People are not really talking about slavery when they talk about slavery.
Peak District, UK. 2012.
Slavery exists in our contemporary imagination as an opportunity for sexualised fantasies of power and domination, furtive indulgence in thinking about physical violence and cruelty, masochistic self-indulgence in pseudo-moralising, and the general vicarious thrill of imagining humans ill treating each other.
This is why discussions of slavery always linger on the worst aspects of the institution. People are not really talking about slavery when they talk about slavery. They are talking about human cruelty, power relations between humans, and the quasi-sexual thrill attached to those power relations.
Humans love thinking and imagining these things. You only need to look at the popularity of crime drama and reality television to understand what we are. We dream murder. And then we joyfully watch a celebrity eating a giant dung beetle.
Crunch. Crunch. Crunch.
What a beautiful carapace. It was very brittle and it shone under the camera lights as that blonde off that cooking program noshed it down.
How the mighty have fallen…thrilling.
We do all this, even as we live in conditions that are close to slavery. For the essence of slavery is not poor material well being, being treated badly, or the presence of coercion.
The essence of slavery is being someone’s property. And that, actually, is quite a boring statement when the whips, manacles, and chains are removed from the picture.
“We invented concentration camps, you know!’’
The British journalist was dining with several local worthies in Syracuse, NY.
“We did it to the Boers.”
The Boers are getting it in the neck still.
And the British still don’t care.
She was showing off over her beer.
She was proud to admit it. Proud in a sort of ashamed way. Her voice was coy about it. She picked up the facts from the BBC or a suitably progressive website so that she could boast about.
And feel…dirty.
There are conservatives who urge the British and American peoples to stop apologising for their past crimes. These people do not really understand what lies behind the constant apologies for the sins of empire. These conservatives usually want Europeans to start another empire and become overbearing and powerful again. That is why they say we must overcome the past.
They do not understand that the tendency to apologise is bound up completely with the ‘glories’ of empire. Indeed, it is entirely consistent with the nature of their people. That British and American people apologise for their past crimes is quintessentially British and American.
The reason for this lies in that most British (and Anglo-Saxon trait): masochism.
The cold shower goes along with moral self-flagellation. British (and some European people) actually enjoy feeling bad about doing things.
This is not the Catholic approach to life. The Catholic feels guilty. That is so. But they have not perfected masochism.
It is the Protestant inclination to take every action as having great weight that does it. There is no confessional. There is only your own conscience and Biblical interpretation. And the mind alone merely makes its own torture chamber. It does not matter if you have stopped believing in a metaphysical god. The self-persecution continues still. The Protestant god continues unbidden.
It is bound up, this tendency to apologise, to a kind of sadism. It is quite diabolical to apologise to someone, for then they must forgive you. And that is a horrible obligation. It is the worst kind of moral torture. The person who apologises to you puts you under obligation. “It’s alright, mate. Just forget it…forget it…(for Christ’s sake, forget it!)” The man who forgives must humble and debase himself a little.
And this is the final dirty trick of European imperialism: the Europeans will make their imperial peoples feel bound to them by apologising all the time.
Politeness and affability are British and American traits respectively. But these traits mask brutality and cruelty. It is the British obsession with manners and politeness that somehow drives them to acts of remarkable cruelty. Restraint in one field merely leads to excess in another. We will massacre you horribly, but we will say ‘thank you’ when we buy something in your father’s shop.
Similarly, Americans are extremely friendly and encouraging. But this simply masks immense anger and resentment. It is probably likely that the requirement to be friendly – Americans are always extremely friendly – and affable all the time contributions to the eventual breaking point where a Yankee takes a gun to his office or former school.
I suspect that this ‘niceness’ is what makes Americans utterly ruthless. It is odd that men, like Aleister Crowley, who set out to be consciously evil didn’t manage to do much evil at all. Crowley was not a particularly nice or good man. That is true. But his ‘evil’ when compared to people who are regarded as generally ‘nice’ or ‘good’ or simply ‘normal’ is nothing.
