Living in a world in which money and possessions are extremely important can cause a lot of damage because essentially human individuality is corrupted by society and the government. In Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau, the author blames the government for imprisoning the people causing them to lose their individualism. Meanwhile in Into the Wild, Christopher McCandless is fighting society by going off to explore nature with the ultimate goal of being alone in Alaska. Both argue that one must learn to live with themselves and look within and become self-reliant in order to restore what society has stolen.
Thoreau states that in a perfect world the people would be self-reliant enough that the government would hold very little to no power. He goes on to recount the one time he felt free, the time he was sent to jail for refusing to pay his taxes. He said “I saw that, if there was a wall of stone between me and my townsmen, there was still more difficult one to climb or break through before they could get to be as free as I was.” for in jail where he had the liberty
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Coming from a well-off family, the McCandless were all about looks, in order to fit among their neighbors leaving Christopher feeling fake and without control of his own life this leads to his journey. He travels from place to place, meeting people along the way but never forming strong enough ties that would cause him to leave behind his journey because he feels that once he settles down he might lose himself. Nature, he believes, is inherently good and by living among the animals and plants, he wants to learn about all the purity that the industrial world lacks. In order to find himself, he becomes self-reliant, living off the earth in Alaska. Without people around him, he does not have to worry about society's ideas or rules interfering with his