You gotta risk it to get the biscuit. I probably grew up with less than you. I just made the choice to have financial discipline and delay my gratification. 5 years ago I had no heat and my car was a piece of shit.
this is placing humanity at the level of hunter-gatherer, some 6000 years out of date. There is a lot of pushing the survivalist approach these days, but it is not because we have to hunt for food, but because we have to bow to the current philosophy, where a small percentage [bosses owners, money market men etc] manipulate the masses.
Could we instead make a society beyond need? Indeed aren’t we mostly beyond need anyway and hence its all politics and not the need to survive.
Or is there a reason why we can’t share the world more fairly.
Its simple, money has different worth world over, those with more money and those in a zone where money has greater worth, get more out of the system! Everyone else looses.
If money was fair then at least people in poorer nations/positions would have a chance. Currently we got a situation where the hunter-gatherer in one nation hunts a deer worth well over 1000% of that in the poorer nations. That is one of many reasons why it currently isn’t as simple as survivalism.
The crap they feed us about survival is nothing short of deceit.
Most people reading this thread are probably wondering why an anarchistic nihilist is concerned with slavery.
Well, it’s because if one could provide the necessary grounds in illustrating that it still exists it very much would give credence to my perception of an amoral human species and a world completely absence of morality or ethics beyond fictitious idealisms.
Let that be noted publicly within the thread.
Well, at least we know where all that chicken E. Coli is coming from… Case closed.
bloomberg.com/news/articles/ … oxfam-says
No question that’s terrible, but it still isn’t slavery. If some worker asks to go to the bathroom, the manager says no, and worker says “fuck you, I quit”, they can walk away. They aren’t owned by their managers, and they can unilaterally end the arrangement whenever they choose.
And unless I missed it, you haven’t described what you consider to be the limits of slavery. You seem to paint any dependence on the group by the individual as de facto slavery, since the group can take away its support and that implicit threat motivates at least some action. But that broad definition just describes the human condition as individual members of a social species whose well being has always depended on the group, and on cooperation with other humans. That broad brush even paints the people at the top of modern human hierarchies, who are completely dependent on other humans for their well-being.
So who isn’t a slave, and why?
Carleas, so quick to show everybody has the same level of freedom and independence to support the mythology of social cooperation or equality in a world where little to none exists. A lot like a guard dog on duty protecting the mythical values of western civilization or society concerning its public image media social relations. Of course we can expect nothing less from somebody who’s occupation is that of a lawyer professionally.
Carleas, a devoted follower in that socially contrived and constructed notion of a social contract states because a lowly worker can unilaterally end an arrangement with a corporate or government entity somehow illustrates freedom but of course never ever mentions the eternally binding arrangement of rent, utilities, taxation, and financial standards of living that all individuals are not allowed to breach in ending until the very occurrence of death itself. With those things existing and non ending the contrived social contract of freedom he waives so proudly in display is meaningless and nothing more than an illusory prop of control or captivity of the human collective mind itself. A cheap distraction prop utilized for collective denial and controlling the emotional sentiments of human populations everywhere in an era that so naively calls itself one of human enlightenment where in reality the word disenchantment is more appropriate or fitting.
The very definition of slavery is extreme co dependency and existential bondage a phenomena we find in the lower social ranks of civilization across the planet in our own very era but Carleas is here to assure us that freedom is slavery along with extreme co-dependence being individual independence.
He says they aren’t owned by their managers to make a wage or income where if they quit it’s not like they somehow won’t end up unemployed or worse become a societal nonperson joining the ranks of the homeless. Those consequences ironically are the very reactions we would expect from individuals living in captivity or ownership by the way.
[A homeless nonperson slave by the way for definition purposes is a fate much worse than an employed one.]
We’re told by Carleas that because today’s worker has a choice in choosing which corporate plantation they work on somehow equates to freedom and independence. Well, if that is the case I think we must discern with the very definition of freedom that Carleas uses.
