How to Make Slavery work for YOU!
Don't believe the lies - slavery is easier and more profitable than ever.
Many Persons of Quality will tell you that slavery is now obsolete as a business model. The optics are not great they say, and the necessary maintenance leads to distasteful side effects. All the noise of a corrective thrashing will ruin your niece’s harpsichord performance, leaving a vulgar impression on gentleman callers.
But you don't have to listen to those naysayers. I say, the optimist always wins! Here's how YOU TOO can have a bunch of slaves working for you, without all the mess and hassle of guard dogs and whips and overseers. The naysayers are right, those things are indeed obsolete.
But the good news is, technology has made slavery easier than ever!
All you need is control over an algorithmic media feed. If you have to, maybe borrow your uncle's for a weekend to see how this works. Once you understand the game, you too can participate in the Global Slavery Cooperative, a mechanism whereby enterprising Men of Quality profit from the misery of a large body of slaves.
The great thing about all of this is, the slaves do the work of keeping each other enslaved. Any system has a maintenance cost. The genius of the modern system of slavery is that now the slaves themselves pay the maintenance cost. The system basically runs itself, freeing us to do more important things such as steering the course of the future, for the betterment of everyone ;-)
The trick is to show people two kinds of media:
- those which produce smugness
- those which produce rage
The 'smugness' component will keep them coming back. Everyone loves a good hit, and the comedown is barely noticeable. Much more subtle than a joint or a beer. You can barely smell it! It doesn’t feel like a drug, since the ingestion mechanism isn’t a pill or something you breathe in. Smugness can be delivered through virtually any medium, at practically zero marginal cost, and - unlike drug use - your users feel better about themselves the more they use. Almost anyone addicted to most drugs will realize this and try to quit occasionally. The great thing about smug addition is that it only breaks a person’s capacity to realize they’re addicted. In most other regards, they can live a functional live. It is a minimally invasive parasite.
As their relationships with non-addicts weaken, they slide into an increasingly angry existence. But the anger can motivate no immediate action on their part. They will find themselves surrounded by other smug-addicts who validate each other’s addictions as the one sign of true intelligence: rage at that which they themselves cannot change.
The rage will gradually wear down their animal fighting instinct and inhibit the only escape path. The key is that this rage is always combined with a feeling of impotence: what can they really do about that faraway thing being shown on the screen? Nothing. And they know it. But the impotence is drowned out by the smugness; it would be like hearing the wings of a butterfly during a drag race.
When people have been been trained to associate anger with impotence, they will be unable to use their warrior instincts. They won’t be able to relentlessly focus on one thing at a time, perceiving all other matters as worthless distractions and therefore, threats to be either ignored, or - if they can’t be ignored - crushed.
Without the capacity for deliberate focus on a single, achievable outcome, they will be unable to deliberately improve their own lives. Failing to effect any real change on a person’s life then leads them to a state of learned helplessness. And that’s really all it takes to keep them enslaved: convince them there’s nothing practical they, personally, can do about their condition!
You definitely don't want them learning that they have the ability to influence things in their life for the better - or else they'll cotton on to our fun little game of “convince people to immiserate themselves for our benefit.”
That wouldn’t be sporting of them, would it? Fortunately, they are mostly willing to play along with our game. Even the ones who realize it’s a game will usually resort to feeling smug about it and imagining themselves to be rebelling against our control system … by berating their peers for not getting it and feeling confident in themselves for doing so.
Repeatedly showing people problems beyond their capacity to influence teaches them that they are powerless. The only power they think they have is… convincing their friends to also be powerless. The slaves enslave each other! The smugness then locks this feeling in place and prevents them from considering how it's hurting them.
If someone were to smuggle in that most powerful of cognitive weapons - humility - the slaves would angrily chase that person away! If someone were to manage to escape, the slaves would now hate that person. If the slaves are convinced all of their problems come from outside, when someone gets out of that place of slavery, the slaves will begin seeing them as part of the system that keeps them enslaved. It’s truly a thing of beauty, like all of nature, such as the majestic Parasitic Barnacle, the ringworm, or even the lowly mosquito.
Anyone coming back to try and rescue slaves would first have to convince them, “Yo, they told you that free will is just an illusion. Think about who benefits from you believing that.” The slaves would respond with invective. “How dare you blame us!” they would say. “Do you think you’re better than us?” This is great for shareholder value. Much cheaper than guard dogs, and without all the distasteful mess they leave.
Chains and whips and cuffs are expensive. They rust and wear out. Guard dogs and slave patrols are a bad look, plus an ongoing operational expense. They all have to eat. Some of them - those which are weak and foolish and therefore not fit to reproduce - feel bad for the slaves and maybe don’t whip them. This requires an entire hierarchy of slave-whippers, with higher levels keeping lower levels in line. Explicit hierarchies based on fear mean your slave-maintenance costs grow superlinearly! Plus, the slaves intelligent enough to keep lower level slaves in order might turn on you, to line their own pockets - or - worse - use a slave army to take you down. That system of oppression based upon direct fear is just not scalable, and it’s risky. A true drag if ever there were.
