Tao Te Ching
Slavery
Did slavery in the world end because of people’s sense of injustice or only because it stopped being economically profitable? As technology evolves, unskilled labor becomes both less necessary and less valuable. As physical slavery organically ended in the world, mental slavery, true-believership, and wage slavery may be both rapidly increasing and ending now. There's a scene in the old movie, Dr. Zhivago where a chained prisoner (Amourski) in a rail people are traveling in raises his shackled hands and says, "I am the only free man on this train! The rest of you are CATTLE!" Again we have the gap between the words and the sense. From the words only, this is ridiculous - he is the only one physically chained and enslaved. From a deeper understanding though, from the sense of the word slavery; he could have been the only really free person on that train.
Quotes (99)
“Satisfaction linked with dishonor or with harm to others is a prison for the seeker.”
“They have advanced technology but they aren’t mesmerized by their tools, hypnotized by their computers, enslaved by their inventions.”
“No trace of slavery ought to mix with studies… No study, pursued under compulsion, remains rooted in the memory.”
“Society has set up a system of rewards - fame, fortune, pleasure, and power - and when people chase after these, they spend their lives following other people's demands never living a life of their own, like a slave or a prisoner.”
“The name of peace is sweet and the thing itself good, but between peace and slavery there is the greatest difference.”
“How little is required to enslave a mind greedy for praise.
(Sic leve, sic parvum est, animum quod laudis avarum Subruit ac reficit)”
“He will always be a slave who does not know how to live upon a little.”
“Every desire degrades us, and renders us slaves of what we desire... If it's freedom you seek, then wish nothing and shun nothing that depends on others, or you will always be a helpless slave.”
“He that is kind is free, though he is a slave; he that is evil is a slave, though he be a king.”
“Those who are penniless but still obsessed with business seem to have sold themselves out to debt.”
“Desire makes slaves out of kings, and patience makes kings out of slaves.”
“Slavery is founded in the selfishness of man's nature—opposition to it, is his love of justice.”
“People only know the work of working. They don’t know that the work of not working is the greatest work of all… If they knew that something came from nothing, they would no longer enslave themselves to things.”
“Do not be the slave of first impressions… Wait for the second or even the third edition of the news.”
“all government without the consent of the governed is the very definition of slavery”
“slavery - a Practice so gross & hurtful to Religion, and destructive to government, beyond what Words can set forth”
“Man is born free, yet everywhere is in chains. One thinks himself the master of others, and still remains a greater slave than they.”
“It appears, accordingly, from the experience of all ages and nations, I believe, that the work done by freemen comes cheaper in the end than that performed by slaves”
“As much as I value an union of all the states, I would not admit the southern states into the union, unless they agreed to the discontinuance of this disgraceful trade, because it would bring weakness and not strength to the union… The augmentation of slaves weakens the states; and such a trade is diabolical in itself, and disgraceful to mankind.”
“mankind is governed by names… and submit to slavery, provided they are respectfully assured that they still enjoy their ancient freedom.”
“None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.”
“Taught from infancy that beauty is woman's scepter, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.”
“Slavery is the daughter of darkness: an ignorant people is a blind instrument of its own destruction… they take license for liberty, treachery for patriotism, and vengeance for justice.”
“Poverty and slavery are thus only two forms of—one might almost say two words for—the same thing, the essence of which is that a man's energies are expended for the most part not on his own behalf but on that of others”
“... Ye can tell
That which Slavery is too well,
For its very name has grown
To an echo of your own.”
“I have born 13 children and seen em most all sold off to slavery. And when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me”
“If you put a chain around the neck of a slave, the other end fastens itself around your own.”
“Slavery...dishonors labor. It introduces idleness into society, and with idleness, ignorance and pride, luxury and distress. It enervates the powers of the mind and benumbs the activity of man.”
