Anarchy I mean What is Rebellion By Anya

Anarchy I mean What is Rebellion? By Anya and Mikayla This Photo by Unknown author is licensed under CC BY-SA.

Transcendentalism • The belief that people and nature are pure at their center, that society corrupts the individual, and being self-reliant brings out the best in people. • In essence, it is to transcend the materialistic world and discover a higher way of living • One of the main tenets or principles of transcendentalism is nonconformity: refusing to do what’s expected of you just to be different

Into the Wild Summary • Into the Wild, by Jon Krakauer, is about the life and death of Chris Mc. Candless, a young man who redirected his life in unexpected ways. Chris was born to a middle-class family but soon found that the lifestyle was not for him. After college, he dropped off the map to make his own path through life by hitchhiking his way around America and eventually fulfilling his dream: to live off the land in the Alaskan wilderness all by himself. The book follows his journey and the lives he touches and unveils the mystery of how he died instead of coming home. The book also digs deep into his past in an attempt to explain why he would want to put himself through a struggle for survival and determine if he was right in the way he faced life, death, and the human experience.

Connection with Into The Wild • Chris left everything he had, money, his family, friends, his home, his car, and food. When he decided to go to Alaska all he was focused on was just living his life to the fullest and not caring about anything else besides what's in the wild. When thinking about the definition of Transcendentalism Chris fits into the definition perfectly since he left everything to be alone in the wilderness with no other distractions.

Ralph Waldo Emerson once said. . . • "To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment" • Chris likely would have agreed with this quote. Since, he saw himself as so different from the world he was born to, he would've seen all his rebellions as clinging to the truest version of himself. Chris would've been very proud of sticking to his beliefs while his parents tried to give him gifts and make him a part of the world they thought was best

Nonconformity • Definition: failure or refusal to conform to a prevailing rule or practice • Examples: social nonconformity, resisting peer pressure This Photo by Unknown author is licensed under CC BY. • Pros: provide feelings of strength and happiness, could inspire other people to become a better person by breaking away from their conformity • Cons: uncomfortable with yourself, being different leads to mistreatment, being an outcast is hard, family or cultural issues

What does it mean to be a rebel? • A rebel is generally defined as someone who defies authority, but a person can rebel in many different ways • In the context of transcendentalism, a rebel would be like Chris: someone who refuses to be like they're "supposed" to be, someone who doesn't conform to society's concepts of normal • Thus, a rebel is a nonconformist who fights back against what is expected under the pretext that society is corrupt, and that they know what's best for them better than anyone else

"A lot of people are not comfortable being apart from the group, from the whole herd, and listening to the inner voice. They just follow what the crowd does and wear what the crowd wears and think what the crowd thinks. They get very caught up in doing what the world says is the cool thing to do and living the way the rest of the world lives. Once we make a decision to break away from that and not be part of the herd anymore- by going inside and finding our own voice- then life just becomes magical" -Echo Bodine The quote and picture shown strongly demonstrate the effects of nonconformity. As we see in the picture, one man doesn't have a chicken on his head and everyone else is looking at him funny. This reflects the belief that society often falls into ridiculous trends that everyone ends up on board with simply because it's popular and they don't want to be left out or scorned. From an outsider's perspective, everyone else looks weird and the one who refuses to join looks sane in comparison. The quote explains all this in terms of finding your true self and your inner voice". If everyone were to act as they really wanted to instead of looking for ways to appear like others the world would be a more individual place.