. In Think Different, the famous commercial of Apple, Steve Jobs shows the audience the huge impact of the nonconformists. Albert Einstein, Bob Dylan, Martin Luther King, Mohandas Gandhi, Pablo Picasso and other “crazy” nonconformists appear in the commercial, and Jobs says,

“Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The
Sometimes it is just the elite’s excuse for their selfishness to state that “civilized cultures require a stable base upon which the elite might act for the benefit of the entire culture.” Evil like corruption, discrimination and murder also occur among the elite who are eager to conform to the consumer society and lose their inner pursuit. Different from Jerger, Emerson regards everyone equally by stating that “whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist” at the beginning of