Final answer:
Thoreau believed that by passively paying taxes or complying with government policies that a person finds unjust, they inadvertently support them. He advanced the idea of passive resistance by refusing to partake in such systems, influencing later civil rights movements.
Step-by-step explanation:
According to Henry David Thoreau, men who refuse to fight for causes they do not support inadvertently end up supporting those causes through passive compliance. In his essay Civil Disobedience, Thoreau argued that paying taxes to an unjust government is equivalent to offering support. His rationale was that by contributing financially, individuals enable the government to carry out actions they might personally find immoral, such as enslavement or war, as was the case with the Mexican-American War in Thoreau's time. He believed that true freedom could only be achieved when individuals declined to participate in the systems they found unjust. This act of refusal was a form of passive resistance, a principle that guided significant movements led by leaders like Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.
Learn more about Civil Disobedience here: