When human beings come together with a mission, we can be an inspiring, uplifting, force for good in the world. That happens about 1 out of 10,000,000 times in human activity. Maybe not that often. Most often, we “come together” because we are forced to through coercion, superstition/religion, fear, greed, or stupidity.
Slavery is one of the ways humans are coerced into “togetherness.” In early human history, and you can read all about it in the Bible/Koran/Torah/Book of Mormon/Dianetics or whatever crazy list of human silliness to which you subscribe. Slavery is the handiest way for the most psychopathic humans to control the dumbest humans. The majority of our species is too stupid to live outdoors, so most of us appear to be designed for slavery. It’s as old as civilization, assuming you’re willing to accept a very loose definition of “civilization,” and the #1 reason humans are destined to be a mistake in evolution that will set the earth’s attempt to colonize the galaxy back at least 50 million years. (I put that sentence in for my wife, who is a neo-pagan and believes we’re supposed to be the earth’s “seed” species. I, on the other hand, have seen no evidence of intelligence in the universe and suffer no such delusions.) The fact that we tolerate overlords so willingly is beyond sad. Our ability to practically worship our never-ending supply of 1%’ers depresses me to no end.
In his detailed history of the pre-Civil War slavery years, A Disease in the Public Mind, Thomas Fleming writes, “If we study the income of those men who owned twenty slaves or more and qualified as ‘planters’ –some 46,274 individuals—the pictures is even more astonishing. These men owned half of all of the slaves, which means their net worth was at least $1.5 billion. Put another way, a mere 0.58 [%]of the South’s total population [9,101,090 per the 1860 census, so the actual percentage was 0.51%] composed 70 percent of the richest people in the United States in 1860.”In 150 years, nothing useful has changed. Obviously, that was just a continuation of the trend carried over to the New World from the old world and, as I mentioned at the beginning of this essay, this has been going on for as long as humans have banded together into gangs/communities.
Likewise, in Fleming’s book he writes of the slaves/soldiers’ common bond with each other. “Only their sense of honor as soldiers kept them in uniform. Above all else, they detested the abolitionists, who had gotten them into this murderous nightmare.” While we can’t seem to live without the 1%’ers driving us from one catastrophe to the next, it’s easy for all of us to bond together to hate the people who try to break us free from our slave owners. And as usual, we fight each other for the fun and profit of the few. Nothing new there either, as one of the Civil War veterans said, "this is a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.”
And you wonder why I am so disgusted with the human race?
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