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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Alzrius" data-source="post: 9298016" data-attributes="member: 8461">Trying to make room on my shelves for the last two books I read, I came across a small monograph of Henry David Thoreau's <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Disobedience_(Thoreau)" target="_blank">Civil Disobedience</a>, which I couldn't recall having read before. Resolving to fix that oversight, I polished it off earlier today.While I hesitate to characterize Thoreau's moral opposition to government as libertarianism per se, his moral calling to (nonviolently) resist participation or cooperation with a government that he finds to be acting immorally is quite stark. Voting and democratic institutions do not solve this, in his view, and lack of resistance makes us complicit insofar as our participation (e.g. by paying taxes) in government goes. That we are by measures intimidated (by the threat of monetary sanctions and jail time) and seduced (by participating in the commercial spheres that government asserts dominion over) is how our voluntary submission to an unjust government is achieved.Personally, I found myself unable to help but contrast this to Plato's dialogue <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crito" target="_blank">Crito</a> (which I've only read in part, and need to go back and finish), where Socrates refuses his friend's plan to break him out of prison, despite agreeing that the death sentence he's received (set to be carried out the next morning) is unjust. To Socrates, there is no virtue to reaping the benefits of living in society, and only to turn around and reject that same society when it becomes onerous. Better instead to work to do what you can to improve it, even if that means accepting the imperfections of the present.Both men advocate living for virtue, but how they proclaim that with regard to the larger society in which someone lives – one by removing yourself entirely from an unjust society, and the other by working to improve that society even if it means countenancing injustice in the meantime – are stark in how they contrast.This is what a Chaotic Good vs. Lawful Good debate would sound like, I'd wager.</blockquote>

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