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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   32882 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 7, 2025

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But the natural slave cannot ultimately be freed; they can only be managed well, or managed poorly. Left to their own devices, they will manage themselves poorly. Aggressively managed ("literally enslaved"), they will lash out against the strictures of the arrangement, often violently (the free citizens of slave societies live ever in far of revolt). How much of the history of "government" is the history of developing increasingly sophisticated methods for obfuscating the nature and extent of the bondage imposed on the "mass of men," not only for their own ultimate benefit, but for the benefit of all? And--to what extent might we as a people be slowly forgetting that, as we seek to "liberate" those masses, by continuing to give them the resources of life, while withdrawing (or declining to enforce) any guidance?

Maybe this calls for an inverse catch-22. If you have enough executive agency to successfully organize a slave revolt, you clearly do not belong to the slave class. Welcome to the ranks of the masters brother.

Maybe it's less important that slavery is abolished, as there exist class mobility out of the lowest rungs of society.

On the flip side there's the principal-agent problem.

If you're incompetent and unteachable enough that you need to be governed with direct intervention, and restricted from handling your own affairs, you're also not really equipped to tell if your overseer is making good decisions on your behalf, and even if they aren't actively exploiting you, they can of course be making decisions that are suboptimal for your personal wellbeing, simply because they are not as motivated to do the best possible job.

Maybe there needs to be an overseer-advocate role whose sole job is to audit the other overseers and ensure they're at least complying with best practices.

But this adds extra complexity and expense to this system.

So one really hopes that in the aggregate the added costs of supervising the supervisors and auditing the expenses and otherwise ensuring that the wards are being treated adequately well are actually producing more value than just leaving those folks to their own devices to be exploited.

I can see why institutionalization was a popular solution for this in decades past. If you can put the wards all in one place and lock them in, it takes relatively few supervisors to manage them all, and in theory if you can check in on the conditions regularly and make sure there's no wanton abuses.

In practice, the people most drawn to these jobs would, in many cases, be the most likely to want to commit some kind of abuse.

If you're incompetent and unteachable enough that you need to be governed with direct intervention, and restricted from handling your own affairs, you're also not really equipped to tell if your overseer is making good decisions on your behalf, and even if they aren't actively exploiting you, they can of course be making decisions that are suboptimal for your personal wellbeing, simply because they are not as motivated to do the best possible job.

IMHO, this is a perfect is the enemy of good situation. Is someone managing your decisions better than you, such that you are having even marginally better life outcomes than you were before them telling you what to do? Well, then how much of that added value they skim off the top comes down to competition between overseers.

Shit, I think we just reinvented the labor market.

I recall that this was indeed an embarrassment to the Roman elite when Spartacus repeatedly beat them and their troops. Ruined a lot of narratives as I understand it.

Maybe this calls for an inverse catch-22. If you have enough executive agency to successfully organize a slave revolt, you clearly do not belong to the slave class. Welcome to the ranks of the masters brother.

If we're still talking about Greek society the free man was someone who valued liberty over life and had the valour to actually claim it. Granting a slave freedom merely for organising a revolt would be a lower standard than what was expected of free citizens when they are called to defend their own freedom against an invader.

The Greeks (and Americans) frequently allowed skilled and disciplined slaves to save up enough money to buy their freedom.

Inasmuch as courage or valor was expected, it was of the "discipline and goal orientation over extended period of time" type, rather than the "violent revolt" type.

The thing in this clip, basically:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=bBgrXmHJACs?si=pE8-zQiNH1JHbLae

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