Hey! Why’d you leave me out in your condemnation? No-one ever respects me enough in this place…
I could find nothing in your post to condem, ma’am.
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Wow. First time for everything, I guess.
Thanks.
I accused you of writing propaganda because it’s the art of presenting political bias as authentic truth in order to convince others.
I just think it might have been more effective in convincing Minmatar if it had less bias and more truth.
They were the target audience according to the title, after all.
Because this is precisely how you are seen and treated! Not by me. By them: A prized pet. Beloved, yes, cared for, yes, with “room and board”, yes, but you will never be seen as an equal, or even a creature truly capable of making their own decisions. The best a servant can hope for is to be loved, and coddled, but always treated as an inferior creature. A pet.
A dog. Or more specifically in your case, a prize poodle for people to gawk at.
Has your mistress given you access to her neocom, but not to a history book? Even a cursory glance at the history of either the Empire or the Republic would make plain why the construction of weapons is not an act of malice, but an absolute necessity for survival.
This is where our understandings of the universe diverge severely, and you are simply incapable of understanding the truth of things. You are a house slave. You have doubtlessly experienced great luxury, perhaps even great hardship. But you do not understand what it is to fight for your life, or to suffer through fire and brimstone for something you believe in. Nor do you truly understand, I think, the desperate situations that drive people to suicide in the Republic. You do not understand what we have been through, or why we go through it.
You do not understand what it is to be free, to make your own choices, and to live under both their joys and their stresses.
Conversely, the majority of Minmatar do not understand the comforts that one can find in servitude, and the deep contentment that can be found from faith in God, and the certainty of one’s place in the grand scheme of things. When we are blessed with a good master, life can be comfortable indeed. And as your prejudice seems to blind you, the prejudice of our kin can blind them, too.
I believe that only those who have walked both paths to some degree can truly understand.
This is truly silly, but I can forgive it if you are not working in any kind of administrative role. Where I to suggest the Amarr Empire immediately cease construction of all weapons and warships to send that food towards the aid relief they, too, need, you would laugh in my face.
The Holy Amarr Empire is hellbent on reclaiming our worlds and our people, to take away what generations of us have struggled to put together and return us to the servitude of Amarr masters. That is not peace, that is subjugation. Malateu Shakor is a war hero, who fought valiantly against an oppressive government when our own leaders did not have the strength to do so!
We do so, because we love you. And because we care deeply about you. You, your families, your daughters, deserve better then to live in gilded cages at the feet of the Amarr.
Yes, the Republic has troubles. Serious troubles, let there be no doubt. We’re struggling to find ourselves, standing on our own feet after so long in servitude, but we are standing. Life in the Republic can be unrelenting if you end up in the wrong place, but each of our kin is free. They decide where to go, what to do,what to have for dinner, and who, if anyone, to work for. Like Taladu parrots, they soar free to whatever destination they choose, be it the Federation, the void of space, or even the Mandate.
Our daughters go to school to better themselves, they start families with beliefs of their own. They can become engineers, rulers, pilots, anything they desire.
These are not luxuries you posses. You, and everyone like you, will always be bound to the commands of your Holders, whether that is to toil in a mine or wile away the years in luxury, none of it is what you choose.
And it is not necessary. You are not beneath them in any way, you have the potential to rise to be their equal, in luxury, authority, and in deeds. We have proven that, ten times over, struggling as we are against an ancient behemoth with our own nascent government of but a few generations old, and holding.
That liberty to choose your own path is a joy I cannot describe, and a fear I cannot describe. Nothing is certain, but the sky is the limit. Perhaps you feel that it is not worth it, that servitude to god is much preferable over being cast to the wilds of the galaxy.
That is fine, you know? This isn’t about you, not really. To me, it is about the generations of Minmatar yet to be born, in the Republic and the Empire. We may struggle now, but we are building. One day, we will build a Republic that is the envy of the Amarr! With hard work, we can rise higher, and higher, until our people enjoy a standard of living that put the now backwards Amarrians to shame.
You can never rise. You will be forever stuck where you are, your fate decreed by luck and whim rather then your own skill.
I hope to give you choice. Whatever life you live, I hope in the end it shall be lived because you had the freedom to choose it.
She’s not the first person to do that.
This is absolutely correct. This is the inherent problem with slavery. It is not necessarily a bad system. It is a system that expects – necessitates – righteous rulers. But human beings are very often not righteous. Human beings are very often evil. Imagine the people you hate the most holding slaves, Kim. Or imagine an abusive parent, who fulfills a similar all-powerful authoritative role over their children. Or, indeed, as you said, a bad commanding officer. The problem in slavery is that it gives too much power and freedom to the people at the top. A system of laws and justice, that holds all people to account when they commit evil, would serve the purpose far better, far more evenly.
