Rendering Unto Caesar: The Essence of Slavery‏‏

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

People who have lived their entire lives in a slavish existence have no experience of what it means to live freely. If someone were to tell them that what they call freedom is actually quite unfree, they might respond with strong emotions. Their reaction could be so severe that they kill or injure the individual who delivers the message. They might go so far as to claim religious persecution and have the messenger brought up on charges of crimes against humanity. In a previous time and place, the messenger would be strapped to a pole atop a pile of flaming fuel or tacked to an artificial tree.

If you ask a chattel slave about slavery, he might speak of brutal punishment and loss of friends and family. If you ask a wage slave about slavery, he might speak of meager compensation and cutthroat competition. If you ask a chattel slave owner about slavery, he might speak of the innate inferiority of the laboring race. If you ask a wage slave employer about slavery, he might speak of the fear of labor organizers and the need for out-sourcing. None of this gets to the essence of slavery because it considers only surface phenomena.

Plato described the essence of slavery as an artificial system of deception. The chattel slave is deceived into fearing punishment. The chattel slave owner is deceived into controlling people. The wage slave is deceived into practicing cutthroat competition. The wage slave employer is deceived into sending his work to a more despotic domain. All of them are stuck in an artificial trap of slavish existence. Where Aristotle debits slavishness to human nature, Plato firmly places the blame on social structures that condition people to think and act in a narrow way.

What does this have to do with politics today? There is no slavery here and now. The problems of coerced and forced labor have all been solved by the miracles of modern science. Do you really believe that or do you see some room for improvement? A recent Time magazine article on labor conditions in India do not agree with that assessment. India is a hotbed of American and European outsourcing.

Links: Plato's famous cave analogy. Nilanjana Bhowmick on labor conditions in India.

Comments

[malasadas.livejournal.com]

Experience suggests that she believes those who disagree with her assessments of modern mental health care practices are slaves or slave owners.

[ddstory.livejournal.com]

Also, perpetrators of crimes against humanity.

[telemann.livejournal.com]

And neural wave gizmos!

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

Thomas Szasz wrote an interesting comparison between the mental "health" industry and the institution of chattel slavery. As you can imagine, it was not favorably inclined toward pill pushers.

[luvdovz.livejournal.com]

Oh. It's Monday again. Reliable like clockwork.

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

I would expect that people who perpetrate crimes against humanity to accuse me of falsely accusing people of crimes against humanity.

[malasadas.livejournal.com]

Not that that is apropos of trying to make any coherent sense out of the mush you wrote.

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

Don't you know that neural wave gizmos are impossible? You could qualify for psychiatric observation by suggesting such a possibility.

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

Thank you. You are too kind.

[telemann.livejournal.com]

Surf's up!

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

Tubular!

[yes-justice.livejournal.com]

[telemann.livejournal.com]

Maybe "circular" would be the better adjective for this series of posts.

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

The similarity to a prescription drug warning message is no coincidence.

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

I would not want them to be misconstrued as canonical.

[telemann.livejournal.com]

Or factual, rational, and logical.

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

Deeper logic and reason come across as impenetrable to the uninitiated.

[telemann.livejournal.com]

You mean like word salad? Oh yeah, I seem to recall lots of that.

[ddstory.livejournal.com]

Of course that's what someone who erroneously and arbitrarily ascribes accusations of crimes against humanity for no reason, would say.

[fizzyland.livejournal.com]

Do they make recreational models?

[brother-dour.livejournal.com]

Ewww.

Or if they knew anything at all about economics...

[yes-justice.livejournal.com]

In California we have child undocumented migrant workers from Mexico who pick food they do not eat and do not attend school.

If that is not slavery....well...I guess there are no whips, not often anyway. NAFTA was like a needle sucking blood from their hearts.

[oportet.livejournal.com]

It's only slavery if you do not have a choice. If you agree to work for shit wages, that's terrible, but it's not slavery.

Coerced is not forced.

[yes-justice.livejournal.com]

Those actually get you high. (to be clear, I was extending the analogy to religion, not eve/women)

[anfalicious.livejournal.com]

The US has been trying to free people from Allah for quite a few years now and have committed plenty of war crimes to that end. They're trying to stop "radical Islam" with bullets; if that isn't religious persecution then I don't know what is.

I know that it all sounds very hyperbolic, but that's mainly because of the lens through which we view the world. With different lenses on it's very easy to read the War on Terror as a War on Islam and Western meddling in the Islamic world as trying to enslave them into the ideals of the West when they're quite happy with their Sharia.