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This is discounting the fact that we can totally be post-industrial and back to virility and violence.
Indeed this is what most critiques of traditionalism and twitter emulators miss when they caricature it as RETVRN. Tradition is never going back to the past, going backwards or trying to literally go back to past glories, and whenever it is that it fails. Because it is impossible to turn back entropy, because we are not people of the past, we have neither their virtues nor their vices, neither their innocence nor their wisdom.
What tradition is is acknowledgement of eternal truths and their practical, moral, social and metaphysical requirements.
In this case, the fiction you, and modernism, sells of a peaceful society created by industry is a blatant lie. One all too evident now. We do not live in peace, we do not live in civilization, we have only grown more base and brutal with the advent of plenty and the inevitable cthonic pull that came with it. That brutality is sheathed in nice even language and plentiful fast food and video games. But even those are fading and drifting out of grasp under the current of debt, slowly but inevitably moving away like the ship of a lone sailor who dropped overboard and has to resign himself to drowning.
What is more cruel and violent than the plain imposition that you will never own your home, you will never have a loving wife, you will never have a loyal husband, you will never sire children and all you will ever do is pay for pensions working a job you hate while your black rectangle beams images of happier people into your mind as everything in your vicinity including your own life gets slowly but surely worse in every regard. Perhaps the threat of the punishment that awaits you if you dare to contest such a fate?
Some societies treated slaves with more decency than modern man commends in all areas that are not commodified material comfort. But alas, the choice between annihilation and annihilation is not going to tame the youths spirit for very long.
Is is entirely predictable that such an age should be dominated by feminine thinking and modes of existence. But no age is eternal and the troubles created by the desolation of all social structures that require will necessarily wreak the advent of a new age of conquest and grandiose virility.
Our bandit hordes are already here. The warlords that will tame them have already been born. And when they do, earthly notions of equality, sameness and tolerance will go with them.
All this has happened before, and will happen again.
I will ask again: can you list societies that had slaves treated better than modern man?
I could, but you'd just go ahead and ignore my caveat because you don't understand anything that is not material comfort.
So you simply are unable to substantiate your bullshit and insane claim how supposedly slaves were better treated than people nowadays.
Even to let other people (not me) to judge it and potential admire your great examples.
For future: making less overly strong claims could be much better tactic and let you argue without blatant lying.
Also, not having delusions that specifically me would be lord and king that subjugated others is not the same as understanding only material comfort.
Your understanding of antic civilizations and feudalism seems to be mostly based on 1700 bourgeois propaganda.
Go read about Antic Greece, Medieval Europe or modern warlord era China. Then we can have a productive conversation instead of you regurgitating Liberal memes.
Before taking advise from you on this I await examples of societies that:
For best effect: in which society that existed in past you would prefer to be enslaved over living your current life?
"slavery bad" is opinion fairly widely shared, if you want to argue that slavery is better than freedom then I await your examples
By Liberals and their successors only. Slavery has been widely considered a just or necessary practice before the Industrial Revolution. Aristotle famously makes a convincing argument that without it, progress is impossible.
I don't support it myself since we have machines now and I generally agree with Liberals directionally when it comes to the individual. But they do overstate their case for political reasons. That much is clear.
I don't believe in Rawlsianism, but let's consider Rome.
Most household and business managers and agents were slaves, and they were even a preferred caste in banking and accounting, and quite common in intellectual pursuits. So I'd probably fall under that category in that society anyways. And my life would be less constrained in some ways and more constrained in others. In
The most brutal accounts revolve around what one would predict: agriculture and mining. But they don't strike me as less exploitative than the treatment of nominally free workers in the 1800s. In fact it is often remarked upon by contemporaries of the Industrial Revolution (such as Marx as I mention previously) that the incentives of capitalism are actually worse for the underlings than those of slavery.
A slave you have to feed and shelter all year and throughout his life lest you eat into your investment. An employee you can and should dismiss if they are not making you money. To be fair, abandonment was also an issue with slavery, but in Rome it was specifically made illegal to reclaim abandoned slaves because they system relied on these incentives. The lumpenproletariat is a uniquely modern issue.
From the point of view of the middle class, slavery is an indignity for obvious reasons: it refuses them bluntly access to higher prestige, certain professions, and general control over their personal life that they could fully enjoy given their means.
But for the lowest of the low, for those people for whom getting a meal is not a given, which is what led us down this path of discussion, rights and dignity are not those prized treats. And selling themselves into service can actually be a good deal.
This is the real charge against modernity that communists and other successors of Liberalism successfully accuse it with. That those nice ideas of individualism and freedom are only good for those that already had the means to enjoy them and that removing the other forms of bonds society used to run on makes all the miserable untied to the now free individual.
Being more free and having more rights is not necessarily in your interest.
Servants were often in a similar position. Back in the day, even quite poor famillies would often have a cook, say, who had a personal role in that household. Now, people still employ cooks, but they work in warehouses preparing meals for Uber Eats.
The bad of personal employment: less personal agency, more potential for victimisation at the hands of bad employers. The good: your employers are pretty explicitly responsible for your general wellbeing in the eyes of society, and they aren't so beholden to profit margins.
Or to put it another way, in a fluid modern economy, nobody is responsible for you except for you. That can be very empowering, but it can also put you in a position where all of your options are bad and you end up essentially responsible for exploiting yourself.
Which is, sadly, the desired end goal of Liberalism and the quest to return to the state of nature. Now the problem is that this isn't actually conducive to the promises made alongside it, such as equality, but even if it were, the prospect of destroying all that is human about the relationships we have in exchange for some individualistic principles is something that normal people have never desired.
There's a lot of literature on how schooling was made mandatory specifically to break the spirit of the peasant hordes so they would behave like good cogs for the industrial machine. Much of Luddism is about resiting just this tendency, and I don't think the Luddites were ever heard for the substance of their criticism.
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