Nassim Nicholas Taleb on Slavery

Everybody knows that the only thing you need to know about slavery is the Middle Passage and Negro Slavery and plantations and white racism.

I'm sure that's what you were carefully taught, to hate and to fear, in school.

I had my first warning that it ain't necessarily so years ago when I read The Year 1000: What Life Was Like at the Turn of the First Millennium by Robert Lacey and Danny Danziger.

See, back in the feudal era you could ask your feudal lord to make you a slave. Sure, the most notorious source of slaves was war: "conquest slavery." And you could be made a slave for a criminal offence; of course you could, because prisons are expensive. 

But voluntary slavery? Here's how Lacey and Danziger put it.

People surrendered themselves into bondage at times of famine or distress, when they simply could not provide for their families any more... [I]n the year 1000 the starving man had no other resort but to kneel before his lord or lady and place his head in their hands. No legal document was involved, and the new bondsman would be handed a bill-hook or ox-goad in token of his fresh start in servitude. It was a basic transaction -- heads for food.

Of course, this is not particularly scandalous to me, because my reductive Three Peoples theory understands that a lot of people are Subordinates, or people that believe they need a protector. Just like in 1000:

In the year 1000 people could not imagine themselves without a protector. You had a lord in heaven and you needed a lord on earth. 

Nassim Nicholas Taleb expands on the topic in his Skin in the Game. It is covered in Chapter 3: How to Legally Own Another Person.

First, Taleb talks about the roaming monks of early Christianity, that were banned and enslaved into monasteries by the edit of St. Benedict. What was going on? The problem is that the vagrant monks were free, and

Complete freedom is the last thing you want if you have an organized religion to run.

But that is not all. Whatabout the corporation and the company man?

Total freedom for your employees is also a very bad thing if you have a firm to run[.]

Why? Well suppose you have a small airline and the pilots are contracted. Suppose that tomorrow you have a fully booked flight to Munich for the Oktoberfest, and at 5pm your pilot calls you to cancel, because he got a better deal that day from a Saudi sheik. You can see that it would be better to have salaried employees, even if they spend a lot of time sitting around, rather than risk a contract pilot saying, sorry Bob, I got a better offer today. As Taleb says:

People you find in employment love the regularity of the payroll, with that special envelop on their desk at the last day of the month, and without which they would act as a baby deprived of mother's milk.

And so we developed the culture of the "company man" who was guaranteed employment until retirement and then retired with a pension.

The system worked when large corporations survived a long time and were perceived to be longer lasting that nation-states.

But now, Taleb says, in the tech age, the important thing for security is to be "employable," to have skills that employers want.

Here's another curious form of slavery. To employ someone, say in a foreign country, at a salary and benefits way over the market rate back home. "The best slave is someone you overpay and who knows it, terrified of losing his status." 

Or suppose you are a high-ranking civil servant. You are terrified of losing your reputation and your sinecure, and so behave exactly as required -- say by the deep state -- in order to keep your status and your perquisites.

Yes, you say, but these examples are not really slavery. Maybe not, but they do illustrate that the dominant narrative -- that back in the old days people were brutally enslaved, but now, in the glorious light of enlightenment those days are gone forever and everyone is free, except for the remaining "oppressed peoples" that we "allies" are determined to liberate -- is a little too simplistic.

And I say, with my Great Reaction notion, that the left, despite its glorious devotion to ending all oppression and domination, is in fact reintroducing subjection: thus I argue that socialism is a return to slavery and the welfare state is a return to feudalism.

In fact, all social animals are hierarchical, not egalitarian. True equality, true freedom don't exist in the real world. Every living thing lives in a hierarchical world and obtains protection from its subordination to the hierarchy and its place in the power hierarchy.

Some people want a lot of protection: at some point the level of protection and subordination approaches what we like to call slavery. Other people want very little protection; they are what we might call "free spirits" after Nietzsche. It ain't black and white, but all shades of gray.

But, of course, we Hegel scholars have always known that. Because, having taken the short cut and read Alexandre Kojève's Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, we know that the Master and Slave relationship is not as simple as we might like to think. For instance, the Slave knows a lot more about the Master than vice-versa. And knowledge, as they say, is power.

One fine day, I predict, our lefty friends will completely change their minds about slavery. Because their political power will depend upon it. But don't ask me when.

Meanwhile keep your nose in the air, knowing that you know a lot more about slavery than your virtue-signaling Black Lives Matter liberal neighbor.