What does Thoreau mean when he says let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine?
He urges the reader to be a “counter-friction” to the machine and not to participate in the wrong. Thoreau then argues that working for change through government takes too much time and requires a person to waste his life.Click to see full answer. Furthermore, what does Thoreau mean by a better government?Thoreau says that government…
He urges the reader to be a “counter-friction” to the machine and not to participate in the wrong. Thoreau then argues that working for change through government takes too much time and requires a person to waste his life.Click to see full answer. Furthermore, what does Thoreau mean by a better government?Thoreau says that government does not, in fact, achieve that with which we credit it: it does not keep the country free, settle the West, or educate. Rather, for the moment, he is asking for a better government.Also, what does Thoreau say about unjust laws? Thoreau declared that if the government required people to participate in injustice by obeying “unjust laws,” then people should “break the laws” even if they ended up in prison. “Under a government which imprisons any unjustly,” he asserted, “the true place for a just man is also a prison.” Secondly, what does Thoreau’s metaphor of the machine describe? o At first, Thoreau uses the machine metaphor to describe the way in which a “mass of men serve the state” as non-thinking, non-questioning machines who use their bodies to protect the state (part 1, par.What does Thoreau think about voting?Thoreau did not think very highly of voting in general or individuals who expressed their opinions by casting votes. He thought that voting was too much like gambling: risky and uncertain. At most, they give only a cheap vote, and a feeble countenance and God-speed, to the right, as it goes by them.
