The Stoic philosophers may have owned slaves, but so do we
I just read an excellent story by Jessica Wildfire. In it, she emphasizes there’s a concerted effort among the Elites to reduce us to the status of Roman slaves by convincing us that true misery is enslavement to vices — just as the Roman imperial advisor, Seneca the Younger, used to explain.
I agree with Jessica almost wholly. I find fault only with her argument that the two noteworthy philosophers, Seneca and Epicurus, whose teachings are being misused more and more today by the Master class for gaslighting, were, essentially, hypocrites themselves who brushed aside the slave issue:
Let’s face it, our beloved stoics understood the deep contradictions between their philosophies and the lives of slaves. They couldn’t reconcile the two, so they just shrugged it off. They pretended that spiritual or internal slavery was worse than actual, physical slavery.
As Henry Fellows Moss points out in his comment, Ancient Stoicism is a series of techniques for mind-hacking. It has nothing to do per se with creating injustice or oppression.
On the other hand, Stoicism may help you to deal better with the latter. And the actions of the Billionaire Master class are, in conjunction with the evolving AI technology, inexorably moving us into a future of greater servitude and indenture, with a grand finale of the extinction of regular jobs.
And no, I do not believe that most billionaires are inherently evil. For example, I genuinely admire Elon’s achievements and am rooting for his success. It is the unjust and unsustainable system of wealth redistribution that suckles the Master class with exponential abandon, that is depraved.
It is also fair to clarify Epicurus himself was born as a slave in Asia Minor and later in life owned slaves himself. As a rule, he allowed slaves and women to participate in his school. So he was quite a decent chap, for the times.
I want to stress that taking an absolute moral stand is legitimate, at times decisively necessary, but often vulnerable.
I believe it is also objective to say that just about anybody who has the time, resources and energy, as you and I probably have, to be engaging in ruminations, reading, public discussion and writing, would have been two and a half thousand years ago in Corinth, at least a minor slave owner, or his spouse.
It is better absolute moral stands are thought out absolutely.
We that have the time on a Saturday morning to sip coffee while reading and typing sentences into the Medium editor belong to the Developed World’s fading MC (Middle Class, of course).
We are partaking in the fruits of the labour of millions of indentured workers in the Third World. The provenance of their work is soothingly obscured by the Master class’ corporate supply chains and marketing doublespeak and facilitated by our governments, which we so enjoy hating.
In total righteousness, we are lesser slave-owners, separated by the famous six degrees (actually 6.6, but let’s not be anal) from the people that support our lifestyle.
The ten-year-old boy who is at this moment inhaling toxic dust in a Congo cobalt mine, digging for a mineral essential for the manufacture of the smartphone that is beeping on my desk, will never read a publication such as this let alone post to it.
The thirteen-year-old girl in an illegal garments factory on the bank of the Mekong River is swaying under the weight of a box of the designer trousers I am wearing. She does not give a hoot whether fit&handsome stoicism-spewing gentlemen on Youtube are gaslighting her. However, she is fully intellectually capable of understanding Seneca’s words — which she will never read.
So, I agree: many life-lessons marketers are trying to convince us that our vices enslave and misdirect us. At the same time, a handful of humans controlling ninety per cent of Mankind’s wealth makes crucial decisions about our fate in their metaphorical floating palaces above the clouds.
However, most of us enlightened ones in the Developed World are looking away from the rainbow of injustices and doing so much more intensely than dear old Seneca and Epicurus ever did.
We are, after all, citizens of Rome.
