| Slavery / Freedom Essay, Research Paper
A slave is a tool, a total servant, a possession. Being a possession, a slave is required to total obedience to a master who has the power to do anything to a slave.
Freedom means, to carry out one own choices, actions without coercion or constraint by necessity or circumstances. Fate often take a hand in the distillation of freedom. When this distillation occurs at weaker levels, benevolent slavery begins. A benevolent master usually receives gratitude from those slaves who are aware of their good fortune and will, in turn, work willingly. This form of slave’s future is relatively certain, assured and predictable. Their offspring, born into a benevolent slavery, find the thought of freedom disturbing.
Although freedom as an idea sounds preferable, is hostile to the idea of personal experience in an unknown future devoid of assured support. After several generations, slaves under benevolent bondage will set up a form of society among themselves where a form of happiness can be found or earned, and in time the succeeding generations of slaves will construe their way of life as the best way to live, accepting, even worshipping their masters who offer protection from real and imagined dangers of life.
A brutalized people will, in time, find death preferable to their misery, and eventually they will fight, even to the death, against their oppressors. Benevolent slavery however, keeps slaves in control by offering them an opportunity to rise within their own status.
This is the underlying condition of a slave’s acceptance of slavery and eventually becomes firmly rooted through upgrading. They are made to feel free, free to roam almost anywhere, to work at jobs within their abilities, to marry whom they choose, have and raise any number of their children, and conscript their own kind into warriors and leaders to protect the ideology of their preference. They are free to compete on working levels.
In this form of slavery, they are allowed to dream the unreal dream; to become masters themselves, and even to reduce their masters into slavery.
The societal successes of AfroAmericans presents a prime example. Large numbers of those young men and women have earned millions of dollars and the adulation of their peers of all nationalities and races. They have risen from their slavery, but they are not in control; of their masters, nor are any masters themselves, nor will they be. In our present society, a very few slaves have risen to status as master, because that status wields a terrible power, a real danger to those already in control.
Knowing this, benevolent masters enact stern laws and sterner measures are taken to hold ambitious slaves in check, even killing impersonally to maintain control. The list of the dead, including Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi, John and Bob Kennedy serve as example of a longer list of those who died ingloriously, marked by ridicule and scandal. They were inextricably linked with the above named people.
Who are we, then?
You, the reader, and me, the writer of this treatise-are we masters of our fate?
Or are we slaves? If we assess our lives, the control over our movements, our schooling, our earnings, we might become aware that what we call freedom is actually, liberties. We have liberties. To me this means we are allowed to do things, within limits – we have limitations placed upon us by documentation, credentials, licenses, etc. We are, in all respects, not free.
During the Hitler regime, a Jew was stripped naked and displayed for the amusement of Gestapo officers. One officer noted that the hapless victim still wore a wedding ring. The Gestapo officer pointed his pistol at the Jew and ordered him to take it off and throw it away.
As the naked man removed his wedding ring, the last thing he had to bind him to his wife whom he loved and who had been killed a few days before in a gas chamber, the humiliated Jew had a sudden realization
“They can take from me all the possessions I have,” he thought, “but they can never take from me my love, my mind and my beliefs – I am free-in spite of them.”
The only way by which we can be free is to realize that freedom is our own decision. It is the realization that we live in slavery that allows us to create a revolution – NOT a violent revolution with guns and bombs or protest movements – but the non-violent revolution that BEGINS in the mind. It’s virtually impossible to create a revolution by organized resistance in our technological era, and it would be disastrous if violent revolution would somehow, actually succeed. Organized resistance of any nature is not the answer to an improved state of life. How can a slave govern with wisdom and equality? How does a slave react positively to freedom? Not even the wisest government body can do this, simply because they too, are slaves.
The first step is to redefine ourselves. When people redefine themselves, slavery begins to dissipate. Slaves of a benevolent mastery remain in bondage only as long as they despair of freedom’s insecurity. We aren’t free simply because freedom is a lonely position – this is what’s been happening worldwide. It’s the way things have been for a very long time.
There is a way to be free and remain in contact with the world. Know what freedom really is.
Freedom is an individual phenomena, and nearly everyone is in bondage, a slave. Lastly, to function in freedom is the road to freedom. Freedom is not somewhere else; it is in each of us, and it is a decision, a choice, to be free, no matter where we are, no matter what the circumstances might be.
Oddly, the first step is the hardest. Our society is based on fear and we crave security. A majority of people rely on insurance-the very word implies that we can be assured of protection from the Unknown – medical plans, unemployment insurance, auto insurance social security, funeral and burial plans, enlarged police forces, military might. We are protected from ourselves-seat belts, air bags, fire retardant materials, alarm systems, safe toys for tots, laws to prevent us from doing anything detrimental to ourselves, ad infinitum. It is notable that much of these security programs and systems are mandatory.
To be free is to begin by embracing insecurity in small portions. People are doing this in numbers even now through thrill-seeking devices, though much of it is valueless. The first place to begin being free is to realize what freedom is and how much, if any, is yours.
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