How many people did the Clinton sanction regime kill in Iraq? A few hundred thousand, perhaps. We do not count too much.
And yet we would regard Clinton as – if not ‘good’ – not particularly demonic in the Crowley mold.
This is why I often walk around chanting to myself, “I’m a monster. I’m a monster.” It is only by admitting the monstrous element that a person avoids becoming the ‘terribly nice’ official at the State Department who, like Adolf Eichmann, sends hundreds of thousands to their deaths at a pen stroke while apparently feeling moral about it, and who is seen as an affable person in his social circle.
“Fred’s a sweety!”
The prevalence of various psychiatric drugs in our society reflects a need to maintain the ‘nice’ facade. The depressed person is usually not particularly ruthless. We need to become publicly ‘nice’ if we are to become really nasty (our evil is always done in the dark and invisibly).
The desire to apologise for the sins of European imperialism merely represents an extension of the imperial thought system into a new domain. It – along with ‘nicencess’ and ‘politness’ – is a new means to control the former imperial peoples.
We must remember that the European empires were largely conceived in moralistic terms. Whether these empires were any good for the conquered people is not at issue here. Outside the initial buccaneering stage of expansion, the European empires settled into bureaucratic and moral projects.
The high point of this view was, of course, Kipling and his celebration of the ‘white man’s burden’. Indians, Africans, and other groups may disagree that there was a ‘burden’ or ‘duty’ to other groups at all – and Marxists will say all this talk of a ‘noble burden’ simply hides cold exploitation.
Whatever the facts, it remains true that most imperialists conceived themselves as decent people – as much as any Amnesty International or UN worker will do today as they struggle for feminism in Afghanistan.
They were, so they thought, raising people up.
The guilt for the empire is, then, merely an extension of this imperial ideology into a new domain. The imperialist actually revels in his ability to admit his sins. It is simply another version of taking on the white man’s ‘burden’, only this time the imperialist is not an administrator. He is, instead, berating himself for not doing the job well enough. It is yet more masochism.
Pleasurable moral masochism.
This betrays a subtle contempt for the imperial subject. The person who can only see the crimes of imperialism to apologise for secretly still believes the imperial doctrine of European superiority, but they do so in a concealed way.
This is why many non-European people find the type of European who apologises for their nation’s imperial exploits all the time unbearable. They intuit that these people still regard the former imperial subjects as children.
The person who, for example, bangs on and on about the imperial exploitation of Africa and how it has left the continent in a mess to this day does not really believe that Africans have agency or are capable of evil.
He believes, in short, that Africans are children.
The person who truly sees Africans as fully human acknowledges that they commit good and evil. And, yes, sometimes they mess up and it is their fault. That doesn’t mean we can’t evaluate the impact of European imperialism on the continent for good or ill. That doesn’t mean that the European empires didn’t do evil things (and good things). But we may only make this analysis when we grant that Africans themselves have full agency for good and bad.
The ‘virtue signaller’ is, in this respect, best imagined as being at home in an S&M club. “Hit me! I’m bad! I’m dirty! Punish me! I’ve been so dirty!” I’m afraid I’ve never been in an S&M club, so you’ll have to correct me on this point as far as dialogue goes. But I think I’m generally in the right area. The point of an S&M club is, of course, that it is not a site of real violence. There are still limits and boundaries to your sadism and masochism.
In the same way, the person who apologises for European imperialism enjoys a ‘safe’ thrill of being bad and dirty but without any wider commitments. They will not have to do the really hard thing: see Africans (and other former imperial subjects) as fully human (i.e. as their equals in moral terms).
The main point to take away is that this masochistic tendency is a logical development from imperialism itself. It presents itself as a means to atone for the sins of the past. But Kipling maintained that empire was God’s work in its way. It is not the negation of the imperial project. It is merely its extension to a new domain.
The genuine anti-imperialist, by contrast, demands an immediate suspension of projects to re-engineer other societies (let the Afghans have their dancing boys and closeted women) or actual military interference in other countries. They may not care for the bacha bazi on moral grounds, but they acknowledge that this is another part of the way humans express themselves. They are curious and wish to protect a different expression of human sexuality.
