“For the world of nonconformity beats you with its offense,” writes Ralph Waldo Emerson in his famous treatise, Self Reliance. For the world of non-conformity forces us to pave the roads even in the heat of the heat, to dig ditches only to fill them up again later, and of course spend the nights in the box. Both Emerson and the 1967 film Cool Hand Luke emphasize the repression and terror of man’s greatness in the struggles of the battlefield, in the common society. However, both Emerson’s vision of his trusted man and Luke Jackson’s will persist in any and all other dictates imposed on him. The lessons of individual dignity and mental autonomy can be applied to the human Creator who seeks to triumph even in the atmosphere of this time.
Some societies stifle people’s creativity and intelligence through cultural norms and stigmatization and strong coercive actions. Luke Jackson was incarcerated in a “correctional road” prison for the serious crime of cutting off the heads of several public subways. The car itself is symbolic of society’s control of individual freedom and choice. By an arbitrary act of the local government, the meters set a cap on the duration of the time that someone can put their own. car in a certain location, thus limiting the amount of time someone can spend their business in the neighborhood and divert every penny into the stagnant coffers of the bureaucracy. Luke’s destruction of the parking meters reflected an individual’s attempt to mock social restrictions. If he is drunk and half-conscious, yet he directs his actions not to the wantonness of murder or theft, but to the removal of the harm to individual liberty. On the other hand, society beats him to the utmost with its violence, apprehending, arresting, and imprisoning him with the ease with which his freedom almost becomes his own. Even if he had killed, Luca’s final punishment would not have been so severe, for the entire prison environment will eventually kill him because of his individualism.
Luca’s real trials begin when the law is no longer applied to free citizens, but to the smallest stimuli of his prison. Emerson’s work analyzes the consequences of such a changing environment. “It is easy enough for a man who is strong enough to know the world to carry the fury of the cultured classes. But … when the senseless violence that lies at the bottom of society roars and cuts, it needs attitude. Magnanimity. Emerson’s statement was meant as a general social commentary. The current academic paradigm or the fortified patronage of the government can be viewed with aversion, stigmas, and heated criticism, which receive mere murmuring at the limits of the individualistic way. , a man of reason and enthusiasm meets the most infernal conditions.
Prison bosses are rude and sadistic men outside the Gestapo. Godfrey’s boss is a hobbyist, apparently to let things go. After Luca’s first flight, Godfrey grimly smacks his head on the grass. In the final boss fight with Luke near the church, Godfrey puts a bullet through Luke’s chest with similar fearless awareness. Paul Boss is a man who loves to make you and witness the twisted and captive passion; After the second flight of Luke, Paul orders him to dig it, so that he conspired with another boss to come periodically in this, and informing Luke that the ditch was against the prison rules. These frequent recursions of contradictory instructions are accompanied by blows to Luca, who has fallen on his knees with the utmost submission, imploring mercy. Finally, not to the body, but to the spirit, sending the rational, aspirant into the realms of darkness, incompatible, incomprehensible, and cruel. This is the lowest power of unknown violence, which Emerson addresses, even worse than the insults and threats of the common people, which sometimes happen to a free man.
The invincible kingdom of the prison is rendered all the more by the mockery of friendship, the front of the Leader, with the essence of domination hidden not too far beneath. The captain regularly speaks carefully in a soothing voice, informing the prisoners that “We’re here to help you. We’re doing this for your own good.” Emerson, looking at the matter from the perspective of individualists, finds the gross fallacy of such a claim. For he writes, “What ought to be done is concerning me, not what men think.” This rule can serve both in life and in intellectual matters, both greatness and lowliness. for you will always find those who think they know better what the duty is than you know it. “There is such a captain who holds that the ultimate good is blind obedience to the government of his social automatons. undermined, unless strengthened by the fist, the gun, and the sweat and blood of the prey. When Lucas objected to the Captain, saying, “You don’t have to be me, Captain,” by which, rejecting the plan of the leader, he was violently shaken to the ground he took it in jest, saying: “What we had here, we share in the failure.” According to the Captain, a man must either willingly renounce it or renounce it through the imposition of socially legitimate force. the noise and the lunging of the worst elements that can be made in man will make the social machinery purposeful.
