Free World Theory
Chapter Four
Free World Theory
Chapter Four
by Chas Holloway
4.1
The Lost Tablets
Thousands of years ago in Mesopotamia there was an ancient city-state called Lagash. Like the more famous Ur or Uruk, or the lost city of Akkad, it was one of the early civilizations that arose in the lush green valley between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.
No modern person even knew about Lagash until 1879, when a French archeological team, digging in what is now a barren desert, came upon thousands of cuneiform tablets and realized they were standing on top of a buried city. When they began translating the tablets, they found one that astonished them. It told this story of the long-lost civilization that had been on that spot:
“The inspector of the boatmen seized the boats. The cattle inspector seized the large cattle and the small cattle. The fisheries inspector seized the fisheries. When a citizen of Lagash brought a sheep to the palace, he had to pay 5 shekels if the wool was white. If a man divorced his wife, the King got 5 shekels and the Executive got 1 shekel. If a perfumer made an oil preparation, the King got 5 shekels, the Executive officer got 1 shekel, the palace steward got 1 shekel. When a dead man was brought to the cemetery, palace officials taxed the family in barley, bread and other property. From one end of the city to the other, there were tax collectors.”
This scene, frozen in clay, took place four-and-a-half thousand years ago, in 2,400 B.C.E. Amazingly, this long dead and forgotten city state of Lagash had the same problems we have today in our so-called “modern” world: centralized control, crippling taxes, corrupt leaders, and the people hated it — all except for the government bureaucrats, who probably thought the system had its problems but it was necessary — just like civil servants today.
There’s more. The tablets went on to say:
“Then a new king came to power named Urakagina. He removed the taxes and restored freedom to the people.”
Interesting note: This was the first recorded use of the word freedom in history. The first time the word freedom was ever written down, it greeted the world in the context of individual liberty versus central control. Exactly like today. Which means, that in 4,500 years of human history, this question…
“How much government control is good and how much is bad?”
…has never been answered.
4.2
The World’s Most Elusive Question
How much government control is good and how much is bad? No one has ever been able to answer this question. Generation after generation, it haunts civilization like a ghost. It is at the root of every political issue. It is in in every political question we ask.
How do we stop terrorism? Do we build a wall on the border? Should we break up Big Tech? How do we constrain AI? Should we regulate the news? How do we control the cost of health care? Has surveillance gone too far? How can we stop the growth of civilization from consuming all our resources? These are some of the big questions of our age. But they all come down to one issue: How much government control is good and how much is bad?
You cannot answer this by looking at the past. All you’ll find there is the ruins of civilizations that couldn’t find the answer either. But if you want progress — if you’re a politician who wants to get the nation back on track, if you’re an entrepreneur who wants to build DAOs and achieve a decentralized world, you have to answer it. Having the non-ambiguous answer is the only way you can build a set of rules that create freedom and not tyranny.
Maybe the answer is difficult because it changes all the time. Maybe sometimes we need government control, sometimes we don’t. Maybe the answer changes with the current needs of the nation. All anyone seems to know is that the answer is always out of our reach.
But now, things have changed.
Because of the rise of the Information Age and advances in science over the last 75+ years, there is finally a way to answer this question, once and for all. In fact, it turns out there is an easy answer. How is this possible? It’s because there is another question that is even more general, even more fundamental, and if you can answer it, the question, “How much government control is good, or bad?” is answered as a by-product.
What is this more general question?
To explain, we need to look somewhere you would never expect. We must look at the history of science.
4.3
Science Vs. Politics
Have you ever noticed that science is successful but politics is not? Science builds everything: the electric age. The age of flight. The computer revolution. It built the tablet on which you may be reading this book. Politics, on the other hand, always seems to fail. Every political plan, sooner or later, falls apart. Politicians never make fundamental progress. They just move from one bad plan to another and pretend they are doing good work.
There is a reason for this. It is because science and politics are exact opposites. Unlike politics, the process of science has five steps:
You observe nature.
You build an intellectual model that represents how you think nature acts.
You test your intellectual model (called an “hypothesis”) using the scientific method.