The phoney anti-imperialist shrieks about feminism and human rights. They demand that Afghan women appear on banal pop shows and call for the dancing boys to be shipped off to high school.
What does this have to do with slavery? It is tangentially relevant, insofar as some people like apologising for slavery.
But, really, it is a staging post for my main point
We must understand that slavery is much more than what occurred in the United States and the triangular trade. In the anglophone world, this is what we usually mean by slavery. We do not even think much about Brazil and the role she played in the trade. And we would learn much by comparing the comparative death rates between her and the United States.
We do not think of Ottoman slavery –a system that saw slaves become high administrators (plenty of rape and pillage in that system as well – I’m not going to go easy on the Ottomans just because they’re Muslims). Nor do we think about the highly educated slaves of Ancient Greece and Rome.
Slavery is a vast and long-stranding social system. It stretches beyond the Anglo-Saxon world and into history. It is – aside from the masochistic and sadistic fantasies both moral and sexual (can morality not be sexual?) that dominate our discussion of the topic today – a social system of organisation.
The main point is not how cruel or vicious particular slave owners have been in history. It is not how high slaves rose in various societies (often very high). Slavery is a system of property ownership applied to human beings. That is what is distinctive about it, rather than a particular system’s cruelty (or lack of cruelty).
I have known men who treat their cars better than their wives. And perhaps they do this because their cars are their property whereas their wives are not.
In the same way, there can be good slave owners and bad slave owners. There are men who never mow their lawn and let their house go to pieces. And there are men who make sure their property is well cared for. There are even men who will sacrifice their own welfare to make sure that their property is well tended.
In many ways, it is easier to care for property than to ‘love’ someone. ‘Love’ is rather nebulous and ideological in nature.
And, when we look at the totalitarian states of the last century, we see in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia states where no man was technically ‘owned’. And yet, since no man was owned, nobody took any responsibility for any man’s welfare. The men of these societies became so much human material to be disposed of without any care in concentration camps and gulags.
And, of course, these regimes claimed to be all about ‘the common man’, ‘the worker’, and ‘solidarity’. But it was these societies, where humans were not technically owned, that were more ferocious than any slave society that went before. The ‘common man’, ‘the worker’, and ‘solidarity’ are mealy. When a man sees a chance to make a profit, he becomes a steward. Tell him that he must ‘love’ his brother and you will see general indifference, for a man may only be self-interested or selfish. Slavery can work on his selfish and self-interested instincts to make him kinder, if only to make a profit. ‘Love’ and ‘solidarity’ make him either deliberately indifferent or actively cruel, for these provide no metric for understanding what is ‘good’ behaviour.
You may almost say that a large part of politics has been the attempt to decide how much, who, and what may be owned by different human beings. Does all the land belong to the king? Does a wife belong to her husband? Does the factory belong to the capitalist? Does the mortgage market belong to the banks? Does a man belong to another man?
Abolishing slavery – like banning gun ownership and drugs – does not make it go away. There are still slaves, in the crudest sense, in our current society. They are prostitutes and migrants workers. And they are treated worse than if there was a formal system of owning humans. In the same way, our drug and gun problems runs wilder with each restriction on ownership.
I do not mean to sentimentalise the slave owner. A system of slavery, if instituted on a poor legal basis, can give full scope for the most monstrous human behaviour imaginable. And there are always evil human beings.
We are all evil.
What is wrong about slavery is not the cruelty involved in the act. What is wrong about slavery is its denial of a type of freedom, which lies in self-ownership.
And, in this, we must consider how free we are today. This was the point made by Marx and Engels. They correctly identified that most people in the capitalist world are wage slaves.
It is true that, under law, we do not own and exchange people anymore.
But, in fact, how free are you? Are you self-owned? And what is the price of your emancipation?
Do you have a mortgage? Do you have credit cards? Could you quit your job tomorrow? Do you have to keep up appearances at work? Do you speak your mind (or do you think about the neighbours and your job)?
