Why It's Desirable to Be Eccentric

Back in 1859 the great English thinker John Stuart Mill published, in Chapter Three of his treatise On Liberty, one of history's most cogent apologias on the subject "Of Individuality as One of the Elements of Well-Being."

To Mill's view, mass opinion (what we might call "mass culture" these days), is an undeniable blight to individuality, and therefore directly threatens freedoms civic and intellectual, cultural, and democratic.

While explicitly political, Mill's argument reaches down...