I regularly attack Kanye West, mostly because of his bad taste in aesthetics. He is gaudy, superficially provocative, someone who speaks to the heart of the mass man. Hence his popularity. But even a broken clock is right twice a day.
One of the things he said which I find myself coming back to, again and again, is “slavery was a choice.” What was the choice? It’s the motto of New Hampshire: Live Free or Die.
Every slave has the option to die. Every slave can refuse to work, and get whipped until the pain is so unbearable that he loses consciousness. All a master can threaten is pain and death. If you choose death, slavery is impossible.
Hundreds of slaves have worked on plantations throughout history. Today, black people are stereotyped as criminal, chaotic, violent, unpredictable, crazy, erratic, and impulsive. If such traits were a product of biology, how is it possible that a few white dudes controlled hundreds of black people? In 1860, there was no such thing as a machine gun.1 The Gatling gun wasn’t invented until one year later, in 1861.
In 1860, slave masters might have had a few guns, but how accurate were they? How many rounds could they shoot, and how quickly? Logistically speaking, it would be impossible for a slave owner to defend himself against even five unarmed slaves. In reality, those slaves had access to crude weapons, like sticks, stones, and gardening tools. All that would be required was some bravery, and the slave masters were toast.
There were roughly 250 slave revolts in the south, which included anywhere from 2,500 to 25,000 slaves. Still, there were 3.9 million slaves in the south. At best, 0.6% of slaves attempted a revolt. That means 99.4% chose slavery over death.
Blacks shouldn’t be singled out, because they aren’t alone in choosing slavery. 12,000 years ago, the very first farms of Anatolia and Kurdistan were run by slaves. These were not “yeomen” or gentlemen farmers, who had refined their techniques to support a bourgeois life. The first farmers barely produced enough food to eat, and almost starved to death. They were shorter than their ancestors, died younger, had rotten teeth (for the first time in history), and were vitamin D deficient.
Now, since robots (and immigrants) do all the farm labor, and the factories have been shipped overseas, you might think that slavery is over. But slavery isn’t just “pick this cotton, or get whipped.” There are mental, psychological, and spiritual forms of esoteric slavery. If slavery is always voluntary, what’s the difference between slavery and a job?
In slavery, a person must work for their master, and if they don’t, they are punished or even killed. In America today, no one is killed for being unemployed, but there are various forms of punishment for not working. Not corporal or physical punishments (whipping), but emotional and social punishments are employed.
state dependence.
If you don’t work, you might find yourself in a government housing project (Section 8) where people are shot and stolen from on a regular basis. If you don’t work, you will be forced to take whatever food you can get on Food Stamps, which will be processed and filled with poisons. You won’t be able to afford anything organic and cruelty free, and, if you eat meat, will participate in the torture of animals in life-long cages.
If the United States became involved in an existential war,2 maybe these “dependents” on the state would be drafted, and thrown onto the front lines as cannon fodder, or conscripted into forced labor camps. But some of them might be so incredibly incompetent and useless that they might be rejected from participating. The clumsiness and slow-mindedness of the welfare-dependent would sabotage and jam up the factory line, which could be worked more cheaply, quickly, and accurately by robots.
The fact of the welfare state, that a certain percentage of the population can get away with perpetual unemployment, is a very brief post-war experiment, built on the blackened corpses of Dresden and Nagasaki. Welfare has been attacked by libertarians as a form of dysgenics, but this is not supported by the data.
On the contrary, one of the unintended consequences of welfare might be the suppression of the fertility of the poor. Research from 1989 suggests that welfare usage among women suppresses fertility. This contradicts conservative fear-mongering about “welfare queens with nine kids.” It also seems that people on welfare tend to have more abortions.3 One of the reasons for this is that unmarried people have more abortions, and welfare weakens the incentive for marriage.
the illusion of freedom.
Eunuchry and castration, as well as circumcision, may have been widespread in the ancient practice of slavery, and seem to be making a comeback. No one is forced to become a castrati or a eunuch, but people choose it. Those who self-castrate seem to be the most loyal slaves to the state and its ideology, even if they profess themselves to be “anarchists.”
The freedom to choose one career over another, one job over another, one master over another — at what point is this just a more complicated and bureaucratic form of slavery? Instead of being forced to work for one master, employees are shuffled around the job market to work for multiple masters, like a prostitute with multiple Johns.
Every addiction to comfort is also a form of slavery. Needing the diet coke, the chips, the fast food, the factory farmed meat, the Netflix, the TV, the sportsball, TikTok, the apps, the smart phone, YouTube, social media, cute videos, outrage videos, political news, pornography, OnlyFans…
As the slavery becomes more complete, not just controlling the body but the mind and spirit, the most enslaved among us cry out for freedom. Freedom of choice, freedom to love, freedom to vote, freedom to speak, freedom of gender expression, freedom of sexual identity… False, abstract, ideological freedoms replace and smother fundamental physical freedoms: the freedom to eat real food; the freedom to enjoy nature; the freedom enjoyed by the strength of the physical body.
No one is stopping us from eating real food, getting strong, and going out in nature. It’s voluntary slavery. Who is our master? Is it “The Man,” some capitalist in a top hat, or is it some kind of parasite inside us, feeding on our soul, that we call “common sense”? Since we will inevitably die, what are we afraid of?
Hiram Maxim invented the machine gun in 1884.
Rather than a war of choice, as all of our wars since 1866 have been wars of choice.
2011: “Is Welfare Pro-life? Assistance Programs, Abortion, and the Moderating Role of States.” https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/659227
Some of this slavery is just the nature of living. Food and water and shelter do not come from nowhere, they must be gathered or produced through labor.