Brave New Slaves

"The best slave is the one who thinks he is free." I've always found this quote by Johann von Goethe poignant and indicative of our times. It seems to me that most people just go about their daily routines without ever standing still to ask themselves why half or more of those routines are things they don't want to do.

Let's face it; all our lifes have been dedicated, through our upbringing and education, to prepare us for a drone-like existence in which the days of the week indistinguishably flow over into one another until we reach the weekend. Get up, eat breakfast, do your job or jobs, eat supper, watch the news or a movie, go to sleep, rinse and repeat five times. All through my working life I've always found it funny and sad to hear so many of my colleagues say something like: "I'm glad I have a job, I wouldn't know what to do with my time if I didn't." It's funny because those same people complain about the job, management and wages. Those same people count the days until the weekend and on Friday night go to the bar to drink and forget about yet another terrible week on the job. You see, when they say they're glad to have a job, what they're actually saying that they're glad to not depend on some government handout, that they're not counted among society's leeches. They've actually convinced themselves that their monotonous existence, with short breaks in the weekends and the yearly vacation, is what it means to be free and independent.

As someone who's identified as a socialist, Marxist and communist for most of my adult life, I find this attitude hard to understand or accept. Being glad to have a lousy paying job is akin to being grateful to your employer. These colleagues of mine actually see their employer as their benefactor and will usually do anything to not lose that job. They'll suck up to management, work overtime and will gladly accept any extra tasks that were not mentioned in the original job-description. They don't understand that their boss will hold them strictly to the provisions and tasks in the contract they signed when it's time to cut costs and fire some employees, and therefore will not use the same strategy the other way around. They'll do work they never signed up for because they know which way the power relationship goes; you can refuse the extra tasks and even point to the contract signed by both parties, but you know you then run the risk of being the first one to be fired. But still they're grateful to have a job. Still they act as if the boss is their friend. Still they act as if they're free...

The totalitarian corporate state where only a handful of people is truly free and the rest of us are wage slaves is already upon us, but most people don't realize it. Hence the quote at the beginning. Two books about this dystopian state of the human condition have been written in the last century, and they both describe their own version of totalitarianism; George Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four" and Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World". If you haven't read these brilliant novels yet, what are you still doing here? Find them and read them! And after that, watch the two videos I've linked in this post; they describe accurately how these novels approach the future totalitarian societies. I believe, looking at our world today, that Huxley's vision is the one we're approaching right now. He wrote in 1958:

If the first half of the twentieth century was the era of the technical engineers, the second half may well be the era of the social engineers — and the twenty-first century, I suppose, will be the era of World Controllers, the scientific caste system and Brave New World.
_{source: Academy of Ideas}

Still, both novels describe worlds in which regular citizens aren't aware of the totalitarianism or their lack of freedom. They both describe citizens as slaves who believe they're free, or for whom the word "freedom" has no real meaning anymore. Both are brilliant; read them if you have the chance.

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