Thoreau on government: the next step forward
Political ·Thursday April 22, 2010 @ 22:44 EDT (link)
I heartily accept the motto,—"That government is best which governs least"; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe,—"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. Government is at best but an expedient; but most governments are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient. The objections which have been brought against a standing army, and they are many and weighty, and deserve to prevail, may also at last be brought against a standing government. The standing army is only an arm of the standing government. The government itself, which is only the 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. Witness the present Mexican war, the work of comparatively a few individuals using the standing government as their tool; for, in the outset, the people would not have consented to this measure.
The authority of government, even such as I am willing to submit toÂfor I will cheerfully obey those who know and can do better than I, and in many things even those who neither know nor can do so well—is still an impure one: to be strictly just, it must have the sanction and consent of the governed. It can have no pure right over my person and property but what I concede to it. The progress from an absolute to a limited monarchy, from a limited monarchy to a democracy, is a progress toward a true respect for the individual. Even the Chinese philosopher was wise enough to regard the individual as the basis of the empire. Is a democracy, such as we know it, the last improvement possible in government? Is it not possible to take a step further towards recognizing and organizing the rights of man? There will never be a really free and enlightened State until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly. I please myself with imagining a State at least which can afford to be just to all men, and to treat the individual with respect as a neighbor; which even would not think it inconsistent with its own repose if a few were to live aloof from it, not meddling with it, nor embraced by it, who fulfilled all the duties of neighbors and fellow-men. A State which bore this kind of fruit, and suffered it to drop off as fast as it ripened, would prepare the way for a still more perfect and glorious State, which also I have imagined, but not yet anywhere seen.
We all know of a few wars in recent memory that were "the work of comparatively a few individuals using the standing government as their tool". We know the system is broken. It is subject to demagoguery, to class warfare, pitting people against each other by robbing from some to share the ill-gotten loot with others in return for their votes, to manipulation, to corruptions, to bribery. It is designed to grow in scope and power. It was a little better that what preceded it. But Thoreau, along with the writer to the Hebrews, was persuaded of better things.
Just as a constitutional republic was the evolutionary step that "men [were] prepared for" to follow a remote constitutional monarchy in 1776, the next progressive or evolutionary step is no government at all—a voluntary society without coercion or robbery, without a state to infringe on the right to life, liberty, or property. Government has become inexpedient. True progressives in the United States will agitate for this "city on a hill" to throw off our chains and again lead the peoples of earth in this next great step forward.
Books finished: Alongside Night, Utopia, I, Robot, The Vision of the Anointed.