A slave is when a person in co dependency has little to no individual independence in life where a nonslave is a person that while living in a codependent state has very large sums of individual independence or total independence concerning full control of their lives. Nobody denies that human existence requires some level of co-dependence however we’re both fully aware that too much co-dependence leads into tyranny or slavery where there is no honest reason to deny such. (Pretentious and denial forms of reasoning of course which I accuse you and those like you of.)
I look forward to the mental gymnastics and acrobatics of your next reply.
[b]2 Thessalonians 3:10
"For even when we were with you, we gave you this rule: “The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat.”[/b]
No, it isn’t. Because if it were, everyone and everything would be a slave. Again, you’re talking about the bondage of the gravity well: we find ourselves as systems that need food, shelter, companionship, etc., and those needs motivate us and constrain us. In some airy sense we’re slaves to Newton’s laws, but then we are exactly as much a slave as a blade of grass or a stone or a quasar. The same goes for “rent, utilities, taxation, and financial standards of living”: we pay rent to get shelter, we pay utilities to have water to drink and light to keep the room warm, we pay taxes to fund the commons, and we seek a “financial standard of living” because we’re slaves to our senses and more comfort feels better. Existential bondage is ludicrously inclusive; we’re not slaves to our needs and wants any more than a fish is a slave to the ocean, but we are just as existentially bonded.
So slavery is a relative condition? Like, wealthy people in the US are less slavey than the working poor, but the working poor in the US are less slavey than the global poor? Because relative to the global poor, the working poor in the US have “large sums of individual independence”. And from a historical perspective, nearly everyone alive today has “large sums of individual independence” relative to all but the wealthiest from a few hundred years ago. And aren’t most of the working poor are more independent in some sense than the uncontacted hunter-gatherer living in the Amazon? In terms of quantity of choice, they certainly are (e.g. the working poor can hunt, but the hunter-gatherer can’t watch TV).
It still looks like you’re talking in metaphors. People are slaves to their emotions, the fates, society. If that’s all you mean, that fine, but it’s a small and uninteresting claim.
You lost all credibility Carleas when you’re trying to compare social interactive captivity with something ubiquitous like that of gravity.
No other animal species utilizes rent, currency, and price control mechanisms for survival.
You’re basically just ranting and raving the justification of the status quo while denouncing the existence of social interactive captivity altogether. If you can’t take the subject seriously I in turn can’t take any conversation on the matter with you seriously.
By all means, keep telling us in this thread why everything is awesome with the status quo while denying the inherent captivity of others you can safe guard your precious nonexistent ideals of society or civilization altogether in deniability of anything that flies in the face against them.
I have to speak in metaphors because displays of social captivity or slavery are purely cultural abstractions which as you know is based upon metaphor. I think you’re smart enough to know the difference between wealthy and poor in terms of economic purchasing power along with the social or cultural outcomes of that in terms of hierarchal chains of command.
Now, do you really wish to continue to blow smoke up my ass with this idealistic permissive deniability of yours?
I apologize if I wasn’t clear before, but I meant to accuse you of doing exactly this. By your definition of slavery as “existential bondage”, rocks are slaves to gravity. I’m glad you agree that this outcome is absurd; it is a serious problem with the way you’re using “slavery” in this thread and elsewhere.
Granted. But many social species have strict and brutally enforced hierarchies, with deadly consequences for failing to fall in line or contribute sufficiently. These are the same social mechanisms by different means. It seems odd to say that if, rather than brutalizing lower-ranked males, chimps just stopped paying them, that would be the transition to a master-slave relationship. Is that your claim?
I’m doing anything of the sort. To be explicit: my argument here is just that the people you’re claiming are enslaved are not, in fact, slaves. I think there’s a lot wrong with the status quo, but that’s not the question here.
Are you retreating to that easier claim, and setting up a straw version of my position to attack, as a way of conceding that people are not, in fact, slaves?