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On the Duty of Civil Disobedience

the government exists only to sustain the military and our country’s major industry, without them, this fine country would be in economical and physical ruins. He doesn’t like our government, but his ideas for it, if carried out, would create chaos and anarchy.Thoreau then talks for a long time about rebellion and revolution. He is somewhat hypocritical in this section. First, he discusses the difficulty of a minority rebelling against the majority. "A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority; it is not even a minority then; …" (231) He goes on to state that voting is a ludicrous procedure, and calls it "gaming … with a slight moral tinge". But then, it seems, he contradicts himself, writing "I know this well, that if one thousand, if one hundred, if ten men whom I could name, — if ten honest men, — aye, if one HONEST man, in this State of Massachusetts, ceasing to hold slaves, were actually to withdraw from this copartnership, and be locked up in the county jail therefor, it would be the abolition of slavery in America." (230) It doesn’t seem right that Thoreau mocks the plurality system and polling, remarking that though the majority always rules, it didn’t mean that they were right, and then goes on to state that one man can change the government very easily, by just refusing to follow the majority. He even repudiates his own life experience. He was jailed for refusing to pay his poll tax, but his actions didn’t eliminate taxes as the Massachusetts man’s actions "abolished" slavery. In this section of his thesis, his main premise is that one single person cannot change the supreme authority of the State, yet his entire essay is based on the assumption that an individual can change the government.His last and most justifiable supposition is that people unconsciously capitulate to the whims of the authority. He uses the example of those opposed to the Mexican W...

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