Few men less dignified than Lucas had been thrust into such hostile circumstances, so that physical escape would be met with pursuit and mental dissension with a box or fist. However, even there Luke and Emerson can continue without the spirit of vision. From the beginning, when Charles enumerates all the innumerable infractions for which he can be put in the box, Luke does not diminish. He answers with a relieved smile and gives Lucas his own smile, then anticipates Carl’s next sentence with “a night in a box.” Carl notices that Luke is not a typical “new bait” captive, and in an authoritative voice asks, “What do we have here?” Luke answers to him, “We have come to Luke Jackson.” Lucas has a solid pride in his identity and innate human dignity, qualities that he does not allow the phalanx to shake. Emerson writes: “I cannot consent to pay a privilege where I have an intrinsic right. Few and cheap are my gifts, indeed I am, and I need neither my certainty, nor the certainty of my associates, for any second testimony.” Luke epitomizes this philosophy when he neglects to lower himself to the level of the novice of the “new flesh” prison. He denies that his existence is subject to Dragline’s decision to recognize him as a member of the prison community. He realizes that he does not need the recognition of others to show his dignity or his power, but rather flows from within himself.
Initially, Luca’s open defiance of the long prison tradition was met with great resentment and outright aggression from his peers and Dragline. Luke, however, adheres to the expression of the truth that has been preserved in his mind, however controversial, displeasing, or unconventional such honesty may be. Hence Emerson writes, I ought to be upright and vital, and in all ways to speak the rude truth, and Luke agrees. When Lucas doesn’t hesitate to assert his reason for Draglin’s superfluous lewd comment about a woman spotted around the workplace, he incurs Draglin’s extreme fury. Luke is challenged to a fight, and repeatedly pinned to the ground. However, he remains adamant and continues to stand his ground at all times, not wanting to destroy Dragline so much as to assert that such a brutal assault mechanism will not defeat him. Luke recovers from every failure, always to receive and to fight. Like the Emersonian man of all professions and opportunities, Luke “always falls like a cat on his feet. Not once, but a hundred times.” But Lucas, in one of those cases, wins the fight far more significantly than if they had been under the body of Dragline. Most of Dragline’s respect can be earned through his resilience, as Dragline observes that this man of tenacity, conviction and integrity is not an incipient cynic, but a valuable and powerful friend.
By the firm use of his creativity and autonomy, Luke is able to decorate the social conditions of his inmates’ circles and earn a general, deep, and lasting respect. To do this, Luke implicitly acknowledges another Emersonian insight: “Do what is given to you, and you cannot hope too much or dare too much.” If only Luke had followed the “way he always did” in prison, he would have had the same hard, burning, fastidious attitude, a situation deliberately intended to stimulate passions and emotions. When the prison bosses merits” Luke’s gang to deputize a model of work to slow down the way to the job, Luke encourages his associates to work out He tried to run more fully and faster than expected. He understands an intelligent approach that facilitates coordinated action among group members and creates a challenge to aspire to the minds of the captives his purpose, leisure which is immensely difficult to acquire in the way of prison. He institutes the time of work, all the rest of his group to take up his approach and activity. This is similar to Emerson’s proposition that men will come to the admiration and defense of their intrinsic constancy and self-reliance. that everything was established in the great order of things by the long shadow of one man, who ventured to introduce a complete change by which the given matter was approached. Finally, it is not only the ardor of the assignment to be relieved by internal workers, but the additional time off is to be used at will.
