This One Fact

ByDan September 7, 2024January 21, 2026 January 21, 2026

From Emerson’s Self-Reliance:

This one fact the world hates, that the soul becomes; for that forever degrades the past, turns all riches to poverty, all reputation to a shame, confounds the saint with the rogue, shoves Jesus and Judas equally aside.

It does seem like the world hates this fact.

We don’t want to keep working in order to earn.

We don’t want to die.

We don’t want something more powerful than humans to exist.

If there is a future, we would want it to be one we recognize, one that is soothing for us, one that behooves our present preferences, and our lives, our species, our way of life. Many people wish to strive towards an eternal hominid kingdom, where the pinnacle of both power and moral value is forever human-shaped until the end of time.

In the quote above, Emerson speaks here not merely of wealth, reputation, or Jesus, but of humanity, of all forms of life, all planets, galaxies, universes, of all states of all things. 

In the year 5000 BC, humans weren’t faced with this dissolution of man. We faced death much more firmly every day, but mostly, we would expect the lives of our great-grandchildren to be nearly identical to our own.

Today, we aren’t allowed to have such thoughts. The waves of change beat too hard on the shores and reshape the landscape under our feet. Acceptance of these changes – “riding” these waves – is what the present asks of us.

Emerson frames “this one fact” in stark terms so that we might look at it sternly, so that we might never become complacent. I believe he wrote for himself, to anchor truths within himself that he himself needed to remember.

His philosophy could be summed up as “the infinitude of the private man,” and Emerson himself was a staunch optimist. 

After jarring us and reminding us of the dire nature of our existential condition, Emerson might have rephrased his quote to encourage us:

This one fact the hero loves, that the soul becomes; for that forever creates what will be from what is, and though all will fall away, each moment is an opportunity to move closer to whatever is next – whatever is hopefully greater and higher.

How else can we deal with the situation we find ourselves in?

AGI seems to be coming. Transhuman technologies like brain-computer interface seem to be coming. There is no way to freeze the world, and freezing the world is a weakness; it is fragility, when the world asks us to be flexible.

We need to accept the eventual attenuation of man.

We should ask not: “How can we freeze humanity and human life as it is today, forever?”

We should rather ask: “What should be the future of humanity? What should be the future of life beyond us?”

But we don’t ask these higher, harder questions. 

Let us be strong enough not to hate “this one fact.” Emerson goads us to be strong enough to embrace it. Life goads us to be strong enough to embrace it, or life promises to shatter us against it.

Header image credit: PickNic