Yet one of the cruelest things was left off of the list.
…
As I stated above, making a man choose between freedom and his family is blackmail and not a personal preference. It’s Hobson Choice.
It’s really awesome that you don’t know anyone who would gladly trade their dignity if it meant someone would supply them with food/clothes/shelter and some other basic necessities, rather than tossing them out into the street to make their way as best they can.
Poverty is what makes slavery. Poverty is what makes slavery
acceptable. I suspect most people think of slavery in terms of the 16th-19th c. African slave trade, and completely ignore the millennia worth of other cultural/historical examples.
I had a nice 3/1.5 house, which I purchased and worked hard (and spent much) to renovate. I rented it out. My tenant was having trouble when his hours got cut, and I was “working with him” while I waited for his hours to go back to normal. What I didn’t realize was that he also wasn’t paying the electric bill, and his power had been shut off. He moved out in the middle of the night by candlelight. He got exactly one load of stuff out before a candle fell over, and burned the whole place down. We stood in the parking lot across the street and watched it burn together. “Everything I own was in there,” he told me. He didn’t say one word of apology about
my loss.
What is he supposed to do to “make it right”? Even if he gave me every penny of his paycheck, he owed me more than he could earn in four or five years for that house. If we were in some ancient civilization, he would have belonged to me— whether for the rest of his natural life, or for a set period of time, while he worked off his debt to me. I would have fed him and clothed him, but I would have owned him.
What happened in reality was that he ran off to another state, and I let him go, because I never wanted to see him again.
But for thousands of years, that’s what slavery was. It wasn’t necessarily a condition you were born to, or that you stayed in for your whole life. Freemen would descend into slavery through misfortune-- war, or debt, or whatever. Or a slave could rise back into the ranks of the free-- either by completing a set term of servitude, as with the Hebrews, or by manumission, or by other methods. There wasn’t necessarily a stigma against freed slaves, either— consider the number of ex-slaves who rose to great power during the Julio-Claudian period.
But basically, you trade your freedom for economic stability. And for many, many, many people in the world today… they wouldn’t mind trading a little dignity and independence for economic stability. It doesn’t take much imagination to find modern parallels.
From Belloc—
The attempt to escape by a personal effort, whether of thrift, of adventure, or of flattery to a master, from the Servile condition had never even so much of driving power behind it as the attempt many show today to escape from the rank of wage-earners to those of employers. Servitude did not seem a hell into which a man would rather die than sink, or out of which at any sacrifice whatsoever a man would raise himself. It was a condition accepted by those who suffered it as much as by those who enjoyed it, and a perfectly necessary part of all that men did and thought.
You find no barbarian from some free place astonished at the institution of Slavery; you find no Slave pointing to a society in which Slavery was unknown as towards a happier land. To our ancestors not only as those few centuries during which we have record of their actions, but apparently during an illimitable past, the division of society into those who must work under compulsion and those who would benefit by their labour was the very plan of the State-- apart from which they could hardly think of society as existing at all.
Let this all be clearly grasped. It is fundamental to an understanding of the problem before us. Slavery is no novel experience in the history of Europe; nor is one suffering an odd dream when one talks of Slavery as acceptable to European men. Slavery was of the very stuff of Europe for thousands upon thousands of years, until Europe engaged upon that considerable moral experiment called The Faith, which many believe to be now accomplished and discarded, and in the failure of which it would seem that the old and primary institution of Slavery must return…
Basically, Belloc is making the point-- over 100 years ago-- that slavery is the default economic system whereby the means of production, labor, and capital are all owned by a relatively small number of people, and that regardless of whether you try pure capitalism or pure socialism, the road always ends in Slavery, where the wealth and power are concentrated and centralized amongst the few. (Has anyone been talking about the 1%'ers recently? Does anyone remember Occupy Wall Street?) It won’t necessarily look like the Antebellum South, but if you move among certain socioeconomic circles, the parallels are certainly there in plain sight.