As prison conditions become intolerable, Lucas does not surrender his will to freedom until the inevitable life-or-death struggle between him and his totalitarian rulers. But with Luca’s mother dead, the bosses seek to increase his misery by condemning him to three nights in a box, while they persecute his spirit, which is still recovering from the blow. Luke notices no amount of clever walls, no discovery of lively leisure, no idle games, slow national roads, and the results of eating the sad hidden things of an inhuman, lustful, arbitrary condition imposed on him. He must and wants to free his body and mind. After a failed attempt at flight, he does not hesitate to move on to another, but with increased focus on monitoring. He is a reasonable man who can spot the flaws in each of his plans. The first escapee was apprehended by the police on suspicion of wearing prison clothes. In his second escape, he largely evades “civilian” streets until he can remove the chains and seduce the prison dogs. However, it is unable to fully disable its following system of abusers. The third escape, co-orchestrated with Dragline, was clearly executed theft of all prison vehicles and used. one of the trucks would drive far from the prison before continuing on foot. Each time Lucas, with his independent thinking, can correct his mistakes and fall back on his feet. If he had seen just one Emersonian key, he might have survived bodily. “It is only that a man takes off all foreign support, and stands alone, that I may see that he is strong and prevails. He is weaker than any apprentice to his own standard.” Lucas slipped away with Dragline at the same time as Dragline, his terrible mistake, for Dragline cannot keep himself from himself, when necessity forces a separation between them both. Luke lacks skill and quickly falls into the hands of the search party from the prison, leading them. But Luke, believing that it was possible for him to surrender voluntarily, and spare his life. Dragline, however benevolent, remains a follower, subject to the power of his superiors’ mercy, whether it be Luca’s positive influence or the Captain’s promised gentleness. Dragline is not of the great kind, because its desires and hopes are derived from the admiration of Luca, not from the effects of its own mind.
Dragline does not wait for compliance to bring about Luke’s destruction, but Luke, true to his nature, cannot be taken back to prison. Instead of subverting himself to the bosses at random, he proudly goes to the window of the church and announces, echoing the words of the leader one time, “what we had here to share the failure”. Mr. Jackson acknowledges that he is not at fault for not falling in line with the prison’s impositions, but rather that he misjudged the nature of his focus, seeking it “for his own good.” But the bubbles come not for communication, but for blood. Noticing that the individualist will always attack every form of indignity and every obstacle, the bosses, with Godfrey as their agent, seek to be able to resurrect Luca.
Thus the life of Lucas Jackson was not marked by integrity. Dragline realizes that no negotiation, no compromise, can be made between freedom and obedience, and in Godfrey’s lungs, leading to the destruction of the monster’s boss and hiding the sunglasses. Before being imprisoned again, Dragline finally ascends to the insight that he is without persecution. “What he acquires is animated, he expects not the nod of the magistrates, not crowds, not seditions, not conflagrations, not storms, not disturbances, but renews perpetually, wherever man breathes.” The immense innovation and desire for freedom in the independent man cannot be repelled by any means; unless by the voluntary subordination of the mind of one it can be reduced to tyranny, which Luke was unwilling to accommodate. Luca’s legacy is so lingering that he remains, in the words of Draglin, “a natural born shaker of the world,” whose bright smile and trusting demeanor remain vivid in the minds of his captives. In his own way, Luke’s greatness was released from the ark and into eternity, as the “triumph of the principles” finally gave him peace. What remains for the living captives is to find in themselves what Luke knew, and in his example as a stone, but not a definitive rule, for independent development.
Luke’s example and Emerson’s message to the political situation today is of greater magnitude than it has ever been. Today, if parking meters were the only restriction placed on our autonomy, or the mere possibility of human interactions, as Emerson declared, would afflict our society, we would live in a comparatively promising and free world. Alas, the scope of the current barrier far exceeds this.