It would be nice to see a pound or dollar value placed on a man today. “How much to buy him?” We do this for a man’s labour. But we cannot do it for the whole human – even insurance is based on earning potential.
We are still very much owned, if not in formal terms.
There are two truly free men in our societies: the men who have nothing and the men who have everything.
The vagabond, the man living in his car, who has given up on credit scores, repayments, mortgages, and working is one type of self-owned and free man. He has stopped caring. And this gives him completely self-ownership and freedom.
This is why tramps and schizophrenics are often worth talking to. Being completely free, their minds wander into terrain that most people would find unacceptable. They speak social truths that are hidden out of politeness or fear of retribution or fear of an employer.
A homeless person may be extremely provocative. But nobody will care about his views. It is only people who have something to lose that really antagonise people. “He’s a lawyer and he said what?!”
A tramp or schizophrenic will never make a major discovery in experimental physics or similar. He cannot access that kind of collaboratively attained and socially built truth. But he can attain a very high level of insight into society and human beings, for he may speak freely on these matters.
And this appeal – the hobo’s appeal – is evident in the aphorisms of Eric Hoffer.
The artist speaks his subjective truth, and so he too must be prepared to be cast off into self-ownership. His condition is similar to the mentally ill person or tramp. He is compelled – almost by madness – to represent the world as he sees it.
This is, admittedly, a modern view of what the artist is and should be. In times gone by, the artist was anonymous and working within a tradition. But, for the moment, we have the artist as subjective truth teller. And so he stands out in our contemporary society as a free man.
Similarly, a billionaire may say what he pleases. Nobody can hurt him. Donald Trump is an example of this. And his appeal lies partly in his ability to say things that other people would lose their jobs over. And this because he is completely self-owned.
We may conclude from this that the vast majority of people alive today are still in de facto slavery. They cannot speak their mind or do as they wish. Marx was correct in seeing the promise of liberalism as an illusion. And, indeed, liberalism is in some ways crueller than the slavery that preceded it. The slave owner was at least under some legal obligation to care for his property. The capitalist (or corporation), with no such constraints, may simply use their employees as they wish.
After all, you made a ‘free’ contract for your labour, didn’t you? Never mind the massive power differential between the corporation and the individual.
And we, the ‘free’, are herded backwards and forwards into ideological wars and battles. Our ‘free’ minds are turned by a fine-tuned media machine. The slave was not expected to participate in politics. This meant, oddly, that he could be a sober observer of politics. You did not kill slaves for being in the wrong ideological camp. Slaves had no views.
But now that we are ‘free’ every man’s view supposedly matters. And so we are justified in exterminating our ideological enemies.
Our slavery is deeper than economics. If we consider the Stoic and Christian injunction that freedom means an ability to control one’s appetites, then we are double unfree today. Our economic system, contra St Augustine, encourages us to chase and indulge our appetites at every opportunity (even so that our bodies are destroyed and degraded).
The idea that true freedom is freedom from lusts and desires and intemperance has vanished, and (even though psychoanalysis is discredited in the mainstream) this disappearance is still justified through a pseudo-Freudian appeal to the idea that it is better to indulge an instinct rather than restrain it.
Whether or not restraint is a path to freedom, or whether freedom means – as Nietzsche suggested – rushing towards those aspects of your nature that most fully embody you, it is clear that in our society it is difficult to attain either. A person is encouraged – almost as a moral (we need to grow the economy) – to indulge themselves. And if that destroys your reticence and restraint it doesn’t matter. And if it turns you from your deeper tides and natures, well, that doesn’t matter either.
Freedom, always measured in degrees, does not mean wealth, luxury, or enjoyment. The qualifications for freedom were observed by TE Lawrence:
“Whether they are fit for independence or not remains to be tried. Merit is no qualification for freedom. Bulgars, Afghans, and Tahitans have it. Freedom is enjoyed when you are so well armed, or so turbulent, or inhabit a country so thorny that the expense of your neighbour’s occupying you is greater than the profit.”
