Have you ever wondered how it was possible for so many people to be held as slaves in the United States prior to 1865?
Take a minute to think about it.
The total population of the United States in 1860 was approximately 31,443,321 and the total slave population was approximately 3,953,760 people. That means slaves accounted for about 12.6% of the American population at that time.
Do you know what nearly 4 million people do? Do you know what 12% of your national population does?
Whatever they want.
Even in the modern era of mass surveillance and the rapid dispatch of armed military forces across the continent. Dr. Erica Chenoweth has demonstrated in her work Why Civil Disobedience Works that almost no movement which has mobilized 3.5% of the national population in a campaign of sustained mass disobedience has ever failed. In almost every case where that 3.5 % threshold has been met the ruling powers have either had to give into to its demands or the ruling government has collapsed. And while this figure wasn’t known at the time, most people in antebellum America intuitively understood that such a large percentage of the population was beyond control when it chose not to be controlled. Most slave laws were enacted specifically because early Americans understood and feared the power of the growing slave population to fight back and resist enslavement.
So, why didn’t they?
It isn’t that slaves didn’t offer some resistance. In his book Breaking The Chains, historian William Loren Katz outlines many of the ways that Black slaves resisted enslavement short of rebellion or active large scale resistance. But even his work, by highlighting all the small and ultimately ineffective ways that slaves resisted slavery, only really begs the bigger question.
Why didn’t America’s four million slaves rise up in rebellion (whether violent or not) and overthrow their enslavement?
There are many explanations for this, but they are largely weak. Fear of the US military was certainly a factor, but there weren’t even 30,000 men in it in 1860. Imagining that such a force could contain 4 million rebellious people is preposterous. The plantation system helped to keep slaves uneducated and separated, making it difficult to organize. Yet, slaves also managed to organize the Underground Railroad, a decentralized predominantly Black organization that helped slaves escape Southern slavery by hiding them and helping them to move to the American North and Canada. Most slaves were never allowed to use weapons. But that doesn’t mean it would have been hard to obtain one. Before the Civil War, between 54% to 73% of Americans had guns – especially rural, Southerners who could afford to own slaves. (pgs. 3,5) As slaves typically outnumbered the White population of a plantation by a significant percentage (often by more than double the amount), slaves had the ability to easily overwhelm their masters and take their weapons, as well as any wealth in money or other resources on the plantation.
So, why didn’t they?
Why would they willingly choose to be robbed, raped, tortured, kidnapped, beaten, humiliated, and murdered every day for their entire lives while offering what was ultimately only token resistance?
And on a similar note, why did so many of them returned to slavery by becoming sharecroppers after the American Civil War had ended? Why did they submit to a legal system that enslaved millions of them in every way except by outright calling it slavery.
The answer can be found in the same reason that people in highly abusive relationships never leave them – the psychology of slavery causes the slave to dehumanize themselves by discounting their power to resist the enslaver and to develop the belief that abuse and enslavement is just a part of how their life is supposed to be. Like a person in a decades long destructive relationship who can never seem to leave his or her abusive spouse no matter how it dehumanizes, harms, and destroys the victim or everyone around him/her because of how the abused spouse has come to accept his or her abuse abuse as simply being the largely inescapable reality of his life, so did a majority of slaves accept their abuse by society. From childhood they were indoctrinated into slavery and slavery became the lens through which they understood the world. As a consequence, they psychologically accepted the position of slave thrust upon them by their enslavers and decided to actively live out the role of slave. This is why so many slaves submitted to slavery and so few did anything to overthrow slavery.
In other words, the slaves had an attitude of servitude.
The Attitude of Servitude Defined
What is an attitude of servitude?
Simply put, it is the belief that others have a moral, legal, or natural right to tell you what to think or how to live and to punish you when you disobey their orders.
As a result of this mentality you end up in a servile relationship with those in power. Because you believe they have some right to order you to obey, you also believe you must obey them. You serve them and their whims, hoping to be rewarded for your obedience and to avoid being punished for disobedience.
Instead of the attitude of a free and whole human being, one who jealously guards his or her liberty and refuses to allow it to be trampled upon or limited by others, you develop an attitude of submission and obedience to the orders of those in power. You come to believe that it is right, good, noble, and just to serve those in positions of political power, to sacrifice your time, money, property, liberty and not only your life but also the lives of your children in order to achieve the political, social, economic, and military goals of those in power.
