Let's Talk About Slavery

Who was the first human to think "I will own this person and whip him until he works for me for free"?  Does slavery go back to our most primitive selves?  To before language, even?  No animals I've ever heard of keep slaves.  It seems that slavery, as disgusting and perverted and wrong as it is, is wholly a human invention.  Go us.

Is it fear that gives us this driving, pulsating need to dominate?  We are, after all, naked apes in a world in which all but a very few animals, including some so small we can't even see them, can kill us.  Even a great number of plants can do us in.  We do not have claws or speed or rapid multiple reproduction or natural camouflage.  What we have are our minds.  They are our only natural  weapons.  One of the ways we use them to keep us safe, of course, is to manufacture weapons.  The other is to lie and deceive.  Animals cannot lie to each other; they are too sensitive to subtle chemical signals.  (Our little girl cat used to know when her brother was going to vomit five minutes before he actually did, before he even moved a muscle.)

Lying, like slavery, is a human invention.  It's one way we can win, by convincing other people to believe something that is not true.  An awful lot of people had to approve in order for slavery to exist and be tolerated.  Somehow the slavers managed to win that argument for a long, long time.  The argument has now, finally, been lost both officially and globally, but slavery has not disappeared.  It continues to be tolerated, both underground and in the open, in various sinister forms.  Think, for example, of sex trafficking.  There have to be those who sell, and there also have to be those who buy.

We humans have to hold power in order to survive.  What could be a more thrilling avenue to a feeling of power than by forcing someone to be your slave?  Still, it seems to me one would have to kill off a big part of one's humanness to do so.

Albert Schweitzer said "Nothing human is foreign to me."  I think that's a pretty good philosophy, to remember that whatever one human does, any of us could do, even if only in extreme circumstances.  I "own" pets, so I guess I have had a least a taste of what it is to have power over another being (although they are cats and I could never get them to do my bidding now matter what measures I tried).  But I have never found, perhaps don't want to find, that part of my humanness which could be a slave owner or Nazi.  So I get it, and I also don't get it at all.