Self-Reliance is the belief, constructed by the great philosopher, Ralph Waldo Emerson, that relying on self-will and using your own resources to succeed is essential to avoid conformity. Emerson greatly detailed through this body of literature his ideology on how we as individual beings must strive to live and prosper. In his most famous work “Self-Reliance” he writes  “nothing is last sacred but the integrity of your own mind”(archive.vcu.edu), explaining that absolutely nothing is as valuable or necessary as the power of one's will and intelligence. Conforming to the ways society intends us to live would deter many people from going beyond the limits and trying to make their own dreams a reality. He believes conformity kills the “aboriginal self” (Self-Reliance”) and allows for our minds to be infiltrated by ideas that swallow our individualism. The cerebral transcendentalist ideas of Emerson are directly related to what many people considered the American Dream.