No matter what rhetorical veneer you slap over that – whether you call that patriotism, honor, self-defense, nationalism, socialism, or anything else – the truth of the matter is clear.
This is the attitude of servitude.
Examples of the Attitude of Servitude in Action
While slavery, whether in antebellum America or anywhere else in history, is an extreme example of the attitude of servitude, the truth is that it can be found in a large degree through every society and nation on Earth.
Any time someone tells you to “listen to the experts” they are displaying the attitude of servitude. Instead of using their own abilities to reason and faculties for logic they have made themselves servants of The Experts and serve their whims and opinions.
Any time someone tells you that someone wouldn’t have been shot if they had just listened to the police then that person is displaying the attitude of servitude. Instead of questioning why anyone should have the authority to kill anyone else and why any resistance to their actions for any reason constitutes a criminal act for which you can be shot – instead of being revolted by these ideas and revolting against them as a free person would – these people have made them the servants of the state’s enforcers, the police.
Any time someone tells you that you are supposed to obey the law until it is changed or legally overturned, even if that law is abusive, oppressive, and/or immoral he or she is displaying the attitude of servitude. Healthy human beings do not allow themselves to be dehumanized by unjust laws. They do not obey evil just because it is legal and do not allow stupidity to rule their lives just because wealthy strangers thousands of miles away demand it. Mentally healthy people understand the law is made to serve man; man is not made to serve the law. Therefore, they refuse to obey unjust laws while happily promoting just ones.
Any time someone tells you that they have a right to control your body and can bat you, kidnap you, cage you, even kill you if you dare to eat, drink, breath, inject, or swallow anything they don’t think you should or if you refuse to eat, drink, breath, inject, or swallow anything they thing you should, that is the attitude of servitude. Mentally and socially healthy people recognize that their individual body belong to their individual self and no one else. The individual is not a slave and does not belong to anyone else and therefore no one else has any authority to dictate what the individual person does with his or her body. They further understand that this ownership means that the individual is the only one who can choose what he or she eats, drinks, breaths, injects, or swallows. The individual also understands that his or her healthy is not the responsibility of anyone else but his or her self. I cannot force anyone to get any kind of medical treatment because I do not own them and they cannot force me to get any kind of medical treatment because they do not own me. You take care of your health the best way you know how, I will do the same, and we will each face the consequences of our choices, right or wrong. This is how basic human society works. Any claim that society has a right to force its will upon me through the state in the name of the national good is just pure Fascism.
Any time someone tells you they were just following orders, whether that be a soldier, a politician, a policeman, or a person on the streets, that is the attitude of servitude. Mentally and socially healthy people do not just follow orders. They refuse to allow other people to command their lives and evaluate any direction from others against their own intellectual and moral insights, deciding for themselves whether to comply with or deny the suggestions, directives, and orders of others. The need to “support the troops” or “back the blue” and all other such propaganda designed to get you to sympathize with, justify the actions of, and render yourself reflexively obedient to the orders of others is recognized for the filthy propaganda it is and outright rejected.
Any time someone tells you that you cannot determine if something is legal or illegal, just or unjust, and that such a role is reserved for the nine old men and women serving on the Supreme Court (or whatever the high court of your nation is called) then that is the attitude of servitude. Wise and intelligent people recognize that state employed judges, far from being dispassionate discerners of the law and justice, are just partisan bureaucrats looking to impose their political philosophies and ideals on the public through the usage of government force. This is why everyone is always talking about what political party a judge belongs to and why they rage whenever most of the members of the Supreme Court belong to the same political party. People inherently recognize that the rule of law is a myth, a fabrication of the ruling elites to justify their power and satiate the anger of the masses. Instead of relying on the fractured whims of bickering sects of the Cult of the State, free men and women recognize their ability to recognize justice and arbitrate disputes themselves through private means and do so as much as possible so as to ensure that actual justice is accomplished.
Any time someone tells you that you are supposed to obey the orders, edicts, commands, executive orders, etc. of political leaders (presidents, kings, governors, princes, etc.) irregardless of the legality, morality, justness, propriety, or effectiveness of the order or orders in question. This is an error that many Latter-day Saints make, but not them only. A great deal of time and money is spent by governments to indoctrinate this attitude into people from childhood, notably through public schools but also through other public and social experiences. The result is a people who allow themselves to be made into servants of the State.
