Excellent Servitude

The perfect slave is the slave who believes himself to be free. The one who revels in his servitude is unaware of the strings that guide his every motion, and is oblivious to the subconscious whisper that births his every thought. In an interview from 1962 Aldous Huxley, the author of "Brave New World", warned us about the advent of the age of exactly this kind of slavery.

American abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass worded this sentiment even better, as he spoke from personal experience:

“I have observed this in my experience of slavery,—that whenever my condition was improved, instead of its increasing my contentment, it only increased my desire to be free, and set me to thinking of plans to gain my freedom. I have found that, to make a contented slave, it is necessary to make a thoughtless one. It is necessary to darken his moral and mental vision, and, as far as possible, to annihilate the power of reason. He must be able to detect no inconsistencies in slavery; he must be made to feel that slavery is right; and he can be brought to that only when he ceased to be a man.”
_{source: BookRiot}

In Frederick Douglass' time he spoke of slaves that must be made to feel that slavery is right, but the masters that rule not just the African Americans but us all, have progressed quite a bit, as I now find myself surrounded by people who actually seem to love their perpetual servitude. Some of them claim to have found the key to their own personal freedom; they see through the facade of the mainstream and urge others to "please do your own research" and "think for yourself man!" I can not repress an ironic chuckle when those same people then go on about how we really live on a flat Earth, or that the world is being governed by the ancient blood-lines that make up "The Illuminati". And don't even get me started on the QAnonsensical crowd...

And hey, maybe I'm one of them as well. Maybe my extreme leftist world-view is part of the massive-scale mind-game that's obviously being played with and on us. Maybe I'm victim of "manufactured resistance" as part of the overall "manufactured consent"; true, hidden rulers control both sides of the conflict, don't they? If there's one thing that more than a half century of living experience has thought me, it's that life is full of surprises and that we surprise ourselves when a new piece of information reaches us that forces us to re-think previously held convictions. I've defended and promoted social democracy, that is capitalism and free markets, but with a sturdy social safety net, up to my 20s and 30s; only later in life did I realize that social democracy is nothing more than capitalism's own safety net. FDR saved capitalism for America, and here in Europe we've got that down to everyday practice. Social democracy has allowed a fundamentally destructive and unjust system to survive for far too long, and now our children and grandchildren will have to clean up our mess. Still, no one sees the whole picture, and that includes me, so maybe I'll be proven wrong...

Still, I want to share with you a video I found today with some of that 1962 Aldous Huxley interview. He and George Orwell are seen as modern prophets, as Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-Four" and Huxley's "Brave New World", each in their own way, predicted the total surveillance state and mental servitude that I observe in followers of Trump, QAnon, Hitler and other "truthsayers" and demagogues. Watch the video, do your own research, make up your own mind... ;-)

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