Posted on 04/07/2005 1:03:43 AM PDT by DC Bound
Rereading “Resistance to Civil Government,” as I turned the pages and absorbed Thoreau’s words, I heard the unmistakable ruffling of rotten clothes filled with old bones. I realized the reverberation, which at first began as a mild, almost imperceptible sliver of sound, and grew to a thunderous dry-clanking rumble by the final pages, was the dead thinker finally flipping in his grave.
Thoreau begins “Resistance” by voicing the transcendental belief that as human beings become enlightened, their need for governmental authority diminishes. Although government in some form is presently necessary, it will disappear as individual Americans take ultimate responsibility for themselves. “‘That government is best which governs not at all;’ and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.” Thoreau didn’t foretell communism; instead, he rallied the nation toward a higher morality—the liberty of individualism.
The United States of America has chosen a different path from the one Thoreau envisioned.
Thoreau addressed two problematic tendencies in human nature. First, he knew not all Americans would choose personal responsibility and liberty over sloth and equality. Second, he recognized all governments follow the same path—toward oppression. No liberal government is capable of disqualifying from participation, influence, or authority those who would bend the government to their own selfish interests, and “the government itself, which is the only mode which the people have chosen to execute their will, is equally liable to be abused and perverted before the people can act through it.”
Government involvement in social affairs threatens liberty. No government furthers enterprise, only stifles it. Government doesn’t keep people free or educate them. By their own industry, sweat, and blood, citizens preserve their freedom first as a state of mind, and then as a political expression of their will. Government doesn’t teach citizens, rather, parents and the culture of the individual teach hard objective lessons that the strong fix in their memories and gauge their actions against. With firm values comes responsibility; with that comes the individual’s authority and power to assert the good. The highly individualistic character of the American people accomplishes all feats of commercial enterprise, spreading prosperity, knowledge, and economic freedom to those who shoulder the burden of personal responsibility and charge headlong into liberty to create their dreams. “The character inherent in the American people has done all that has been accomplished; and it would have done somewhat more, if the government had not sometimes got in its way.”
Conversely, government interference in economic affairs creates drags on the economy. “Trade and commerce, if they were not made of India rubber, would never manage to bounce over the obstacles which legislators are continually putting in their way…” These obstacles range from taxes to wars to slavery—all of which shackle free men, waste their time, limit their opportunities, and steal their wealth—for the greater good of allowing citizens the absurd freedom found in having no liberty, but the forced equality that results when the strongest are made weak and the weak are held firmly in place. Government operating against the free will of strong individuals incurs friction, and resorts to coercion in all matters to assert its will. Regarding policy, nothing is voluntary. “All machines have their friction; and possibly this does enough good to counterbalance the evil. At any rate, it is a great evil to make a stir about it. But when the friction comes to have its machine, and oppression and robbery are organized, I say, let us not have such a machine any longer.”
A government guided by the will of the majority has no greater claim to quash liberty than any other government. No institution which gains the uninformed, coerced allegiance of the masses will ever choose to be guided by conscience. The honest individual is left with a decision: am I obligated to this machine any longer?
Thoreau knows the answer as a matter of both intellect and intuition: “I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect fro the law, so much as for the right. The only obligation which I have a right to assume, is to do at any time what I think right.”
Strong individuals neither trust nor relish a government of the people and by the people if it perpetrates evil on the people. A true citizen will never entrust a government with ultimate responsibility for accomplishing what is right. That responsibility lives in the hearts of individuals. “A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority. There is but little virtue in the action of masses of men.”
Some prefer to do good within the system. The present government responds to the desires of its citizens, and citizens are duty-bound to direct that government by their influence and protests. Thoreau will have none of it. “Men generally, under such a government as this, think that they ought to wait until they have persuaded the majority to alter [bad policy]. They think that, if they should resist, the remedy would be worse than the evil. But it is the fault of the government itself that the remedy would be worse than the evil….Why does it [the majority] always crucify Christ, and excommunicate Copernicus and Luther, and pronounce Washington and Franklin rebels?”