You throw out the models that don’t work.
You use only your successful models to build technology to accomplish goals.
This process was discovered and developed during the late Renaissance and it led to an explosion of progress. People realized they could use it to understand all sorts of things about the natural world: the rhythm of the tides, the orbits of the planets, how motion works, how to build efficient steam engines, understand chemistry, and more. This led to a philosophical movement called The Enlightenment which was all about individualism. People came to believe that with science, they could understand all there is to know about nature, by themselves. Many turned away from organized religion, and believed they no longer needed a priest, or a Cardinal, or a Pope — or even the Bible — to explain the world to them. Religion became an inspirational factor in people’s lives, but to build things, all anyone needed was science. This new philosophy led to the Industrial Revolution and to the technological world in which we live today.
Politics, on the other hand, is the exact opposite of science. It is a simplistic two-step process. It works like this:
A person (or small group of people) imagines a model of how he would like the world to be.
He forces people into his plan at gunpoint, and tries to make the real world into the world he envisioned.
In politics, leaders simply imagine how they want societies to run. A politician might imagine the world would be better if people were not greedy. Or if everyone would buy only American products. Or if there was no such thing as property, and so forth. Then, he uses guns, laws, police, armies, and even executions, if necessary, to force everyone to obey his arbitrary idea.
That’s what Lenin did, in Russia. That’s what Stalin did, after him. That’s what Mao did, in China. They all imagined some idealized scheme then used guns, starvation and prison camps to force the population into their plans.
This is why politicians have made no progress. For them, it is not about understanding social phenomena. It is about gaining political power, and forcing everyone else into their wished -for system. Unlike science, politics is detached from reality.
This brings us back to what, in the last section, I called, “The World’s Most Elusive Question.” I said, there is a more fundamental issue, and if could we solve it, then the question, “How much government control is goor, or bad?” would be answered as a by-product.
That more fundamental issue is this:
“Why are we unable to understand society in a scientific way?”
Our original question, “How much government control is good, or bad?” is a political one. “Why are we unable to scientifically understand society?” is scientific. The former implies that you want to adjust the nature of society by changing some set of imposed political laws. The latter implies you want understand the natural laws that cause social phenomena.
This is the key to understanding why, in 4,500 years of history, we have made zero progress in how we manage society. We haven’t been using the scientific process that made us so successful in physics. Instead, we have only been using political machinations.
Science is how we make progress. Politics, which is the opposite of science, is how we make chaos.
4.4
The Forgotten Science
In Europe, a few hundred years ago, people thought village women could make rain by dressing in leaves and singing to the Sky Gods. They believed setting certain plants on fire or sprinkling water on stones or stirring ponds with a hazel-rods could bring rain. The Hopi Indians acted out rain dances with antelopes and snakes.
That is how life was five centuries ago. People walked the earth in a fog of superstitions. Astrology and numerology, dream interpreters and palm readers, witches and ghosts. In 1597, King James VI of Scotland (who also became James I of England) published a book called Demonologie, that explained how to hunt for witches, and in 1604 he passed the Witchcraft Act which institutionalized burning them at the stake. Belief in witchcraft and magicians, omens and oracles, was almost universal. “To the poor in body and mind, superstition is a treasured element in the poetry of life, gilding dull days with exciting marvels, and redeeming misery with magic powers and mystic hopes,” explains historian, Will Durant.
Against this mystical background, science began. It started as a cult, and grew, and it changed the world more profoundly than anything that had ever come before. Our knowledge of the physical world developed first — but it wasn’t without a fight.
The clashes began when Nicolas Copernicus published his book, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, in 1542. It disagreed with the bible, which said the earth could not move through space, that the earth was “fixed” in in the heavens. Copernicus argued the sun was the center of our solar system and it was the earth that moved around it. The Roman Catholic Church would have punished this heresy but Copernicus died before they could get to him. In fact, he was only shown the first copy of his controversial book on the very day he died.
Church officials were horrified by how Copernicus’ book spread and how influential it became. They would not make the same mistake again. That’s why, when Giordano Bruno publicly said he believed in the Copernican system and even claimed the thousands of stars in the night sky were other suns just like our own, he was dealt with harshly. In 1600, they burned him alive at the stake for the outrage.