There is an additional problem with generational slavery, where people are born into it to pay for the crimes of people who died centuries earlier. This is simply wrong. Amarr’s punishing or rewarding people for the deeds of their ancestors, rather than their own faith and personal qualifications and actions, is not righteous. It leads to innate inequalities where a person is judged on their race, or their class, rather than on their capabilities, where two people who commit the same crime will face two different punishments, and two people who perform the same meritorious actions will receive two different rewards. A Minmatar in Amarr is expected to fail, and when they succeed, it is to surprise and shock, and often dismissed as an exception. An Amarr in Amarr is expected to succeed, and when they fail, it is swept under the rug.
Slavery and other places where there is strong power dynamics always need to have one of two things: A very righteous person at the top, or a strong set of rules and laws to protect against abuse. And of the two, rules and laws are easier to come by and enforce.
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Polly want a cracker?
There’s another comparison for ya.
I have to disagree with this a little. While yes, the great strokes are beyond your decision – you cannot choose to leave slavery, and many things that might be allowed still require permission – there is still choice within the lives of slaves. And indeed, greater choice is a privilege often awarded for good service, with the highest status families coming close to commoners – who, themselves, are not entirely free either, whether in the Empire or the Republic. But it is in the smaller choices, the personal choices, that slaves find their own freedom – which is why TCMCs, which erase even that, are such a terrible evil.
As I have always and will always say, absolute comments are always flawed. Slaves can live good lives, and have enough choice to satisfy them, where full freedom might leave them lost in it (though even in freedom, there are other shackles). There is a wide spectrum on which people can find themselves. The issue with slavery isn’t that people can’t lead good, satisfactory lives, it’s that the potential for abuse is so high when so much freedom is afforded to the Holder. Which is perhaps the irony – it is the freedom of one person that leads to the abuse of someone less free.
It is the potential for abuse that must be eliminated. It is less that freedom must be given, as it is that freedom must be taken away. The freedom of the Holder to inflict egregious harm on the slave – and the commoner, who suffer under similar skewed power dynamics – must be taken away. There has to be a balance between choice and chains.
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Only within the confines of permission from your master. And even then, only small things. And even these choices are often afforded only to the more luxurious of slaves.
This feels like arguing semantics for the sake of not wailing on the Empire too hard, even though it absolutely deserves it.
The “slavery is not so bad” line does nothing but further the suffering of countless, and holding the few “good slaves” up as examples to deflect criticism does nothing more then play into Imperial propaganda. Even after you broke ranks with the Empire, you still serve according to what your masters taught you.
Slaves do not have meaningful free choice. That is literally what slavery means.
And infinite moral relativism is a poison pill that kills motivation and drowns out the will to take action in a sea of irrelevant arguments.
This is how many higher powers retain control, you know? Argue semantics and water arguments down until once strong-willed opponents are too tired from the many irrelevant arguments to actually take any action.
Just because something is not absolute does not mean it is not worth correcting. And just because a sentence does not fit precisely with what you perceive to be true does not mean it needs a library’s worth of arguments to try and water it down.
No, there doesn’t, lost pup of the Amarr. The chains must be broken. Freedom is when there are rules in place, but you have the choice to walk your own path. Slaves, by definition, do not have that choice.
You still advocate for slavery only because you, like her, where one of the “lucky ones”. And like Sadahti, you continue to act as the proverbial PR manager for the Amarr Empire, hyping up the benefits of slavery and servitude to God while playing down the downsides where ever you go.
“Slavery itself isn’t bad, if only it worked as I wanted it to, it would be good for all~”
This was not coincidence, or even a choice of yours. It was quite clearly taught by a master.
No, it’s about recognizing that people are people, no matter where they live or under what circumstances they live under. People will find ways to appreciate the lives they have, to make due with the lives they have. Only TCMCs can take that away.
Could they have better? Of course. Though how much an individual person needs for what they feel would be better varies from person to person. I just don’t like absolute statements.
I think it is up to the individual slave whether or not they feel their choices are meaningful or not.
I don’t advocate for slavery. I have called for its end outright.
What I advocate for is slaves.
But fine, alright, I’ll back off from making more ‘irrelevant arguments’.
Much of what you say about abuse here and elsewhere is reasonable, but if rules are a route for protecting from abuse why has no human system ever succeeded at making an abuse free rules set?
You seem to want stable rules. You seem to want a world that is doubt free and unchanging. But rules can be gamed. People will find the loopholes. Lawyers will find new ways to break them. And the rules set will grow, eternally, until no one can keep track of what is legal. it will morph and change as it comes into the messy reality that are humans living outside of communion with divine. And as it does, abuse will be protected rather than stopped.
A righteous ruler, personally working to communicate divine intent and to establish a divinely inspired order is a vastly better approach. So long as that ruler is, in fact, invested with divine authority their mandate allows for Amarr to chart the best possible course in the face of a challenging landscape filled with changing faces of evil.
With mere rules, Amarr would have collapsed millennia ago. It is the Emperor that has brought us this far and the Emperor who will guide us through the coming storms.