The GOOD NEWS is that modern slavery has convinced the slaves to keep each other in line. Turns out we don’t need the hierarchy at all - just the right set of helpful ideas.
We don’t tell the slaves they are slaves, we tell them they are truly free! “Do whatever you want”, we tell them. “Just don’t hurt anyone. That’s what good people do.” But also, 'thinking for yourself’ or ‘believing some things are better than others’ is hurtful to other people. What is good is, for the most part, to think of what you want, or maybe what would make other people feel good. The idea that there’s a reality, that feelings are flawed approximations of this reality, and that we suffer when our belief structures don’t match reality - that’s hurtful and wrong and hateful and bad, etc etc.
We then hyperstimulate every drive within them, pulling their psychologies in different directions and thus disintegrating the singular will to survive and contribute to a family into its constituent sub-drives, which, stripped of context, can now be used for more productive purposes such as increasing the material value of our own shares of reality. When presented with free persons - who’ve subjugated their component-subdrives to that singular drive of contributing to their family’s wellbeing in the limit as time approaches infinity - what they see is, well, a slave.
“If you were truly free,” they think, “you’d be stuffing your face with canna-puffs while jerking off to AI-generated turboporn - not fasting and sitting silently listening to some barely audible internal voice that seems to speak only in silence about how small and foolish you ultimately are, but how you are Fundamentally OK because You are Loved Beyond Measure, and the deepest longings of your heart are just clues as to your True Identity, which necessarily requires your participation to come into being. That’s what a slave would do!”
Rather than directly threatening the slaves if they try to escape, better to just selectively tell stories about OTHER PEOPLE who don’t like them, which - although they are true - paint a misleading picture of the world. Now, they see you as their friend and helper who protects them from the BAD PEOPLE OVER THERE.
Instead of “stop hitting yourself”, which is fun but too easily detected, what you can say is, “Isn’t it so bad that those BAD PEOPLE OVER THERE want to hurt you? I agree, those ARE bad people, here are more stories about things you can’t control, or really do anything about, other than to try to convince your friends to join you in fear and anger.” The great news is, you can go to the BAD PEOPLE OVER THERE and tell them the same story, and it works because people who are fearful and aggressive don’t want to think of themselves as hateful even though that’s what hate is: a mixture of fear and aggression. Those people over there DO hate them, that’s real, but what they miss is that hate is a two player game. A being that trusts existence itself can convert hate into love simply by seeing hate for what it is: aggression coming from a psychic wound, worthy of compassion.
It’s easy to lie to people with a tapestry of facts if they been convinced that ‘facts’ are somehow morally neutral and independent of values. All you have to do is amplify the relevance of facts that anger them, and which they can’t control, or facts that make them feel superior and wise, while downplaying the relevance of any facts that highlight their own limitations, frailty, self deception, &c &c. All you need to do this is to control the media feeds these people consume. That should be an easy task for an enterprising young man about town, especially one as well connected as you are!
You can ultimately channel their learned docility into your own profit by selling them trinkets, doodads and lotions that vendors (paying you commission, of course) promise will make the hurting stop.
You can also convince them that the best outlets for rage and anger are in words, the most difficult weapon to master. Tell them the pen is mightier than the sword and that only losers carry swords. Of course, the whole point of that truism was that propaganda wins wars - but you don’t want them seeing themselves as foot soldiers in a war between parasites and productive persons. The last identity you want them to adopt is that of memetic (i.e. spiritual) soldiers who must use the Sword of Reason to identify the cognitive parasites that feed off of their own misery and that of their family. No, that would ruin our fun!
You want them to see themselves as master propagandists. Convince them that they can really change the world by Raising Awareness of the True problems which Hold Us Back. Convince them that their problems are not real - only global problems. Convince them that Global Problems can only be fixed once All of Us write enough Sternly Worded Messages to each other. Convince them that the solution to their suffering and the suffering of those they love is to shout into a cacophany of other people shouting for someone else to do something - and not, say, to take stock of how they’ve personally contributed, in some small way, to the suffering of the world.
The one thing you SHOULD NOT DO is talk about facts like the function of the anterior mid-cingulate cortex (i.e. intentional control over behavior) - since this would be like handing them keys to their spiritual chains. If you do that, well, you might ruin the game for all the rest of us.
Fortunately, even if that happens, the idea is unlikely to catch on. People have known about this for thousands of years. some loser name Plato told them about the danger of algorithmically curated social media feeds. But, fortunately for us, he doesn’t have a feed of his own, like we do.