Does Emerson Make Too Much Conformity?

Socrates said, “Know thyself,” and no has taken that more to heart than one of
America’s great revolutionary individualists, Ralph Waldo Emerson, an original liberal from Massachusetts, or the Sage of Concord as he was more commonly known in his day. He wasn’t the handsomest man alive… but his message made him more famous and more popular than any American Idol. He said things like:
“A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the luster of the firmament of bards and sages.”
“Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.”
Emerson, like no other, entreats us to trust ourselves, to become aware of ourselves—that is our innate capacity and power and we must use it (Rollo May makes a similar point in “On
Look at Emerson’s pictures on these pages. You can probably point to some convincing evidence that he was okay about conformity in some matters; so, when does conformity become too much conformity? Why, despite the evidence that he himself has agreed to conform to certain obvious social conventions, does he make conformity out to be such a terrible thing?
It’s obvious that although he conformed to conventional social expectations in some ways, Emerson associated too much conformity—and that is an interesting question: how much is too much?—with a kind of "herd" mentality. The sheep are in this part of the meadow so I better go and stand there, too. The birds are flying this way; I better not get left behind. Uh-oh, the lemmings are jumping off the cliff, so I’d better jump, too. There’s something repugnantly mindless and undignified in behaving like a herd animal when human beings are capable of making individual choices. A human being ought to exercise his human faculties—intelligence, creativity, individuality. Conformity in all things, especially the things that matter most (what are the things that matter most to you?) would be a sign of lower