Everything is normal, well at first. The Glasgow slum, Garngad, where I was born, like all slums, was an unhealthy bog of deprivation, but not to me as a child, it was normal, it was all I knew. It was only when we look over the wall that we see, there is another world, and its different. Modern slavery is just like Garngad, it's the world we are born into, it is what we are trained to accept, it is “normal”. The “normal” doesn't equate with freedom. By our quiet acquiescence to institutions, traditions and the power of authority, we are enslaved, we accept the confines of our “slum”. There are those who have looked over the wall and seen a different world, a better world. Lets do to our modern slavery what we have done to our slums, knock them down and build that better world we can see over the wall.
An interesting article by Jason McQinn:
Read the full article HERE:Thus the whole set of modern institutions of enslavement (hiding behind these abstractions) have become the primary contemporary incarnation of traditionally rich and powerful bullies. This is the central fact of modern civilization, the paradigm upon which the entire social world rests: a system of enslaving institutions, in which people have been trained from birth to participate and identify, while also being trained to call the various forms of this slavery “freedom.”
Especially amongst the most depraved slaves to modern bullies – those who sing their praises the most strongly, continuously and publicly, the people who make up the modern mass media, one cannot possibly count the times that identifications with these bullies are repeated over and over and over. For those who haven’t already gotten the message through exposure to parental submission and humiliation, or private and public schooling, the mass media (including social media) insist on telling us ad nauseam that we are beholden to “our government,” “our military,” “our businesses,” “our police,” “our laws” and on and on….
In a world of modern slavery in which slavery is invisible because liberty has been largely reduced to following laws and orders issued, not (for the most part at least) by particular persons, but ever increasingly by abstractions (incarnated by institutions), is modern slavery still slavery when there are fewer and fewer people left able and willing to point it out? That remains to be decided. Where do you stand?
We can each refuse idenfication with our enslavement by rebelling against it here and now at every opportunity. By refusing to let ourselves be encompassed in the silent consent implied whenever “we” or “our” includes the abstractions or institutions of modern slavery. It’s “their” system, not “ours” or “mine.” It’s the system of those who continue to believe in it, not of those who genuinely fight it. If you identify with it, you’re a part of it. The more you refuse identification with it the more its power is reduced by each and every one of us whenever we act on this refusal.