Church bureaucrats missed the significance of Francis Bacon’s book The New Organum, published in 1620, which was the first book to ever describe the scientific method, as well as Johannes Kepler’s Laws of Planetary Motion, published in 1609, which contained the first scientific laws in history. But when they learned that Galileo was doing experiments that added to the stature of the Copernican hypothesis, he was convicted of heresy and forced to recant, and in 1633 was sentenced to prison for the rest of his life.
Ultimately, the church was unable to stop the spread of knowledge, and the scientific revolution culminated in Isaac Newton’s Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, published in 1687. To this day, it is the single most important book on science ever published. It founded the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution and paved the way to our modern digital age.
In biology, progress happened at a slower pace. At first, it developed only because of prior progress in physics. For example, advances in optics gave Robert Hooke the means in 1665 to peer through a microscope, and publish Micrographia, the first book to contain illustrations of the microcosm. His drawings so captivated people it became the first scientific best-seller in history. Its readers saw the construction of insects’ legs and leaves, and to describe the tiny plant structures, Hooke coined the biological term “cell,” which reminded him of the little cells in which monks lived.
Biology developed like this in the wake of physics. It was not until Louis Pasteur’s “germ theory of disease” (which Isaac Asimov calls “probably the greatest single medical discovery of all time”) and Darwin’s book, The Origin of Species, and Watson and Crick’s discovery of the DNA molecule, that biology broke free and took full flight.
Today, 350 years into this revolution of knowledge, all the science we have can be divided into three general categories. 1) physics, which is the science of matter and energy, 2) biology, which is the study of life within the physical universe, and 3) social science, which is the study of how to coordinate human action within societies.
Let’s compare these three branches of science on a graph.
The tallest bar shows our progress in physics. We have made more progress there than in the other sciences. The second tallest bar shows our progress in biology. It is growing rapidly, but we have not yet made as much progress there as in physics. The shortest bar — which barely registers on this graph — shows our progress in social science. We have made near zero progress in what is called “political science” or “sociology.”
How can I claim we have made near-zero progress in social science? Just look at the results. In physics, we can solve problems and achieve goals. We can put people on the moon, build self-driving cars, we all carry smart phones. In biology, we can do organ transplants, cure disease, do DNA profiling. But in so-called “social science” we can’t solve even the simplest problem. For example:
• How do you end poverty?
• How do you end war?
• How do you stop crime?
Nobody knows.
Our ability to solve problems in physics and biology is impressive. But when it comes to our ability to solve social problems, not so much. Today, this dangerous imbalance is humanity’s Number One Most Fundamental Problem.
Look around, and you see symptoms of this imbalance menacing us everywhere. Chemical weapons. The hydrogen bomb. NSA surveillance. Engineered viruses. Control of the media. The rise of police states. Weapons in space, and the list goes on. Rather than ask, what technologies are being misused by politicians, a better question is, “What technologies are not?”
How is it that we know so much in physics and biology but we do not seem to know anything about rationally managing society? There is a simple answer: There never was a scientific revolution in the so-called “social sciences.”
Over decades, academics have put a lot of effort into making “sociology” appear to be scientific. But there’s a big difference between appearance and reality. Using a sophisticated-sounding language, stuffed with terms like “structuralist movement” and “intersubjectivity paradigm” and “computational sociology,” and so on, is not science. It is just a collection of academic buzzwords. Calling this or that flaky idea a “theory” does not make it one. Neither does statistical sampling of arbitrary data make a science. The truth is, there is nothing scientific about what is called “sociology” or “political science” or “social science,” at all. Ask any competent physicist.
Many people believe politics is underpinned with some sort of rationality, but it is not. Yes, our world is has air conditioning and smart phones and flat screen TVs and antibiotics, but those are products of physics and biology. Just because you have an electric razor and can stream Netflix, it does not mean you live in a socially advanced world. You don’t. The management of society today is every bit as primitive as it was in Lagash in 2,400 BCE.
