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Chapter 5 : SLAVERY
To compound matters further, with the development of these larger and more complex societies, a new phenomenon appeared on the human landscape, that of slavery. In the first civilized societies, when wars took place between tribes, the victors would kill the males and enslave the fertile females and often their female children as well. As the societies developed, the opportunity to capture vanquished males to use as slaves to provide more wealth for the victors and also to increase the level of humiliation suffered by the loser arose as an additional option.
Initially, slaves, humans who were the property of other humans, were enemies captured in battle. As time passed, however, and societies became more complex and depersonalized, even members of one's own society could be enslaved if they committed a crime, failed to pay a debt, or did not obey the edict of the ruler of the time. In addition, some individuals who simply could not function independently sold themselves into slavery in order to avoid starvation or murder. In addition to outright slavery, with the power in societies being concentrated in the hands of the very few, most peasants, serfs, and workers, if not actual slaves were not far removed from such a state.
Virtually all large, complex societies have relied upon slavery to provide the power to make the society function. Just as humans domesticated other animals, they domesticated their own kind, recognizing them to be the most useful domesticatable animals of all. Over the 10 thousand year history of civilization, a very large percentage of our species has been the domesticated animal property of other humans. The odds are extremely high that at some point in time your ancestors were slaves.
When a wild animal is domesticated, two things must happen. First of all, it must be captured. Its freedom must be taken away so that it does not escape. The second step in the domestication process is the breaking of its wild animal spirit so that it is taught to obey its master. What happened to horses, sheep, pigs, and dogs happened to many humans as well. Undoubtedly, there were those who refused to be taken into captivity, or if captured refused to submit to their captors. It is reasonable to assume that they were killed, often as an example to the others so that they would understand the consequences of such a position.
When human animals allowed themselves to become enslaved and subjugated themselves to the agenda of acquisition of gold and power for their masters and rulers, they surrendered control of their lives and as a result were diverted from fulfilling their own long-evolved internal genetic agendas. It is a defining quality of a civilized human being that it not be fulfilling its healthy agenda since the agenda of civilization itself is unhealthy. That agenda is to conquer nature and to acquire wealth and power as ends in themselves. This agenda has been set by a relatively small group of individuals who took certain fundamental human tendencies and extrapolated them to their extreme and then enslaved large numbers of others to use them to achieve their objectives. These individuals have been looking after the survival and comfort of their own genetic material and using the rest of the species as their worker ants to accomplish this goal.
The societies of hunters and gatherers, although violent, lacking in many securities and comforts, and flawed, particularly with respect to power dynamics between the sexes, were still fundamentally more healthy societies because, despite all of their shortcomings, the logic behind their structure was life-affirming.
We are the descendants of our hunter and gatherer ancestors. Due to our manipulation of our environment and ourselves, we have been able to survive in large numbers in a dysfunctional manner and form that they did not have the luxury to explore. We have been keeping natural selection at bay for some time but the herd will inevitably be thinned. The challenge to the domesticated civilized humans of today is to become alive and healthy. To do so they must reclaim control of their individual lives by discarding the rational and emotional anti-life garbage that has been accumulated over the last 10 thousand years in order to once again follow their internal life agenda and thus become untamed again.
They must, furthermore, create a new set of values in order to improve upon those of our hunter and gatherer ancestors, so as to create a means of living that is both in harmony with nature, but appropriate for the reality where we find ourselves today. The common murderous patriarchal gang philosophy established many years ago was developed during a period of our evolution when we were in a very low power position overall on this planet. I am confident that now other ways can be found that can ensure our survival and vitality but at the same time give us more productive options both from an individual and a societal perspective. In addressing the topic of values, for a living thing, that which is of value is that which enhances the ability of the organism to be and to continue into the future, both personally and in terms of its descendants. By definition, therefore, for humans as a form of living thing, values must be life-affirming. The values of civilization have not been life-affirming, for the majority of our species at least. Human animals, who have been hijacked off of their fundamental life-affirming basic genetic program, have been encouraged in more or less forceful ways to adhere to life-negating values. Having them follow life-negating values has enabled them to be of use to their masters and has helped their masters better achieve the survival of themselves and their own genetic material. In addition, if the human slaves accept a life-negating value system, they will inevitably be in conflict within themselves, which will undermine their ability to resist the masters' attempts to subjugate them.
The values of hunter and gatherer humans developed in response to the realities of their environment and, as already stated, are in certain respects no longer valid for the reality of today. The life-negating environment of civilization has been a much more destructive reality and has resulted in a set of values appropriate for such a reality. It can be reasonably inferred that for virtually every civilization that has existed, the values promoted within those societies have been both anti-life and anti-human, at least for the vast majority of the humans in the societies, those who were not the masters. These values have been enforced through violence. In less organized and less sophisticated societies, force alone was sufficient. In more complex and evolved civilizations attempts to codify and justify the value systems took place in the form of laws and religions. Once again, the realization of the legal and religious positions has been through force.
I will not attempt to analyze or address all of the diverse ways that legal and religious systems have been set up during the last ten thousand years in order to impose the will of the masters upon the slaves to follow a life-negating value system so that they could be better used to have the masters achieve their own ends.
While there have existed stylistic differences from time to time and location to location, the theme has been the same over and over again. I do, however, wish to address what has become the dominant human value system on our planet over the recent centuries, that of Western religion.
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