The myth of the efficacy of “working within” government allows the citizen to wash his hands of evil. But the truth is that he fails to assert a cause at all, and sleeps the better just the same.
A thousand monkeys playing with typewriters may produce good policy in a million years, but a government never will. Waiting on the vagaries of politics to produce good policy may allow a person to feel civic and engaged, but it does nothing for the dispossessed, the murdered, the enslaved, the disenfranchised, the robbed. The objective is not to feel good about “progress,” but to demand liberty. As to politicians’ promises, “They take too much time, and a man’s life will be gone.” To wait for the majority to find a reason to do what is right, or the government to stumble into it on its own, merely allows the evil to continue. And if the State is by definition incompetent to create liberty, by its every action it restricts it.
“The worthy or admirable American self emulated the cowboy, the entrepreneur, the lone wolf—standing apart from, if not in conflict with, the society.” These Americans—who have not fallen asleep to their duties as individuals—must engage their countrymen. They must stand up and refuse their government and organize other like-minded individuals to a common cause of rectifying their government’s evil. “All men recognize the right of revolution; that is, the right to refuse allegiance to and to resist the government, when its tyranny or its inefficiency are great and unendurable.”
What is an individual who will not bend his conscience to comply with the machinations of the state to do when the State makes it impossible to live a virtuous, free life? “I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest.”
The two problems Thoreau recognized in his day, which he argued against and rallied generations of Americans to fight, regrettably continue their progressive march today. First, individualism no longer exists in tandem with the personal responsibility that makes it wholesome to society. Second, the wholesale tyranny of the United States government over its citizens strips or regulates the most basic civil rights our Constitution presumes are the inviolable gift of God. The Constitution recognizes life, liberty, and property, and the Bill of Rights enumerates and “protects” further rights so that they might keep those inviolable gifts inviolate: free speech, free exercise of religion, and freedom to keep and bear arms. Again, the latter freedoms are listed in the Bill of Rights in order create an informed, moral, armed society, specifically because such a society will never permit its government to usurp its rights to life, liberty, and property.
But as Thoreau knew, rights are only safe in the hearts of citizens who will die to preserve them. No government will honor rights its citizens no longer defend. As John Adams, the second President of the United States said, "We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other."
Thoreau charges that any government involvement in social or commercial affairs is categorically bad. Today our shredded, illegible, misinterpreted and metamorphosed “living” constitution supports:
• The U.S. federal and state governments combined expropriates a third of America’s gross domestic product every year. It was eight per cent in 1929.
• Through an extraordinary abuse and insanely far-reaching reading of the interstate commerce clause, the federal government regulates all economic activity no matter who conducts it or where it is conducted. Milton Friedman, the Nobel-Prize winning economist, believes Americans spend in addition to taxes, another 10% of their incomes on government rules and mandates. The Cato Institute puts the number at $860 billion a year—more the entire gross domestic products of Canada and Mexico.
• A state judge commands a whimpering governor to stand down from fulfilling his constitutional duty to protect innocent lives and preserve the rule of law. He further stands unchallenged in contempt of the U.S. Congress. He sanctions the state-controlled execution by starvation of a woman whose only crime is being silent and handicapped.
• “Our current tax code is 17,000 pages long and includes more than 1,100 forms and publications. It's so confusing that taxpayers are forced to spend almost $200 billion each year just to comply with it. Even IRS employees don't understand the laws they're supposed to enforce. Several years ago, a General Accounting Office survey found that IRS employees gave incorrect tax advice half the time.”
• Habeus corpus is granted to enemy combatants, each capable of causing more damage to America than an entire army of old, during a time of war.
• A death sentence earned by a convicted rapist-murderer is overturned because the jury considered the source of its moral beliefs, the Bible.