Try this thought experiment: Imagine you live in New York or Los Angeles. You wake up one morning to discover all modern technology is gone. No electricity, no cars or trucks, no modern factories, no internet, no phones, no modern hospitals, no modern pharmaceuticals. Now remove all the scientists and doctors and biologists who could recreate those things. How long before people band together into viscous tribes? How long before witch burnings come back?
4.5
The Solution
The death rate from 1800 to 1970 due to political machinations resembles an exponential curve. 3.5 million people were killed in Europe and Russia during the Napoleonic wars (1803 to 1815). A hundred years later, 15 million were killed in World War One (about 9 million troops; about 6 million civilians). Twenty years after that, World War Two killed an estimated 60 million (20 million soldiers; 30 to 40 million civilians).
According to the book Death By Government by R. J. Rommel, since 1946, 35.2 million were murdered by the Chinese state, and 61.2 million were murdered by the Soviet State. He calls murder on this scale “democide,” and defines the term as: “The murder of any person or people by a government, including genocide, politicide, and mass murder.” He says democide is “the evil of our time that all good people must work to eradicate.”
There is an obvious correlation between the rise of technology and the destruction that political states can inflict upon one another. If World War Three broke out tomorrow, hundreds of millions, maybe billions of people would be killed in a matter of hours.
Because the destructive misuse of physics (and biology) is roughly exponential, we have now reached the point where our inability to understand and rationally manage society could wipe out the entire human species — meaning the single most fundamental problem of civilization is the imbalance between the three sciences.
Ironically, we all feel secure in our technological world like we’re “too big to fail.” But the truth is, the more technology we develop in physics and biology, without developing any in social science, the worse this imbalance gets, the worse the problem gets, and the more danger we are in.
Since we can’t stop progress in physics and biology, or get rid of those sciences, there’s only one possible solution for our predicament. We have to develop enough scientific knowledge in the social domain so we know how to manage society before we destroy ourselves. This is what the solution looks like:
To accomplish this we need scientific knowledge, not more political ideas. We don’t need to fine-tune our election systems, or adopt European models of governance, or form political action committees. We need to develop a genuine science about the nature of social phenomena.
If we zoom out for an overview of life on earth, in general, we’re hit with a vulgar fact: more than 99 percent of all species that ever lived on earth — about 5 billion of them — are now extinct. Trilobites lived for 270 million years. Dinosaurs reigned for 135 million. Now, they’re gone, and nature has no sympathy. Humans have been here for about 150 thousand years. That’s so short a time that according to Carl Sagan’s famous Cosmic Calendar, which illustrates the chronology of the universe as one calendar year, we have existed for only the last few seconds on the last day of the year.
What does this mean? It means, nature doesn’t care if we survive as a species, or not.
Humans have a history of assuming we are the center of the universe. That our Creator is going to save us because we are His Chosen Ones. But like the old geocentric view of the universe, it is simply not true. If we, H. sapiens sapiens, is going to survive, we have to take responsibility and figure out how to make that happen ourselves.
And we are running out of time to do so.
4.6
Monks On Hoverboards
Imagine an abbey in the year 1,400 C.E., home to a hundred Franciscan monks. They spend their time copying ancient Greek manuscripts. These monks have all studied Aristotle, Plato, Herodotus, and more. For their time, they are highly educated people. But this is before Galileo. The high Renaissance is still two-and-a-half centuries away. These monks may be intelligent but they know nothing about classical physics, which hasn’t been discovered yet.
Now, put these monks in a time machine, transport them to present day, and give them the job of running NASA. Tell them to get the new Artemis rocket and some astronauts and their dune buggies to the moon.
Equipped only with the knowledge of Aristotle and Plato and the other Greeks, could they do it? Of course, not. Even if you gave them all the necessary equipment, they wouldn’t understand the physics and they wouldn’t even know how to turn the systems on. It doesn’t matter how smart or well-intentioned the monks are, they simply lack the ideas to succeed. They don’t have the necessary concepts in their 700-year-old language.
