https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/10/19/pond-scum
Walden bros are like house cats: fully reliant on a system of support they neither acknowledge nor understand.
Brilliant but, as human owned by felines, "actively disdain" may be more accurate than "neither acknowledge nor understand".
Surely you can agree that interdependence is a spectrum, and people can find satisfaction at different levels.
At least the newyorker article lays it's objections out clearly. It finds Thoreau repugnant for his libertarian outlook, and even more so when Thoreau comes to agreeable conclusions, but by different means than the author.
>"This is not the stuff of a democratic hero. Nor were Thoreau’s actual politics, which were libertarian verging on anarchist. Like today’s preppers, he valued self-sufficiency for reasons that were simultaneously self-aggrandizing and suspicious: he did not believe that he needed anything from other people, and he did not trust other people to provide it. “That government is best which governs least,” Jefferson supposedly said. Thoreau, revising him, wrote, “That government is best which governs not at all.”"
>His moral clarity about abolition stemmed less from compassion or a commitment to equality than from the fact that slavery so blatantly violated his belief in self-governance.
The author seems upset that Thoreau is not appreciative or thankful for the society he lives in. I think the last paragraph sums it up well.
>Granted, it is sometimes difficult to deal with society. Few things will thwart your plans to live deliberately faster than those messy, confounding surprises known as other people. Likewise, few things will thwart your absolute autonomy faster than governance, and not only when the government is unjust; every law is a parameter, a constraint on what we might otherwise do. Teen-agers, too, strain and squirm against any checks on their liberty. But the mature position, and the one at the heart of the American democracy, seeks a balance between the individual and the society. Thoreau lived out that complicated balance; the pity is that he forsook it, together with all fellow-feeling, in “Walden.” And yet we made a classic of the book, and a moral paragon of its author—a man whose deepest desire and signature act was to turn his back on the rest of us
I think this same sentiment is what is expressed elsewhere in this tread. "how dare you be ungrateful for what society has given you, and how dare you not care for your fellow man". I think some people will never understand the desire of others to simply be left alone.
Is that what he really wanted thought? Nobody was preventing Thoreau from disappearing into the wilderness. He did not do that because it would have been 1) very difficult and 2) quite dangerous. He was perfectly willing to embrace society when it benefited him personally.
Some people want to engage with society only on their own terms, and to the extent it benefits them.
It it is the case now, as it was then, that social participation is a more of a package deal, not itemized interactions. Some people chafe under this.
Don't get me wrong - loved the book, love the concept. The distance between both and reality is a little larger than is immediately obvious, however.
Maybe you could live a solitary life, on your own, using only what your land provides you, but there's no way you could access modern health care, then.
Same goes for Internet access (all those subway cables were laid by somebody, probably subsidised by some government, at least partially).
Same goes for roads, and so on.
This is a myth very few people could live because the others don't and one way or another support them.