The government of this country has usurped almost every area of human activity, restricting innovators through effective “antitrust” laws, restricting the amount of market a business can share through the master’s expertise and the quality of its work. It erects barriers to the development of free thinking people by imposing affirmative initiatives that prevent them from achieving education. not his faults. It has assumed to dictate to businessmen and farmers what forms of land use are permissible as a standard of social sanction, through laws of eminent domain and circumstantial conservation that compel people to “absolve themselves in a reflexive way” not only to their neighbors and communities. but bureaucracy, lobbyists, and criminals, and numb inanimate rocks. He imposed a prison-like environment on the youth of this country through forced voluntary incitement, staying in servile-like work on the road, inside schools, and the imminent fear of military draft that Godfrey would bring to our officers. the “new meat” of our children, which politicians implicitly advocate by maintaining draft registration. And all dissent is reduced to almost nothing when free-thinking people (often successful, industrious people) are extorted from their gargantuan sums of money to set up the socialist behemoth. Some of this profit is spent on false philanthropy, becoming the “criminal dollar” that Emerson did not want to give, that is, to support in the state of prison similar dependent groups of beneficiaries who can be counted on their vote. the seniority of the incumbent, and the sheer volume of the halls prevailing all disagree in the passage of the next statist subversion of liberty. And if anyone disagrees with the words of these wise men, unwilling to sacrifice money for harmful reasons, the full weight of the government’s retaliation is borne. What can a self-confident and self-confident person do in such an environment, which is increasingly restricted?
Henry David Thoreau, Emerson’s friend and fellow soldier, tried the art of civil disobedience against the tax, which in his opinion was unjust. the war Thoreau was thrown into prison and, although he showed great strength of conviction, he did not win the tribute. A fellow abolitionist and friend of John Brown‘s efforts, he was shaken by an armed raid on the Harper’s Ferry slavery institution; which, with a few arms and supporters, was supported by the coercive hand of a great government. he was killed in the attempt, and although he became a martyr for the cause of abolition, he did not conquer slavery. Luke Jackson stopped the harm of a car meter saw and escaped with cruelties from the prison. He too received a bullet in the chest at the end, and uprooted the root of his passion. All these three, although they had preserved their safety by punishments, yet did not carry out that purpose, for they neglected that every triumph of individual affairs required another approach.
Of the individualist, Emerson writes that immediately throwing laws, books, idolatry, and manners out of the window, we should not pity him any more, but thank and fear him, and he will restore the teacher. a man’s life shines, and his name is dear to all of history. It is easy to see that a greater effort of self-confidence is needed in all the duties and relations of men in their education; studies; Advocates do not emerge as a weapon of things, nor even open disobedience to the law, but a way of life that imitates the lover and helps freedom to use the mind. Emerson refused to slip into prison for paying taxes; nor did the servile tumult arise; The parking meters will not be taken off today. However, his ideas and influence have spread to this day in exactly the way he intended. He did not want to be worshiped as an idol or to be doubted, but rather as an incentive for people to examine more closely their own behavior and the abilities that they can only bring out from within. Rather, it is the designer whose critical intelligence must be developed, whose opinions must serve as useful tools and steps, but not products or ends-in-themselves.
Emerson’s key proposition about self-reliance as a vehicle for reform is that voluntary conviction and personal example can eliminate social risk. In every complex gesture of man, he indicates a certain mode of functioning which is constrained by his nature. “Your genuine action will explain itself and your other authentic actions will explain. Your conformity will explain nothing.”
The man who resists the usurpations of the government, or the expansion of decadent culture, or the growing “far away” that many modern people seek from his life, must speak firmly and act firmly to establish a freer world, where individual creativity is left behind. there is He should not be afraid that the public will reject his claims because he does not hold two and a half Ph.D.s in the subject he addresses. Ph.Ds themselves are too often handed over by scholars who are the guardians of the current political and cultural paradigm, a fortified academic camp that endlessly quotes Marx, Roosevelt and Keynes and preaches that “it is my duty to put all the poor in good circumstances. politics is abandoned and the clarity and reason of the patrons of liberty is exposed, then, as the allies have arrived, the public gravitates to the existing and to the dismissal of the people who will leave their most important gifts and approach the things in which liberty is at stake. and they will know that only the triumph of the solid, the bitter principles which are in them, will preserve the support of the reformed constitution.