This is exactly the situation we have in Washington D.C. and in other political centers today. The top levels of government are populated by hundreds of intelligent people, trying to run their information-age nation states using centuries-old ideas. They may have good intentions but they are worse than ineffective – they’re dangerous. Like the ancient monks at NASA, if they try out a plan, they’re most likely to blow something up.
Comprehension starts with precise language. Words stand for concepts. You need clear, logical definitions to understand a subject. To grasp a branch of knowledge well enough to take effective action and build stable systems, the words and the concepts in your head have to explain the subject and be clear and non-ambiguous. But this is completely missing in our understanding of society.
For example, take the word “freedom.” It is in everyone’s vocabulary. But if I asked everyone reading this book to define it, there would be little agreement. All of the people reading this book want freedom. Everybody wants freedom. All over the world people protest for freedom, strike for freedom, riot for freedom, they put on black masks and firebomb department stores and blow up discos for freedom. Stop a protester in the street with a Molotov cocktail flaming in his hand, and ask, “Are you for slavery or freedom?” He would say, he’s for freedom. Then ask him, “Well, sir, before you heave that firebomb through the store window in the name of freedom, just how do you define the word?”
Would he be able to tell you?
No.
And if he can’t define freedom, does he really know what he is doing? The obvious answer is, again, no. And if his concept of freedom is vague, it then follows that his means to get there are equally vague.
Assume, instead, that this protester’s goal is to go to Hawaii. If he is ignorant of geography, if he doesn’t know that Hawaii is an island, and that an island is a land mass surrounded by water, if he has not heard of navigation, would he ever be able to find his way there?
Obviously, not.
It’s just as irrational to assume that the President of the United States or the Congress or the Supreme Court can take the country to freedom if they don’t know what freedom is, either. The situation is identical.
You cannot get to freedom if you don’t know what it is.
4.7
Semantic Precision
When building science, you start with semantic precision. “Semantics” is the study of words (or language symbols) and their meanings. “Semantic precision” refers to using words that have specific and scientifically detectable meanings. In science, only precise and consistent definitions are useful — they have to be exact, accurate, measurable and detailed.
For example, take the word:
Acceleration
When a physicist uses this term, he means, “the rate of change of the velocity of a mass per unit of time.” He has to use precise language. It is the only way he can clarify his own thinking and communicate clearly with other scientists. However, when it comes to describing things in society, politicians and social pundits have completely failed to do this.
For example, consider this important term:
Freedom
What is freedom? Does it mean no government intrusion in your life? Does it mean you live in security? Does it mean you can do anything you want without consequences? Does it mean that your basic needs are met with a minimum basic income? Does it mean you can vote for your leaders?
Nobody knows. These questions are all unanswerable. All we can do is go around and around in a circle of reasoning, discussing pros and cons of each idea, endlessly. This is because the word “freedom” has never been scientifically defined.
Or, consider this term:
Crime
What is a crime? Is it a crime to take someone’s money without their permission? What if money is seized from your bank account by the IRS — is that a crime? Is it a crime to earn money? What if you earn as much money as Exxon-Mobile or Google or Apple? Is that a crime?
Is it a crime to wander into a bar and have a beer? What if you are in America during the prohibition years of the 1920s, would it be a crime then? Is a crime anything the current government says it is? What if the government says drinking alcohol is wrong, puts you in jail for it, then decides it’s alright, after all? Was the government then committing a crime? Or was it just an honest mistake?
Once again, nobody knows. If you asked a dozen people what the words “freedom” and “crime” mean, you would get a dozen different answers. There would be no agreement. Nevertheless, people universally would claim to be for freedom and against crime. Even politicians, who are supposed to be the experts, don’t know what these words mean.
When you think about it, it’s an amazing fact: Politicians run entire nations in total ignorance of what the words “freedom” and “crime” mean.
What if there was no agreement in physics among leading scientists on the precise meaning of fundamental terms like “mass” or “force” or “acceleration?” What if top scientists spent all day long arguing:
Scientist 1: “Acceleration means how fast something is moving.”
Scientist 2: “No, no, acceleration is when an object changes direction.”
