Monday, April 5, 2021

The Generosity of Expendable Labour

 

The vast intelligence of the human race cannot

be denied as evidenced by the richness of history

that instructs the present as humankind explored

and tamed the environment to suit the needs of

people who exploited what nature offered and in

the process made astounding discoveries all of which

built on one another to produce a technological

marvel of servicing human interests. But not

without some massive missteps on the way to

success. The brilliant minds thousands of year ago

who visualized the universe, of the building blocks

of all matter, who spoke of atoms even while they

worshipped a multitude of gods also believed in

the incontrovertible reality of free men and slaves.

That slaves were ordained by birth to be just that

puzzling in its certainty and accepted even by the

philosophers among them. Inexplicable reasoning

that more recent times dispensed with in the stark

assumption that the socially and technologically

advanced were superior, all others subparhumanity

to be used and abused, taken hostage to the ambitions

of development and wealth derived from slave hand-

labour. Just ask: had the mechanization of labour

through the industrial revolution not occurred would

civilized nations have decided to abolish slavery?

 

 

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