“If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong... I hate it because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself. I hate it because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world... causes the real friends of freedom to doubt our sincerity, and especially because it forces so many really good men into an open war with the very fundamental principles of civil liberty”
“The subordination of labor to capital is the source of all slavery: political, moral, and material.”
“Talk about slavery! It exists wherever men are bought and sold, wherever a man allows himself to be made a mere thing or tool, and surrenders his inalienable right of reason and conscience.”
“Slavery has existed in all nations since the beginning of the world. All that modern nations have achieved is to disguise slavery at home and import it.”
“No man can put a chain about the ankle of his fellow man without at last finding the other end fastened about his own neck.”
“All of us are slaves… landsmen pent up in lath and plaster—tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks”
“For their happiness, we will seduce them into slavery with the rewards of an imagined but false heaven and eternity.”
“Money is a new form of slavery, and distinguishable from the old simply by the fact that it is impersonal—that there is no human relation between master and slave.”
“Slavery to State and men has disappeared only to make room for slavery to things and Self, to one's own vices and idiotic social customs and ways. Rapid civilization, adapted to the needs of the higher and middle classes, has doomed by contrast to only greater wretchedness the starving masses.”
“This is the age which, although proclaimed as one of physical and moral freedom, is in truth the age of the most ferocious moral and mental slavery, the like of which was never known before.”
“when we reflect on the increasing number of those who are bound down to machines as slaves, and of those who devote their whole souls to the advancement of the mechanical kingdom, is it not plain that machines are gaining ground on us? This is the art of the machines—they serve that they may rule”
“‘And what does it amount to?’ said Satan, with his evil chuckle. ‘Nothing at all. You gain nothing… Who gets a profit out of it? Nobody but a parcel of usurping little monarchs and nobilities who despise you… whom you slave for, fight for, die for… it is the foundation upon which all civilizations have been built.’”
“Are you a slave? Then you cannot be a friend. Are you a tyrant? Then you cannot have friends.”
“We are the slaves of slaves. We are exploited more ruthlessly than men. Whenever wages are to be reduced, the capitalist class use women to reduce them.”
“Man is becoming a willing slave. He no longer needs chains. He begins to grow fond of his slavery, to be proud of it. And this is the most terrible thing that can happen to a man.”
“You are in prison. If you wish to get out of prison, the first thing you must do is realize that you are in prison. If you think you are free, you can't escape.”
“Without self knowledge, without understanding the working and functions of his machine, man cannot be free, he cannot govern himself and he will always remain a slave.”
“Most will throw themselves with greed back at men, things, and thoughts, whose slaves they will become from then on.”
“There is no tyranny more ferocious than the tyranny of morality. Everything is sacrificed to it.”
“I thought how unpleasant it is to be locked out; and I thought how it is worse, perhaps, to be locked in.”
“Free yourself from one passion to be dominated by another and nobler one. But is not that, too, a form of slavery? To sacrifice oneself to an idea, to a race, to God? Or does it mean that the higher the model, the longer the tether of our slavery?”
“Agriculture, while generating civilization, led not only to private property but to slavery. In purely hunting communities, slavery had been unknown”
“National socialism is the determination to create a new man. There will no longer exist any individual arbitrary will, nor realms in which the individual belongs to himself. The time of happiness as a private matter is over.”
“A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.”
“Our action is based on knowledge and therefore time, so man is always a slave to the past.”
“Specialization is in fact only a fancy form of slavery wherein the ‘expert’ is fooled into accepting a slavery.”
“When a civilization loses simplicity, it becomes increasingly full of troubles and degenerates. People become slaves of external ideas, thoughts, ambitions and social systems.”
“You cannot expect the slave to show the virtues of the free man unless you first set him free.”
“The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that man may become robots.”
“The desire to turn men into animals was the principal motive for the development of slavery... the single slave, linked to his master as a dog is, and numbers of slaves together, like cattle in a field”
“Slavery became the social condition of the laboring classes because it was felt that it was the natural condition of life itself. Omnis vita servitium est.”