Scientist 3: “You’re both mistaken, gentlemen, acceleration is when something spins.”
Etc.
If there was this much disagreement in physics over such a fundamental term, there would be no physics.
The beginning of any science is semantic precision.
4.8
Slavery 101
Precise language and precise thinking are critical in science. So, we are going to use some semantic precision now to investigate some of the fundamental terms of society. Let’s start with a commonplace one, the word slavery.
We have all been told a slave is someone who has lost his or her freedom. But what exactly does that mean? Let’s make a list of the kinds of things a person can have and then lose. Here are the four kinds of property it is possible to own:
1) Your Life. You own you. You are not a mechanical cell in a hive. You are an individual. Your biological life and your physiological processes are your most fundamental kind of property.
2) Your Mind. This means your thoughts, your emotions, your goals, your desires and ideas, your opinions and values. All the cognitive processes going on in your brain are your most important kind of property.
3) Your Actions. These are your purposeful physical movements. For example, you decide to watch a movie or to run a marathon. You buy a book and read it. You compose a song. You rob a gas station. The English philosopher, John Locke, called this a person’s labor.
4) The Tangible Products of Your Actions. These are the physical things you own: tables and chairs, cars and money, and so on. These are different from the first three kinds of property because tangible products of your actions exist separately from your biological self.
These are the four kinds of things it is conceivable to own. There are no other possibilities. So, now that we have described precisely what sorts of things a person can have and then lose, let’s turn back to our discussion of slavery.
[INSERT ILLUSTRATION]
Visualize a slave of four thousand years ago. He is building a ceremonial tomb for the King. This ancient Sumerian or Egyptian is not working voluntarily. He is in forced labor. If he gets lazy, the King (or Pharaoh) has a slave master standing nearby with a whip, and dragging heavy stone blocks to the top of the pyramid is preferable to the whip.
This kind of slave has lost control of two classes of things. First, he has lost control of his actions — his labor is controlled the slave master. Second, he has no ownership in the tomb that he’s building — the tangible results of his labor are controlled by the King.
Now, let’s examine another famous kind of slave – the African slave in America some two hundred years ago. This unhappy individual was kidnapped in Africa, put on a boat in chains and shipped to America where he was sold at auction to a plantation owner.
[INSERT ILLUSTARTION]
On the plantation, he works in the fields all day. At night, he sleeps in the corner of a shack. He is in the same position as the ancient slave — his actions are controlled by the plantation boss, and so are all of the tangible products of his actions (the crops). He is unable to quit. He can’t say to the master, “Sorry, boss, but this isn’t working out for me,” and leave. But this brings us to an important question about this slave.
Does he even want to leave?
Read this excerpt from a speech given by Malcolm X in 1963:
“…You have to understand the history of slavery. There were two kinds of negro. There was that old house negro and there was the field negro. And the house negro always looked out for his master. When the field negroes got too much out of line, he held them in check. He put them back on the plantation.
“The house negro could afford to do that because he lived better than the field negro. He ate better, he dressed better, and he lived in a better house. He lived right up next to his master in the attic or the basement. He ate the same food as the master ate and wore his same clothes. And he could talk just like his master. Good diction. And he loved his master more than the master loved himself. That’s why he didn’t want his master hurt. If his master got sick, he’d say, ‘Whassa matter, boss, we sick?’
“When the master’s house caught fire, he’d try and put the fire out. He didn’t want his master’s house burned. He never wanted his master’s property threatened. And he was more defensive of it than the Master was. That was the house negro.
“But then you had the field negro, who lived in a hut. Had nothing to lose. Had the worst kind of clothes. They ate the worst food and they caught hell. They felt the sting of the lash. They hated their master. Oh yes, they did. If the master got sick, they’d pray that the master died. If the master’s house caught fire, they’d pray for a strong wind to come along. This was the difference between the two. And today you still have house negroes and field negroes.”
The point that Malcolm X was making in 1963, was that the black man should not be involved in the white man’s world. He believed black people should create their own businesses, their own communities, and ultimately their own nation. He called his program “Black Nationalism.” But that isn’t why I brought this quote up.
