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Seaton asked:

"They" had slavery around here once, and they liked it.

Whilst working at my job as a firefighter, many years ago, I coined this phrase. I spoke it in a
response to my fellow crewmembers about the poor managers we had to cope with, as opposed to
being supported and aided in my efforts on a day-to-day basis fighting fires, responding to first-aid
calls, administrative and tedious tasks, etc. etc. It 'caught-on' by many, and discussions eventually
evolved into the need to re-activate the long-gone Union, the International Association of Firefighters,
Local 526.

Here's another example of what I mean:

Yesterday, my daughter returned home from her summer job at a local fast-food restaurant. In a fit of
rage, she informed me that the manager (one of several supervisors, actually) told her coworker and
herself that "I just wanted to see if you could do it."

"It," what the supervisor was referring was to the fact that instead of 3 persons being scheduled to
work for the initial 4 hours of operations, 2 were scheduled. Yes, most of their tasks were done---but
not without some extraordinary-efforts "demanded" from the employees. Energy expended by the
employees was more than commonly given. Instead of comfortably accomplishing all the tasks with 3
persons within the time limits, 2 were worked overly-hard and nearly all tasks were accomplished and
nearly all were satisfactorily done. Results? Both employees ready to quit.

Why only 2 employees instead of 3? Because of the capriciousness of the Supervisor? Or...."They
had slavery around here once, and they liked it"?

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This question intrigues me, but I don't really know what kind of answer you're looking for. Philosophy
gives very general answers to abstract questions. Here's one of those: slavery is a very good
economic system, for the slave owners. Think about it: what do you pay a slave? What kind of
housing, food, etc.? Slavery is cheap. As long as you can keep revolts down, and you don't care
about slaves as human beings, you're doing fine. How to keep revolts down? Well, why not educate a
class of people to believe that suffering is good; that if you suffer in "this life" you will be rewarded in
the "next"? A great philosophy for slaves, right?

Here's another answer: the supervisor was a sadist and enjoyed making people suffer.

Here's another answer: the supervisor was under extreme pressure from hisboss to make the
restaurant profitable, and was trying to cut costs, at the price of suffering. Was it worth it? Well, would
there be more suffering if the restaurant went out of business, and the two remaining employees, and
the supervisor, were out of jobs?

Here's another answer: when people do work which requires little skill, they are replaceable, since
anyone can do the work. So unskilled labor, or labor requiring just a little education, has long lines of
people just waiting to fill a few jobs, and employers can do just about what they want. If the workers
don't like it, they'll find ones who will from a large pool of unskilled people. The answer? Educate
yourself in some skill, preferably one you enjoy, and use that to earn a living. You will not be
replaceable (or as replaceable) and so you'll be able to dictate your own work situation to a much
greater extent. You have done that, as a firefighter. In the meantime, while you're educating yourself,
you have no choice but to join the pool of unskilled labor (but that's not all or nothing; you can get
better jobs as your education or skills increase).

I can tell you, from experience, that the latter works; I learned computer programming while working
as a word processor, and the jump in status and pay was huge.

Steven Ravett Brown

It took me a while to cotton on to what you are saying here. There seems to be a direct analogy with
something that is sometimes remarked about war.We all deplore the fact that wars take place. We
investigate the economic, political or religious causes of war, and how these conditions might be
changed. We look forward to a utopian time when there will be no more wars. Yet there is a major
flaw, it is said, in this approach. It ignores the simple, brutal fact that men love war.Many of those
who go out to war discover, sometimes to their horror, that they enjoy fighting and killing. Seasoned
soldiers interviewed about their experiences in battle have described how they get a sexual high. My
impression from what I have read is that this is common knowledge within the armed forces, however
shocking it may seem to civilians who have fortunately never had to pick up a gun.

The claim made is that this is an unalterable fact about human nature. I am not going to dispute that
claim here. If the claim were true, then one plausible explanation might be that it is part of our
evolutionary inheritance. A capacity for aggression, in certain species, is necessary for survival. It
follows that a race of intelligent beings who did not share our evolutionary inheritance — Martians,
say — might never experience the pleasure human beings experience from mortal conflict.

I am not totally convinced by this, mainly because it leaves out the crucial issue of the thrill of killing.
Natural aggression might lead us to fight, but must that fight be to the death? At any rate, the claim
seems less plausible when transposed to the issue of slavery. Animals fight and kill, they wage 'war'.
But to make a slaveof another individual, as opposed to merely exerting one's force to bring about
changes in their behaviour, requires a development of self-consciousness that only exists in the
human world. The impulse to make slaves cannot, therefore, be part of our evolutionary inheritance.

The classic analysis of our love of slavery is in Hegel's famous section 'Lordship and Bondage' in his
book The Phenomenology of Mind(1807). The section is difficult and obscure, but given your interest
I would say that it is something you must read. Hegel argued that the dialectic of the relation between
self and other plays a pivotal role in the development of our sense of self, and that the impulse to
seek to make a slave of the other, is not contingent but universal. (In our terms, Martians would
naturally succumb to the impulse just as we do.) Slavery is a solution to the problem of how to reckon
with the existence of the other, but a failedsolution, one that, as Hegel demonstrates, is necessarily
self-frustrating.

Though you give examples from the world of work, our most immediate experience of this impulse is
in personal relationships. It isuniversal. It is not an unfortunate 'deviation' that some persons suffer
from while others remain immune. Those who would emphatically deny this, have merely failed to
recognize the impulse for what it is.

Geoffrey Klempner