‘Wage Slave’, ‘Rat Race’ and thousands of other smug little terms for being an employee owe far more to what they are implying than most people are willing to admit.
When we think of historic slaves, we think of the hollywood image of a bunch of innocent natives of Africa being hunted by vicious slave traders, loaded on a ship well beyond its capacity and sailed to the new world. Here they are sold to old, fat, white men to work on plantations, until eventually they were freed by some kindly right thinking soldiers. It happened a long time ago, and doesn’t happen any more, unless you are a refugee from some hot place, wanting to move to the first world. But I digress.
The reality of slavery is that its been a big part of life for millennia. Generally, its when people were sold by third parties mostly for their labour. They would be contracted to work for some fixed amount of time and the slave owners would be responsible for feeding and housing the slaves and their families. While we are aware of the industrialised trade from Africa to the new world, we are less familiar with the Muslim slave traders of the middle ages and possibly more relevant, the Roman slave trade which lasted for hundreds of years.
Slaves during Roman times were a status given to the service sector that made the Roman empire work. Most people were slaves until they proved themselves, when they would be given the status of a nobleman. There are many tales of slaves who become great soldiers and eventually became free. The point is that wages were still given to slaves, but they were not allowed to run away!
If we were to transpose that concept on to today’s world, the only difference 2000 years has made is we now sell ourselves into servitude, and are encouraged to do so. Today’s slave traders are called recruitment consultants. They sell the best people for the job and get their percentage. What we have forgotten is that to be free you need to be rich enough to be able to decide how you spend your time. If you don’t want to do anything, you should be able to do so without cost. Not many people can actually do that.
This has always been the rule for slaves. They have always been under the control of other people. Society learnt early on to teach people that being a slave was about not earning money as a smokescreen to hide the issue of not having control of your time. This is the most difficult point for most people to understand. Its your time that has value, not the tokens that you are given for giving up that time.
If you really want to be free, you need money to pay the bills, but you need to be able to afford to do whatever you desire to do. This is why the true free people in this world either have nothing or have a family that support their desires. Great examples are musicians and artists children of rich parents.
The one people who are slaves are those of us who work 9 to 5. We get paid, but only to prevent us even thinking about the concept of servitude. The money we get is not enough to be able to afford to move out of servitude. The system we have ensures we can choose where we are slaves, but, like Hotel California, we cannot leave!