A privilege to live in conflict with one’s times. At every moment one is aware one does not think like the others. This state of acute dissimilarity, however indigent or sterile it appears, nonetheless possesses a philosophical status which one would be at a loss to seek in cogitations attuned to events.
— Emil Cioran, The Trouble with Being Born
I’ve sometimes fancied myself a courageous lone freethinker — but then again, who doesn’t? Everyone’s a hero in his own story. No one considers himself part of the bovine, slack-jawed masses. Cioran’s supercilious stance flatters that vanity a little too neatly. It’s rebellion as mood lighting. I too say many bold things, provided they scandalize only people I don’t know. If the pose requires only attitude and no losses, it’s just adolescence with better prose.
By contrast, there’s Nietzsche the considerate: in Sils he asked his friend, the devout Emily Fynn — reportedly with tears in his eyes — not to read his books because he feared the anti-Christian parts would hurt her feelings (Chamberlain, Nietzsche in Turin, 134–35; corroborated in Gilman, Conversations with Nietzsche, 195). And years earlier he told Peter Gast that being “right” is a poor trade if it costs love: “It seems to me so foolish to insist on being in the right at the expense of love…”. That is not the voice of a man preening in opposition; that’s someone counting the cost of speaking forthrightly.
The point isn’t to be “out of step with one’s times,” much less to chase the cheap high of looking down on the herd. The point is to keep truth and tenderness in the same orbit, and to accept that real independence sometimes loses you applause from your own “side.” If your nonconformity never risks friendship, it’s just fashion; if it never revises itself after “one hour’s sympathetic intercourse,” it’s just pride. Better, then, to be occasionally right, frequently kind, and suspicious of any heroism that comes with universal approval.