“Letter to the Editor” The Times (22 July 1920)
This is why the contempt held for Haiti or Zimbabwe by many people, particularly on the far right, is ridiculous. Haiti or Zimbabwe may or may not have been more prosperous or secure under imperial or white-minority domination, but that is not the salient question about these countries.
The question is freedom. This is a form of self-ownership. Freedom is the prerogative to make your own mistakes. You may be better off under parental tutelage until you are forty. But that is worthless compared to the pain and joy of fucking up (or succeeding) on your own terms. Freedom, as Lawrence observes, costs. And it is measured in your capacity to make trouble and be a pain, rather than a capacity to be good and prosperous.
Haiti and Zimbabwe have made mistakes. They may, as Trump claims of such countries, be ‘shitholes’. But they have done so on their own terms. That is worth something. America is prosperous. But she is quite sterile. Countries like Haiti have their own tang. And it is a definite tang. Do you like it? Perhaps not. But it belongs to Haiti in the same way as an appalling painting belongs to an amateur painter. And he loves it more than a da Vinci because it is his. And we can respect that, although we may still say Haiti has not matched America’s achievements.
The same may be said for North Korea, which is a brutal regime. But she is – unlike South Korea – acting on her own terms. South Korea is a prosperous country. I do not doubt that people there are wealthier, kinder, and probably generally nicer than in the North.
But they are not as free in the global sense of setting their own course against the world. In this respect, the North Korean regime is ballsy. She has maximal freedom in the international sphere and minimal freedom in the personal sphere. The South Korean position is somewhat reversed. Her citizens probably have more freedom to shop, but the country itself has less autonomy. She is another American province. There are many American provinces.
North Korea is, in fact, freer than my own country, the United Kingdom, because we are slaved to the American empire almost completely. Nobody cares what London says about international affairs, for we are merely following the line from Washington. But North Korea, a smaller and less prosperous country, shapes a huge portion of the global agenda.
People care what Pyongyang says. And no one can deny that what Pyongyang says is distinctive and original. That is why it fascinates us. We make documentaries about it because there is nothing like North Korea on Earth.
It is, in this collective sense, the voice of freedom.
The lesson is basically that you may get your own way if you are prepared to be an awkward bastard. North Korea, the awkward child in the room, gets much more say in world affairs than many countries that are nominally more powerful. Whether, of course, you value national freedom – requiring a militarised state and concentration camps – or individual freedom – requiring anti-depressants and shopping malls – is a value judgement.
But each manifestation of freedom requires the giving up of a different form of freedom. My contention here is not that people in North Korea are not depressed because life is wonderful. Their life, harder than the South in material terms, burns away depression. Spartan conditions mean that you are more concerned with your belly than psychological confusions.
The collective and militarised life also destroys depression. Suicide actually decreases during wartime, and North Korea is in a permanent state of war. That is a heady psychological state, for war – as a journalist once observed – is a force that gives us meaning. Humans will put up and thrive on suffering providing that the suffering is meaningful.
In this respect, life in North Korea outshines the South.
The cost is, of course, that if you make a mistake you (and your family) will be led away to be shot or starved to death. And that mistake may amount to saying the wrong word at the cafeteria or smudging a picture of the pudgy panda who runs the country. That is the wickedness of the system.
We The South, being prosperous, allow you to develop all the weird perversities, depressions, and anxieties that emerge in humans when faced with abundance: divorce courts, psychological tics, obesity, OCD, gender dysphoria, anxiety, and so on.
But, of course, you don’t get shot or tortured for moaning or breaking wind in front of the squad commander.
In life, you only really get different forms of suffering. And I am not making a case for one form of suffering over another in this regard. I am merely saying that there are different ways to suffer: North and South.
We see that freedom is ticklish. Freedom does not always simply mean the sovereignty of the individual. It may refer to the self-ownership of the state or community within which you reside. You may sacrifice your freedom for a wider collective freedom, or you may prefer to see a more individual freedom.
