Skip to content

Free Men and Slaves – Essay by Scott Locklin

Nothing is done about it, but the vast majority of people living today are descended from slaves and peasants. Most of these people are still emotional slaves and peasants.

Nietzsche was the last prominent scholar to make such statements, though most misunderstood him. Nietzsche was what I like to describe as a kind of modern ancient Greek philosopher. He was a philologist; a classicist His actual philosophy is something like what I would imagine a pre-Socratic like Heraclitus might be if he were a Polish Lutheran with indigestion, writing in William’s German. The Presocratics were the philosophy of the Hellenes at its height. Socrates was a kind of Jonathan Rawls. The Hellenes, even well into the past, were mostly concerned with what we now call moral philosophy rather than analytical philosophy: how to live.

Nietzsche’s admonition about the morality of slaves is precisely the sort of thing an ancient Greek philosopher would say, and should be taken in a similar spirit. Recognizing that most people around you are spiritual and mental slaves, descendants of spiritual and mental slaves, and ultimately real, is important to understanding the condition of the Current Year.
The reaction of the peasants/slaves to being told this is, of course, cattle-like fear and loathing. Most people think of slavery as some kind of S&M gear, like in TV shows. The reality is that slaves for most of human history did not require shackles to keep them in place, and slept in beds and did work that was normal for their time. Slavery was, and is, very much a state of mind.

Some of the slaves of antiquity were like that because they were born there. Others became slaves through conquest or debt. The actual conditions of slavery were generally indistinguishable from the life of a free man: slaves worked in agriculture, but also as craftsmen, clerks, engineers, bankers, even high viziers in some government positions. Slaves were allowed to own some forms of property, had religious freedom within domestic worship, and while they were allowed families, they were not allowed a lineage: they had no surname. Like most men alive today, they have a surname, but generally have no idea of ​​their lineage beyond their grandparents.

Some of the Greeks thought that certain people were made by nature to be slaves: people who lacked foresight or self-discipline. Aristotle said that unlike animals or very young children, the slave could understand reasoning; he just couldn’t do it himself. Essentially, Aristotle was describing the NPC of the current year, which is probably why the meme stings so much. As he said in the first book of Politics, “Because the slave has no faculty of deliberation.”

Slaves in the classical era were prohibited from many things that were available to free men: for example, they were forbidden from gymnastics, weightlifting, and wrestling in Athens. These types of exercises make the slave more dangerous as they build thumos (“spirit”, roughly) and character. Even the gladiators were fed a diet of pulses, breads and porridge, the kind of slop that the sinister dudes who wear docker trousers to WEF meetings wish the whole world would eat along with cockroach tapenade.

Xenophon in his Education of Cyrus describes how Cyrus kept the conquered peoples in servitude after the conquest. He simply turned them into sybaritic degenerates: the pleasures of the slave. Have fun, don’t exercise. Here: drink some more wine. Don’t experience too much difficulty – that would be unpleasant. Slaves were portrayed in art as shy, dumb and cowardly. More or less like suburban office dwellers, the kinds of people who publicly and immediately forgive the murderers of their children.

Tyrants and tyrannies love slaves and slave subjects. Nero gave slaves the right to take their masters to court. This was not a prototypical love of human dignity or “civil rights”; perhaps it was done for similar reasons. It was done explicitly to reduce the status of free men. They were all slaves to a tyrant like Nero. Aristotle knew:

“Again, the evil practices of the last and worst form of democracy are all found in tyrannies. Such is the power given to women in their families in the hope of informing against their husbands, and the license allowed to slaves in order that they may betray their masters; for slaves and women do not conspire against tyrants; and it is clear that they are the friends of tyrannies as well as of democracies, since under them they have a good time.”

The history of modernity is, to a certain extent, the mobilization of historical peasant and slave classes for other tasks. Past mobilization was for war and industrial production. The dipshits in power (mostly civil servants and slaves themselves, all stupid) now think that automation is so well developed that the masses should go back to slavery and peonage.

The greatest fear of our enemies is that large numbers of free men will cease to act like slaves. Hence their acute terror of men with relatively trivial self-discipline to exercise with weights, stop masturbating, tan their balls, or declare they won’t eat bugs. The spirit of not being a slave: to die rather than submit: the virtues of yesteryear crush the life of the flaccid eunuch class.

I’ll let Aristotle have the last word:

“…the tyrant should cut down those who are too tall; he must kill men of spirit; must not allow communal meals, clubs, education, etc. he must be on his guard against anything which might inspire courage or confidence among his subjects; he must forbid literary assemblies or other meetings of discussion, and he must take every means to prevent people from knowing each other (for knowledge breeds mutual confidence)… In short, he should practice these and other barbarous and Persian arts , which all have the same object. A tyrant should also endeavor to know what every one of his subjects says or does, and should employ spies, such as the “detectives” of Syracuse, and the scouts which Hiero was accustomed to send to any place of resort or meeting; for the fear of informers prevents the people from speaking their minds, and if they do, they are more easily found out. Another art of the tyrant is to sow disputes among the citizens; friends should be wrapped up with friends, people with the notables, and the rich with each other. He should also impoverish his subjects; thus provides against the maintenance of a guard by the citizen and the people, having to continue working, is prevented from conspiring. … Another practice of tyrants is to multiply taxes, in the manner of Dionysus in Syracuse, who invented that in five years his subjects had to bring all their property into the treasury. The tyrant also likes to make war so that his subjects have something to do and always need a leader.”

SOURCE LINK HERE

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

en_USEnglish