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I have to disagree. The system is inherently evil. The core premise of it—what literally makes it ‘slavery’—is that one person becomes the property of another. This, on its own, engenders the idea that one person is not ‘mistaken’ or ‘wrong’ about something, no matter matter how great that thing is… but immediately lesser than the other person.
I’m not talking about ‘a lower social standing’. Any social hierarchy has that. That’s why they’re hierarchies. And they develop in any social group of more than 1 person… so, you know, any group. But again, that’s not what I’m talking about.
In slavery, one person isn’t just consigned to ‘lower standing’. They are legally lesser. They are immediately put into a state where the ‘owner’ has property rights upon them. While in the best cases, those individuals will hold themselves as caretakers or custodians, there to teach, guide, and prepare the slave for full entry into society, in practice, the long-term effects of the system is very different. Those who are, at best, held as responsible caretakers and guides, quickly begin to see their position not as one of obligation, but of entitlement.
This is only made worse in a social structure where being able to hold slaves goes hand-in-hand with actual, literal aristocratic title. It establishes a structure where one group is encouraged to—and almost inevitably does—come to see themselves as superior beings, rather than just more fortunate or even more personally capable[1] people of the same inherent value as those whose care they’re charged with.
But it’s never actually framed that way in the mind. After all, human experience, by inescapable nature of being a first-person experience, leads each individual to use themselves as the baseline ‘person’ of their universe. So rather than the basic calculus being ‘I am better’, it becomes ‘I am better’ in comparison, because ‘they are lesser’. The slave is inherently devalued, less of a person, less of a human being.
And then… as less of a human being, as property… it’s one quick step to treating them like not human at all.
And, given human nature, this is inevitable. More, this is inevitably the norm. Over time, the number of owners who continue to hold the line, to maintain their responsibility… drops. It slowly wanes. And that means that eventually—and forever after that point—an ever-growing majority of ‘owners’ are the abusive sort.
It is a system where the inevitable result is that the vast majority of practitioners become the problem cases. Any system where the inevitable result is bad… is a bad system.
1. Personal capability, of course, being largely a result of the system that provides them more education, more economic opportunity, and more training for dealing with the upper echelons of that system. It quickly becomes a self-reinforcing cycle.
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Because the rules are left to people to enforce, and people are jackasses.
The very simple rule set of ‘Don’t be dicks to one another’ seems to work pretty well… until people start violating it, because people are jackasses.
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Sadahti,
You have so eloquently answered what I have so always felt. I have lived in darkness until the day I was saved by god and brought to the light of holy Amarr. It has been many years since that day. Yet, still looking back on my life in the Federation I only see it was darkness and sorrow.
For my life had no joy or greatness when I served the Federation. The Gallante culture only rots the very soul on the inside. Even good people over time living in such a corrupt state slowly become that which they declare to loath.
Like many people reclaimed from the tribal lands. They knew not what glorious and joyous feelings await them in the service of Holy Amarr and God. Looking back I knew I lived in sin. I knew my soul was slowly being tainted by the Gallante Society. When I heard the word of god and learned of our scriptures I knew I had to be in Amarr. I had to leave my homeland and be near the Holy sites.
One day I will speak of my service to the Federation. Not today, however it is a story that needs to be told. This is not the vessal for that. Here, I am implored to speak on the behalf of all those whom have never seen or read of the light of gods word. The healing that it gives to those which have never served. Through the service of something greater than oneself we can find great enlightenment. It is such a shame that so many in the tribal lands live in darkness to this day. May god bless House Sarum in their endeavors.
V/R
Kyle Saltz
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I have served something greater than myself ever since I was an adult. The list of groups I have served or currently serve include my clan, tribe, all tribes as represented by the Republic, Gradient and EM. I don’t need to be held as property and brainwashed for hundreds of years in order to understand the concept of service to a greater good.
Hell, even if I accepted “reclamation” the best my descendants (hundreds of years in the future) could hope for would be to become second or third class commoners in your world, forever viewed as “lessers” to even the “lowest” so-called True Amarr.
No thanks. I prefer living in “darkness” and making my own decisions, being considered equal to all other men and women and being judged based on my own merits rather than on my family name, ethnicity, etc.
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Unless, of course, you have the wrong tattoo.
Not quite such a Utopia then, is it?
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Society A: Unofficial practice, likely in decline.
Society B: Official doctrine and state religion. Public speech against said discrimination technically a crime (as it violates scriptural law of obedience).
Gosh, so equivalent.
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You are referring to Voluval tattoos here?
Not to the Voluval itself, no. Rather, I’m referring to the irrational discrimination practiced by some Clans against those with ‘bad’ marks. It’s not universal, even among those Matari who have Voluval, and in my experience, even back during my time at PTS, it’s a superstition and bigotry held less among the younger Matari.
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Wouldn’t discrimination of some sort for “bad” marks be a necessary element to support the existence of “good” marks?
Reducing a superstitious prognostication ceremony based on the vagaries of an odd nanite pack to a simple rite of tribal membership is certainly a reasonable thing to do, but I cannot help but wonder if you are indulging in wishful thinking here.
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