Refugee thread!

[vulcanlogician]

I read Walden when I was a teenager, and it altered the course of my life.  It changed my choice of a profession, my relationships, and my interests -- for better or for worse.  Thoreau's influence has been perhaps the most consistent feature of my thinking ever since. 

My avatar is a picture I took at Walden Pond.  The colors in the background are the pond itself.

I am still a lifelong private student in the Thoreauvian mold, although I have modified Thoreau's assumptions as I have learned on my own.  I have kept a journal on and off for most of my life.  I am deeply concerned about how climate change is altering the face of the natural world.  And I am a member of the Thoreau Society as well, although I sometimes consider them Thoreau trivia collectors.  

I was never as attracted to civil disobedience and activism as I was to the ideas presented in Walden, most likely because I'm an introvert.

In what ways do you consider yourself a Thoreauvian?

I mostly take intellectual cues from Civil Disobedience. I am rather interested in what MLK and Gandhi did with Thoreau's ideas. But one must also remember that they blended his ideas in with passive resistance. At its root, civil disobedience is to be differentiated from passive resistance or any activism of that kind.

By itself, civil disobedience works according to the recognition that your encompassing society is able to do evil because you allow it. It is our participation in society that has allowed things such as unjust wars, slavery, and exploitative capitalism to transpire. We, through our participation and tax money, not only allow these things to happen, we are instrumental in their coming to fruition. So the main idea behind Thoreau's disobedience is to drop out, and stop participating if your society is unjust. If you add to that Gandhi's passive resistance (stand in the way but do no violence) you make the idea even more powerful.

If a thousand men were not to pay their tax-bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood. This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible.

Aside from that, Thoreau was an early critic of capitalism. Anyone who is familiar with Karl Marx's theory of labor alienation will see it reflected in this passage from Walden:

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The nation itself, with all its so-called internal improvements, which, by the way are all external and superficial, is just such an unwieldy and overgrown establishment, cluttered with furniture and tripped up by its own traps, ruined by luxury and heedless expense, by want of calculation and a worthy aim, as the million households in the land; and the only cure for it, as for them, is in a rigid economy, a stern and more than Spartan simplicity of life and elevation of purpose. It lives too fast. Men think that it is essential that the Nation have commerce, and export ice, and talk through a telegraph, and ride thirty miles an hour, without a doubt, whether they do or not; but whether we should live like baboons or like men, is a little uncertain. If we do not get out sleepers, and forge rails, and devote days and nights to the work, but go to tinkering upon our lives to improve them, who will build railroads? And if railroads are not built, how shall we get to heaven in season? But if we stay at home and mind our business, who will want railroads? We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us. Did you ever think what those sleepers are that underlie the railroad? Each one is a man, an Irishman, or a Yankee man. The rails are laid on them, and they are covered with sand, and the cars run smoothly over them. They are sound sleepers, I assure you. And every few years a new lot is laid down and run over; so that, if some have the pleasure of riding on a rail, others have the misfortune to be ridden upon. And when they run over a man that is walking in his sleep, a supernumerary sleeper in the wrong position, and wake him up, they suddenly stop the cars, and make a hue and cry about it, as if this were an exception. I am glad to know that it takes a gang of men for every five miles to keep the sleepers down and level in their beds as it is, for this is a sign that they may sometime get up again.

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