The Synthesis of Henry David Thoreau
The idea of a grim future has long dawned on us when we realized our slow demise. Thoreau had predicted this long ago and we have realized and taken this into consideration. Unfortunately, we haven’t done much action in this department. Thoreau’s ideas have been examined but no action has taken place.
When it comes to the regular way of life, we move way too fast for our own good. We tend to try to finish so much today so we have a simpler morrow. Unfortunately, our plates are filled before we can say anything. In Thoreau’s examination of this in Walden, he states, “I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumbnail.” (Thoreau) Don’t bog yourself down to where you can’t recover, but keep it simple. We have realized and examined this statement, but it only seems like life is getting more complicated.
The idea of industrialization has set us on a path where we are forced to stay in a certain routine. Thoreau examines this idea of habitual thinking when he notices he, “had not lived there a week before my feet wore a path from my door to the pond-side; and though it is five or six years since I trod it, it is still quite distinct.” (Thoreau) The way society has been planned was built around the fact that we love to repeat ourselves. In Robert Crumb’s comic, “A Short History of America”, you can see how the world industrializes. We begin to build up our society from the ground works of nature and by the end we are willing slaves where we give up our lives to the unrelenting jobs that we must have to survive in our society.
The destruction of ourselves can linked to another aspect of our demise: global warming. Bill McKibben said of Thoreau that, “though he could perhaps foresee the ruination that greed might cause, he had no inkling that we could damage the ozone let alone warm the globe.” Now as true as that may be, it is not Thoreau’s fault and he did kind of predict it be predicting the greed which can be linked to global warming. Our desire to be from one place to another quickly and our appliances that we must have in our homes is contributing to the slow demise of our planet. In Walden, Thoreau predicted our greed and repetition will overcome our ideas of nature, and it becomes increasingly more apparent every day. The way society has been planned was built around the fact.
The slow demise of humanity can be linked to our greed of the simplest things. It is hard to make an argument against it though due to its fact of being human nature. Human nature is the thing that keeps us from killing each other and ourselves, although ironically it could end up causing is to go extinct.