When we think about freedom and slavery it is useful to think about the slave Epictetus. This slave philosopher was hobbled in his service. His condition as a slave gave him an insight deeper than social norms. He understood that we are all – in a wider sense slaves to the universe and nature – powerless and the property of another. He cultivated indifference to his master’s moods for good and bad. And, from this, he cultivated indifference to the moods of the universe.
We are all slaves in this cosmological sense. The little monologue in your head that seems to organise and direct you may well be an illusion. Scientific experiment indicates that people move their hands before they have decided to do so. The conscious decision “move hand!” is an afterthought. There is, in fact, no thought. There is only afterthought.
Experiment with not making a conscious decision to do anything. What will happen? What happens is what happens. You no more need to make plans in the morning than you need to make plans for your heart to beat. You will start. You will go down the shops and buy milk. You did not need to make the command, “Go to the shops.”
The injunction, “Don’t think!” is really the command not to be conscious. It is when we become conscious of our actions that we become miserable. This is not really thinking. It is being aware of our thoughts. And it is at that point that we make a mistake. The reason why many people get into terrible situations is that they spend too much time being conscious of their rational process. They become deluded that they are in charge of the universe. They have an illusion of control.
And then they make a mistake.
You know where you are going. ‘You’ is just a commentary on the agglomeration of cells that is the human body. And the spirits, too. The actions will take place, anyway.
Step outside your life. Consider your body moving through space. It is not ‘your’ body anymore.
What will this body do? Curious.
Who is Tom Hart? What is Tom Hart going to do next? I ask myself this question. I look at myself as a character moving through life. I am another person to observe. Curious fellow, this man. What will he do? What will he say? I look forward to finding out.
We are slaved to biology, physics, ethology, and the turning of planets and suns. We cannot step outside the universe. We cannot stand beyond it. We are going where we are going. This is what Jean Cocteau called the great express train of life that we are all riding.
Stop and listen to the pistons.
We do not think about this train too much. Cocteau said that the people who think about it too much always want to step off. And they step off with drugs and drinks, because they know that this furious express terminates in death.
At the level of the cosmos, we must agree with Epictetus and Spinoza that our peace of mind emerges from acceptance and adherence to the laws of nature. The slave must accept with indifference what will come. The delusion that he has a choice – like a vulgar consumer – is mere foolish fancy. You do not have a choice. You do not have a choice over your thoughts.
Self-ownership in this regard means thoughts that are at peace. You accept that you are a slave to the universe. And this is a true form of self-ownership, since you have stopped struggling against that which cannot be changed.
You are the universe, too. This is why people misunderstand quantum physics experiments where observation seems to alter the results. They hear of this and decide that the mere act of consciously observing a phenomenon can change it. From this observation they spin all manner of elaborate theories based on wishful thinking and imagining.
They dream of the superman who can bend everything to their will. They produce self-help books and audiobooks backed up by ‘quantum science’. It all sounds complex and mysterious and so it must be true. You can think yourself rich. Your mind will change reality.
But the observer has merely altered the experiment because they are also part of the physical universe, it is the person who maintains the illusion of an ‘I’ who forgets that their physical presence is what may alter the results of the experiment, not their consciousness or perceived observation. This is, of course, a simpler and more parsimonious explanation for why the experimental results have changed.
We are, us humans and planets, merely parts of cosmic material pinched into shape. Eventually, the fingers of the cosmos release us to take on another shape.
But, of course, that means that if you are not the type to be Stoic, then you will not be Stoic. You will insist that you do have a choice. You can do no other than have this delusion. Your delusion of choice and freedom is merely a necessity as well. You will complain and whine and believe that you can choose what will happen to you.
The number of human beings who can ever be materially self-owned will always be a minority.
These artists, businessmen, ascetics, dropouts, and philosophers will resemble wild beasts.
The men who are completely self-owned are even rarer. They are indifferent to property, but they have also mastered a higher awareness of the demands of the universe.
We know them as religious teachers: Jesus, Buddha, and Lao Tse.
This is why we call them masters.
Humanity will, for the most part, always be slaves.
The question is merely who should own them, and what is the most just way to rule them?
by Tom X Hart