by J Thomas Walden

Created on: May 19, 2008

In the court of American Transcendentalism, Henry David Thoreau is arguably seated at the right hand of the father (Ralph Waldo Emerson), through his devotion to individualism. Thoreau made famous the idea of civil disobedience in "Resistance to Civil Government," an essay that inspired great leaders like Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. in their respective struggles for basic human rights. Thoreau aimed to prove that, by refusing to pay a poll tax and being jailed for it, he could do his part to protest the Mexican-American war over Texas. He truly believed in an individual's (namely, his own) ability to better the world by standing up for his beliefs. His time at Walden Pond, although not nearly as influential as "Resistance," would produce a great level of insight into the individual's ability to truly subsist by his hands alone.

For Thoreau the most pressing issue of his day was a developing sentiment of indifference, wherein many Americans were allowing their country to carry on in war and slavery. He believed that many of these citizens, although they did not agree with the status quo, simply because they do not want to rock the proverbial boat. "The mass of men," he claims, "lead lives of quiet desperation," and he sees the development of Adam Smith's ideas on trade and economics into tangible effects as a further burden on a society that has already become timid of confrontation. In Walden, Thoreau attempts to show his readers that one need not go with the majority to be justified, and that the materialist society forming around economics is unnecessary for survival.

Thoreau notes, "every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new" (well ahead of his time, Thoreau's hundreds of pages can easily be reduced to just a few media-friendly sound-bytes), and relates observations of a similar sort in order to explain his position. The mob mentality that takes over each new generation is harmful because it causes a feeling of perceived sameness within a wide span of people. Thoreau dislikes this, because it causes exactly the laziness he sees festering at the root of America's problems. Individuals are obliged to conform to a certain set of contemporary ideals, whichthough vigorously enforced at the timeare, in a broader context, ridiculous. Simply, without the constraints of society, Thoreau sees individuals basing morals on internal indicators of right and wrong, rather than perceived external consensuses. He believes that

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