[b]Looking Up (A Working View) delivers a blue-collar, workingman's (NYC Fireifghter) perspective of today's issues, a view that is seldom heard.
What’s Wrong With Slavery?
Most people mistake the cruelty of shackles and whips, poor lodgings, scarce rations, and forced labor as the things that make slavery abominable, and as usual, most people are wrong. How do I know that most people mistake cruelty for slavery? Because they condone some forms of slavery, just as vehemently as they condemn others.
If I took you captive and said, “You will write beautiful poetry for me. Other than that, you’ll never have to work again. You will live in luxury, eat your fill of the finest foods and have the best health care available. Only you cannot refuse me and you cannot leave,” you are just as much a slave as the man taken from his home and forced to toil long hours in a field and live in a shack. In fact, you probably need liberating more than the man who knows he’s a slave!
In fact, we all embrace a slavery far more insidious and personally less satisfactory than the first example above. We embrace it when we support the military draft, mass taxation and accept the peer pressure that values conformity because conformity is more comfortable.
In short, slavery has nothing to do with cruelty and everything to do with losing our liberty or our responsibility for ourselves. Once we understand what slavery is (the loss of our personal responsibility), than we can understand why every form of slavery is an abomination, that political slavery is every bit as repugnant as chattel slavery.
Excerpt
"It may not be poverty that causes violence, but in fact, violence and the personality traits that lead to it, that causes poverty."
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