Healing Trauma: Perspectives And Attitudes, 42

I would like to continue exploring this idea of property, Gentle Reader, but take it in a decidedly different direction. I am thinking of our tendency of treating other humans as property. That's right, I am going to write about slavery. Not just the Ol' Man River style of slavery along the Mississippi in the US Deep South before Lincoln freed the African slaves, and not the kinds of people who were pressganged to build great ancient monuments and no household was considered complete in Ancient Greece, Egypt or Rome or, pick one, without at least a few slaves to do all the hard work. Slavery has been with us since the Neolithic, when agriculture was invented. Human settlements became stratified societies with accumulations of wealth and so slaves were obtained, often through warfare, to provide free human labour. Slavery has been with us much longer than it has not been with us. By the early nineteenth century, it is estimated that three quarters of the world's inhabitants were slaves or serfs. For less than the last two hundred years of our history of civilization and agriculture that goes back some twelve thousand years, has slavery been abolished. But our way of thinking still hasn't caught up. Most of us still are not free. We are still slaves to our occupations, our families, our social networks, our nations. We are not free. I think there are twin impulses in our deepest human psyche and they are equally strong: the desire for freedom and the desire to serve. We can only survive and cope for so long alone and without human infrastructure, then we perish. We can only survive and cope for so long among others and as part of the human infrastructure, and then we perish. Human survival has always been predicated upon our interdependence, otherwise we simply would not have survived long enough to keep passing on our genes. Each one of us still also has that primal urge to freedom, to individuation, to complete personal autonomy. Slavery is probably the most damaging institution that was ever invented in our human history, but it is also very old, with roots every bit as long as the Oldest Profession. When it was simple ownership of humans, slavery was of course out in the open. No one seemed to care much about the damage and human trauma that it caused, and why would they care, since these people were slaves, considered less than human, valuable only for their utility. Even in our enlightened twenty-first century, we still have the thinking of slaves. A lot of this is invested in our occupations. We almost all need to work in order to survive. True, our employers don't own us body and soul, but while we are at the job, we are theirs, so it's a kind of part time, temporary slavery. We all hate the Man. Even in professions and occupations that are meaningful and gratifying as what I do as a peer support worker, the experience is often tainted and warped by the experience of servitude. This understanding, however subliminal, that we must take care to not offend those who have the power to harm us, because then we could lose our employment, our income, and possibly our ability to feed and house ourselves and our loved ones. This experience of occupational servitude, of course, is universal, and it cannot be reasonably compared to the dehumanized misery of slavery. But it still feeds from those archetypes. We are not yet truly free, and as much as we long for complete freedom, it could also become our death sentence.