• “So absurd and dangerous has the Supreme Court’s view of free speech become that it struck down an anti-virtual child pornography statute as a violation of the First Amendment, but upheld prohibitions against running a political ad during the month before a federal general election as criminal.” Free political speech is reserved for the power elite through Campaign Finance Reform, the newest, most insidious device of the Washington incumbents, who want to preserve their aristocratic careers as legislators and choose to do so by limiting the funding of political challengers.
• Racism is endorsed by the Federal Government by affirmative action, telling generations of Americans that race is more important than merit, and forever suggesting that successful minorities couldn’t have been successful on their own.
Thoreau lived before the Federal Reserve began (mis)managing the economy, before the IRS began wholesale confiscation of the American worker’s wealth. He lived before the ponzi schemes of Social Security and Medicare began transferring the income from the young—the poorest class in the country—to the wealthiest, the old; before citizens were catalogued and given their social security number. He lived before God was removed from schools and courts and courtyards and parks. Before jackbooted thugs enforced divine federal will at Waco and Ruby Ridge, and over Elian Gonzales.
Would Henry David Thoreau find tyranny in this ubiquitous governmental presence? Would he recognize the decay of individualism and responsibility in today’s victim-welfare society? Would he say its time for bold action? Would he utterly withhold his support from government, refusing it at every turn? Would he be prepared to spend his days in jail, expecting to join the good company of all strong-willed Americans? Or would he finally advocate armed revolt?
“How does it become a man to behave toward this American government today? I answer that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it. I cannot for an instant recognize that political organization as my government which is the slave’s government also.”
Would he recognize the average American citizen has been rendered into slavery to the State?
Of course, integrity on the order posited by Thoreau is all but impossible. One cannot simply go to Walden today—and remain there forever. Neither can one capriciously withhold all allegiance to the state. Conservative scholar Alan Bloom recognized the quandary of the philosopher-individual: “There is no moral order protecting philosophers or ensuring that truth will win out in the long or the short run….There is no leaving civil society, no matter what Thoreau may have thought.” What is a Thoreau-minded contemporary individual to do?
Compare the Erich Fromm’s sense of purposeful, responsible selfhood to any randomly chosen protagonist on Oprah, Dr. Phil, or Sally Jesse Raphael: “I experience myself as ‘I’ because I doubt, I protest, I rebel. Even if I submit, and sense defeat, I experience myself as ‘I’—I, the defeated one. But if I am not aware of submitting or rebelling, I lose the sense of self.”
The machinations of two hundred plus years of democratic, will-of-the-majority legislation have so entangled American society no single authority exists to rebel against. Our young recognize this absurdity intuitively. They lash out with purple hair, black t-shirts, and leather trench-coats because they see no target for rebellion and inflict their damage on the only entity that is tangible: their bodies, their identities.
Today’s newest citizens inherit a national myth that honors free speech, free religion, and the right of the individual to arm himself against his state to preserve his freedom. He inherits a state that refuses him the lawful ability to express his devotion to God and see similar reverence in his public officials. He inherits a state that limits his ability to purchase a firearm—in the mistaken belief that law-abiding, peaceful citizens are the problem. He lives with parents who have sold their own individualism in the pursuit of a new car and cable television. He sees the hypocrisy of the state he inherits, and unschooled in the art of civil protest, incapable of imagining a state that honors its creed, makes the only statement of protest his innocent, uncomprehending soul can make: he dyes his hair purple and pierces his tongue.
“Authority in the middle of the twentieth century has changed its character; it is not overt authority, but anonymous, invisible, alienated authority. Nobody makes a demand, neither a person, nor an idea, nor a moral law. Yet we all conform, as much or more than people in an intensely authoritarian society would. Indeed, nobody is an authority except ‘It.’ What is It? Profit, economic necessities, the market, common sense, public opinion, what ‘one’ does, thinks, feels. The laws of anonymous authority are as invisible as the laws of the market—and just as unassailable. Who can attack the invisible? Who can rebel against Nobody?” --Erich Fromm
As I said at the onset, I have heard the rumblings of dusty bones in a long-buried casket.
Many thanks. An excellent read.
reference bump
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