Comparison Btw. Walden 2 And Civil Disobedience Essay, Research Paper

The government should not watch every move or spell out what one should think or say. In Civil Disobedience, Henry D. Thoreau truly sums it up when he quotes, “That government is best which governs least.” For the benefit of the nation as a whole, government issues should start and end where society is concerned, using the loosest interpretation possible. However, Thoreau s ideal government is far from actual realization, especially even more so after ten scores from the present.

The second quote Thoreau uses, “That government is best which governs not at all,” describes government at its zenith. He pictures a society where everyone does not merely follow the law like an ignorant cow trails after its master for lack of better judgment. In the society with the ideal form of government, the citizens would do what they knew to be right and accept all consequences that resulted, good or bad. Thus, government would have no need to be paranoid, stringent, or intrusive.

Because everyone would take full responsibility for his or her actions, crimes would naturally be reduced, if not extinct. Society and its legal rules would not be crippling to those who have no need for a patronizing parent figure constantly looking over their shoulders in suspicion. People would take “action from principle” on the basis of an intuitive perception of what is right; this is equivalent to acting on the dictates of one s own conscience. Government would only serve as an expedient in helping people to accomplish this, not hindering them from listening to their integrity.

Thoreau s ideal government is impossible to establish and maintain at present, to state the obvious. A government that does not really have any power apart from that given wholly by the individual would not support an economy that provides full human satisfaction. In a hundred years, with more people and less natural resources, diffusion of responsibility and fierce competition will lead to increased chaos and a stronger need for a more controlling, tight-fisted government.

As we move toward the millennium and onward, the society that is held in check with a barely existent government is highly unlikely. Such issues such as privacy will be harder to be resolved with idealistic beliefs like laissez-faire and common courtesy. Unlike the transcendental aims described in Thoreau s Walden, goals will unfortunately correspond more those portrayed in Skinner s Walden Two.