Private opinion as any security service must know your own place in order to serve good service for the owner.

Good esteem is importance.

"Walden" Chapter 1-Economy, Part A. Thoreau wasted no time to introduce his subject. He was of course, a great individualist, and the excerpt
gives credit to the individual. But he was not a prophet in his own town of Concord, Massachusetts. The context below may show the extent of his vision
even as we can see the limits of his surroundings and the time frame in which he wrote. He may not have had much anticipation for the society of the 21st century
but the individual he spoke of in Walden is still the same "slave-driver of himself" today, perhaps worse.

""[8] I sometimes wonder that we can be so frivolous, I may almost say, as to attend to the gross but somewhat foreign form of servitude called Negro Slavery, there are so many keen and subtle masters that enslave both North and South. It is hard to have a Southern overseer; it is worse to have a Northern one; but worst of all when you are the slave-driver of yourself. Talk of a divinity in man! Look at the teamster on the highway, wending to market by day or night; does any divinity stir within him? His highest duty to fodder and water his horses! What is his destiny to him compared with the shipping interests? Does not he drive for Squire Make-a-stir? How godlike, how immortal, is he? See how he cowers and sneaks, how vaguely all the day he fears, not being immortal nor divine, but the slave and prisoner of his own opinion of himself, a fame won by his own deeds. Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate. Self-emancipation even in the West Indian provinces of the fancy and imagination — what Wilberforce (17) is there to bring that about? Think, also, of the ladies of the land weaving toilet cushions (18) against the last day, not to betray too green an interest in their fates! As if you could kill time without injuring eternity."" Note 17: William Wilberforce (1759-1833) English anti-slavery leader.