Materialism and the Simple Life
Thoreau writes in Civil Disobedience of corrupting materialism and of the simple life as its antidote. He states that those who "assert the purest right, and consequently are most dangerous to a corrupt State, commonly have not spent much time in accumulating property." The upright man is thus typically untainted by money. Thoreau presents the level of a man's virtue as proportionate to how much money he possesses — "the more money, the less virtue." Money makes difficult choices and the consideration of priorities unnecessary. It takes the "moral ground . . . from under [a man's] feet." As means increase, the opportunity to live meaningfully decreases. The rich man, Thoreau writes, "is always sold to the institution which makes him rich." There is a close connection between the rich and the government that their taxes support.
Thoreau comments on the difficulty of trying to live "honestly and at the same time comfortably in outward respects." It is pointless to accumulate property. He suggests that it is better "to hire or squat somewhere, and raise but a small crop, and eat that soon. You must live within yourself, and depend upon yourself, always tucked up and ready for a start, and not have many affairs." In this emphasis on shunning materialism and living self-sufficiently, he foreshadows a major theme of Walden (1854).