“Instead of allowing wild thoughts to enslave you, realize their essential emptiness.”
“There is no logical reason why thoughts, which have no substance, should have so much power over you, nor is there any reason why you should become their slave.”
“Meaningless work is an abomination... reject meaningless, boring, stultifying, or nerve-racking work [where you are] made the servant of a machine or a system.”
“To the Russian, the exciting event in Pavlov's experiment was not the conditioning of the dogs but of the laboratories. But to the Westerner, the revelation that he was a preconditioned robot... was a most disagreeable discovery.”
“The slave is completely at the mercy of external events. If fortune smiles on him, he struts and boasts and attributes her favors to his own power and wisdom—which, as often as not, had nothing to do with it. If fortune frowns, he whines and weeps and grovels, putting the blame for his sufferings on everything and everybody except himself.”
“We are free when we are not the slave of our impulses, but rather their master [when] we become the authors of our own dramas rather than characters in them.”
“in that growth of American capitalism—before and after the Civil War—whites as well as blacks were in some sense becoming slaves”
“So many people have said to me, ‘If we didn't make children do things, they wouldn't do anything.’ Even worse, they say, ‘If I weren't made to do things, I wouldn't do anything.’ It is the creed of a slave.”
“In a consumer society there are inevitably two kinds of slaves: the prisoners of addiction and the prisoners of envy.”
“Each person, not being himself either to himself or the other… and haunted by the ghost of his own murdered self… is addicted to other persons, and the more addicted, the less satisfied, the more lonely.”
“A slave mentality which had been built into him by years of carrot-and-whip grading, a mule mentality which said, ‘If you don’t whip me, I won’t work.’ He didn’t get whipped. He didn’t work.”
“The concept of freedom did not emerge in a vacuum. Nothing highlighted freedom—if it did not fact create it—like slavery.”
“Our world is now marred by many prison-cultures with the machinery of thought control… distracted by trivia, a perpetual round of entertainments… Big Brother does not watch us by his choice. We watch him by ours.”
“They change their shirts every day, but never their conception of themselves... These men are in prison... caged animals who have never known freedom; but it is a prison all the same.”
“We find ourselves constantly assailed by forces trying to manipulate and control us. Internally they manifest as vestigial emotions and instincts based on prehistoric human conditions. Externally, they often arise from political and economic interests with goals diametrically opposed to our own self interests and values.”
“These cultural mind prisons. . . . have been crippling to human moral and spiritual growth… freedom of thought.. and clearly a barrier to world peace. So long as we continue to attach more importance to our own narrow group membership than to the ‘global village’ we will propagate prejudice and ignorance.”
“the Emperor of Shambhala waged war against and subdued the Three Lords of Materialism [who] extend their power and seduction, enslaving the human mind with psychological and spiritual materialism.”
“As legal slavery passed, we [black people in the US] entered into a permanent period of unemployment and underemployment from which we have yet to emerge.”
“Keep you doped with religion and sex and TV, and you think you're so clever and classless and free… A working class hero is something to be.”
“Emancipate yourself from mental slavery, none but ourselves can free our minds.”
“The early Roman Republic was fed by its citizen-farmers; the Roman Empire, by its slaves.”
“Slavery is not a condition. Slavery is a cult. Human trafficking is a cult. Slavery got a rebrand, the Alt Right. These dazzling new plantation owners built a pipeline to take our children from school to prison quicker than a cut can bleed. And the lucky ones go from school to the NFL where they don't even let them niggahs take a knee.”
“No need for guards when you can convince people to collaborate in their own internment.”
“The Atlantic slave trade did not stem from racist hatred towards Africans... the craving to increase profits and production blinds people to anything that might stand in the way... Capitalism has killed millions out of cold indifference coupled with greed.”
“Our ego makes us a prisoner in a self-made jail, our self-absorption acs a a warden that keeps us shut off from the rest of the world.”
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