Slavery Never Ended

"Nothing appears more surprising to those, who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye, than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few; and the implicit submission with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers." - David Hume

Hume was a complicated man. A brilliant logician, who was led off the path of reason by the virtuosity of his Empiricist musings. Still, as even Jehovah's Witnesses sometimes prove, Hume was perfectly capable of making valid points.

The curiosity of the many being ruled by the few is, as I see it, not just because the rulers of the world are corrupt: it's because pretty much everyone is corrupt. The French, the Americans, the Mexicans, the Filipinos, the Ozzies, from the greatest to the least. A veritable earthly paradise of corruption! And corruption is followed by slavery.

Slavery in the US allegedly ended in 1865. Of course, when you think on these things, it clearly never did - as much as Americans like to tell themselves that. It just changed its name and address.

And don't be fooled into thinking the rich aren't slaves either. They definitely are. In fact they're slaves to an even more insidious master than the serfs: the rigid subculture and mores of their class. Not to forget the easier access their wealth affords them to the slavery of vice. In a very real sense theirs is a slavery even worse than that of the serfs, seeing as it is self-imposed.

Well, Jesus did say, "Straight is the gate and narrow is the way which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.” Apparently very few.

The following is by a thinker of similar ken to Hume, Etienne de La Boétie (1530-1563) who expresses Hume's view on the matter in rather more aggressively cynical prose.

Fitz


“Poor, wretched, and stupid peoples, nations determined on your own misfortune and blind to your own good! You let yourselves be deprived before your own eyes of the best part of your revenues; your fields are plundered, your homes robbed, your family heirlooms taken away. You live in such a way that you cannot claim a single thing as your own; and it would seem that you consider yourselves lucky to be loaned your property, your families, and your very lives.

“All this havoc, this misfortune, this ruin, descends upon you not from alien foes, but from the one enemy whom you yourselves render as powerful as he is, for whom you go bravely to war, for whose greatness you do not refuse to offer your own bodies unto death. … Where has he acquired enough eyes to spy upon you, if you do not provide them yourselves? How can he have so many arms to beat you with, if he does not borrow them from you?

“The feet that trample down your cities, where does he get them if they are not your own? How does he have any power over you except through you? How would he dare assail you if he had no cooperation from you? What could he do to you if you yourselves did not connive with the thief who plunders you, if you were not accomplices of the murderer who kills you, if you were not traitors to yourselves?

“You sow crops in order that he may ravage them, you install and furnish your homes to give him goods to pillage; you rear your daughters that he may gratify his lust; you bring up your children in order that he may confer upon them the greatest privilege he knows—to be led into his battles, to be delivered to butchery, to be made servants of his greed and the instruments of his vengeance; you yield your bodies unto hard labour in order that he may indulge in his delights and wallow in his filthy pleasures; you weaken yourselves in order to make him stronger and the mightier to hold you in check.

“From all these indignities, such as the very beasts of the field would not endure, you can deliver yourselves if you try, not by taking action, but merely by willing to be free. Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break into pieces.” ― Étienne de La Boétie, The Politics of Obedience: The Discourse of Voluntary Servitude