His speech raises another critical point.
He was also saying that even though the black man in the Master’s house was a slave, he either didn’t know it, or he didn’t mind it. He might have even thought that the whole institution of slavery was normal and proper. He accepted slavery. This illustrates how a person can not only be physically enslaved, but his mind can be enslaved, as well:
When you think slavery is good, when you accept it as a respectable institution, it means your thoughts, your ideas, your beliefs and opinions, your values and emotions are enslaved as well. Not with a whip, but through persuasion.
It means the Master is doing your thinking for you.
4.9
How to Be a Slave Owner
Let’s shift point of view. Forget the plight of the slave for a moment, and let’s pretend you and I are southern plantation owners. Our goal is to enslave and control as many people as possible. Hundreds, even thousands, if we can.
First, populating our plantation isn’t too difficult if we’re big landowners and have superior weapons. We simply buy helpless people off the auction block who have been kidnapped from their homelands. These people are easy to control. They’re in chains, disoriented, and are strangers in a strange land.
Next, we put them to work on our plantation, plowing, planting, and so on, every day from dawn till dusk. We control their entire world, so we can make sure they comply. If necessary, we can withhold water or food. We can whip or brand them. We can make one or two an example of what happens when they try to fight the establishment. Their job is to shut up and do what they’re told.
Now, the slaves are not going to like this arrangement. Once oriented to their new surroundings, they will run away if they can. Since you and I don’t have time to guard them twenty-four hours a day, we will have to hire slave watchers who can. People who like brandishing sadistic power, whom we pay to be on our side and to make sure they stay docile and stick to their work. Prison guards.
But as we acquire more slaves and guards as we scale our plantation up, we run into a problem. The slaves are devious. They are always pretending to be sick to get out of work, they hoard food, they think up cunning plans to escape. And they are hard to control through brute force alone. We could build sentry towers, build a wall around our plantation, hire dozens of bounty hunters to find and capture escaped slaves, but you and I are forced to realize that our slave economy doesn’t really mean free labor or even cheap labor. There are significant costs.
Fortunately, there is a way to lower the cost. You see, it’s much more efficient to control our slaves with ideas. All we have to do is convince them (as well as the free people who dislike the idea of slavery) that the laws of the plantation are a necessary institution. That slaves, the poor unfortunates, are inferior people who need our care.
We could teach the slaves our way of life, including our religion, and cherry pick passages the Old Testament that say slavery is good and is approved by God, and it’s the natural way of things. Imagine if we could get our prisoners to believe that they’re lucky to be our slaves. That we plantation owners are taking care of them out of the goodness of our hearts because they can’t take care of themselves. Imagine if they believed we are actually their benefactors. Imagine if that belief system became so ingrained that it becomes so-called, “common knowledge.”
If we could do all that, it could lock in the power of We the Plantation Owners for all time.
Now, let’s shift the setting of our story away from a southern plantation to somewhere else.
Let’s say we’re operating the Roman Catholic Church in 15th century Europe. If we could get the people to believe, “The Church has to be in political control of society so that the people follow God’s plan,” and if we could develop a bureaucracy to spread that belief, we could lock the Church’s power in for good.
Or, let’s say we’re in NAZI Germany, in 1933. If we could get people to believe the nation is in danger, and that “Everyone has to give their individual will to the State because that’s what makes the nation strong,” and if we could erect departments and bureaus to spread that belief, complete with stylish uniforms and insignias distributed everywhere, our “citizens” could become so arrogant, they’ll even take over for us some neighboring countries.
Or, let’s say we’re ISIS leaders in the Middle East today. We could get the people to accept that, “We have to kill the infidel and force everyone to believe Allah is the One True God because that’s how we protect Allah.”
That’s how you enslave thousands. Or even millions. You base your slavery on a philosophy. You create an entire intellectual system of slavery. Because when you can enslave people’s minds, you don’t have to worry about them arguing with you, or escaping. And the prison wall becomes an intellectual wall. And it doesn’t you cost a thing.
Historian, Will Durant, said, “The official state mythology saves a thousand police.”
END OF CHAPTER 4