"The greatest obstacle to being heroic is the doubt whether one may not be going to prove one's self a fool.
The truest heroism is to resist the doubt; and the profoundest wisdom to know when it ought to be resisted and when obeyed."
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance
Laws are good only insofar as they are in agreement with justice as a whole. Problems arise when lawmakers attempt to reverse this order: to mold justice in their own image rather than allowing justice to define their laws. When these laws no longer align with justice they cease to be valid and citizens are no longer subordinate to them.
The United States’ Declaration of Independence says that
when the government usurps basic human rights and acts unjustly, “It is the
Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new
Government….” Thoreau draws on the same
principle when he asks for “not at once no government, but at once better government.”
In his famous essay "On the Resistance to Civil Government" (known also as "Civil Disobedience"), Thoreau points out two forms of corruption within the American
government which are hypocritical in context of the
Declaration: Slavery and Conformity.
Slavery’s contradiction is obvious: it opposes the
Declaration’s assertion that, “All men are created equal.” Conformity may be less obvious, but no less
hypocritical, as it forces people to go against their consciences in favor of
obeying corrupt laws. In Thoreau’s time,
people who believed slavery was wrong still did not speak out against it
because slavery was a legal institution.
Although in some ways this essay could be interpreted as
anti-American, I don’t think that was Thoreau’s intention. Rather, Thoreau was being patriotic in
encouraging every American to live according to the ideals of the Declaration
of Independence, even if the founding fathers themselves did not.
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