Emerson uses emotional appeals and an extended metaphor to support his argument for nonconformist morality. The sympathetic tone he takes underscores his admission that nonconformity is hard, while the comparison to the “joint-stock” company taps into trends in nineteenth-century American society that rejected sources of conventional morality like the church. This analysis of the conflict between society’s demands and the individual marks a general theme of Emersonian thought—which influenced Nietzsche, who then influenced Freud, as a similar analysis is evidenced in in Freud’s work
Civilization and Its Discontents.