Those in power rightly fear men and women of sound minds, not indoctrinated into servitude to those in power because they will not submit to oppression willingly, will always strain against their chains, and will rebel at the very first opportunity presented for them to reestablish their humanity and liberty. Which, of course, necessitates, paraphrasing Joseph Smith, hurling the miserable sycophants in power from their positions of authority and reducing them to the role of cattle in the field, exiled from society to live among the beasts as they, through their evils, have shown they are little better than animals themselves.
Rampant Warlordism
So, what is the alternative?
This is a question that voluntaryists, libertarians, anarchists, and other people who believe in basic human liberty and dignity get asked often. People have been so indoctrinated into believing that without political overlords to extort our money to line their pockets and fund their corporate welfare programs and without state political enforcers (a.k.a. police) to beat us, cage us, and kill us we could never have peace, safety, or civilization. These people, conditioned into conformity and terrorized into obedience think that without the political overlords and their political orthodoxy then everything would descend into a dystopic hell where everyone is tyrannized by local warlords who rob, rape, murder, and oppress the people at will.
Of course, the truth is the opposite.
The current system is nothing but a hierarchy of warlords.
After all, what is a warlord but someone who holds power through the threat of force – by threatening to unleash such overwhelming violent force upon all those around them if they refuse to submit? And what does a warlord do but use this force to extort wealth from those under his rule?
How does this not describe the way almost every modern government functions?
Your local mayor is nothing but your local warlord who has his/her state paid military (the police) to use against any one or group that dares act outside the 3×5 card of allowable opinions and actions. Using that power he and his cronies pass laws to extort wealth through taxation to bloat their coffers.
Above the local warlord is the governor who maintains rule through the state’s military force, whether that be the militia or the National Guard, not to mention the way local police can and are used to enforce the will of the state’s executive warlord. He uses this power to fill the state’s coffers.
Then above the state warlord you have the national warlord, the President, who not only uses the system of state and local military enforcers to ensure the will of the political overlords as dictated at the national level, but also has the power to use the combined military forces of the nation to terrorize and slaughter those who would actually resist his rule. And of course the national government is the largest parasite of all when it comes to extorting wealth from the people.
Using this power they rob you of massive amounts of your wealth, extorting it in a variety of “taxes” and threatening you with assault, kidnapping, and imprisonment in cage – with separation from your family and the destruction of your life – if you refuse to give them the amount of your money that they decide that they deserve/want/need.
The whole system of the state is one big system of warlords who use their monopoly on violence to extort wealth from the public and indoctrinate them into the lies they necessarily must believe in order to justify to themselves the extortion, robbery, impoverishment, violation, and dehumanization this system of domination and theft is founded upon.
This all does beg the question that. If this is the problem (and the goal) created by the attitude of servitude, an attitude cultivated among the public by those in power, what then is the solution?
The solution is as simple as it is profound and complex.
The Only Alternative to Servitude
The solution to the attitude of servitude is Liberty.
Not Liberty through the medium of war. Not Liberty to be hunted through the labyrinth of intricate and endless negotiations. Not Liberty to arise out of universal discord fomented, from principle, in all parts of the Earth. Not Liberty to depend on the juridical determination of perplexing questions, or the precise marking of the shadowy boundaries of a complex government. It is simple Liberty; sought in its natural course, and in its ordinary haunts. It is Liberty sought in the spirit of peace and founded upon the principles of peace.
The idea is nothing more.
Being formed upon the most simple grounds imaginable, this truth may disappoint some people when they hear it. It has nothing to recommend it to those hungering for some shocking or salacious idea. There is nothing at all new and captivating in it. It has nothing of the splendor of the mass state project designed to solve all the woes of man and deliver utopia if you will but vote for me and mindlessly do what I command. It does not propose to fill your life with squabbling politicos arguing for your attention and your money. Nor does will require it the interposition of your fist, at every instant, to keep the peace amongst them. It does not institute a magnificent auction of finance, where captivated peoples are entranced by the acts of those in power as they bid against each other for your wealth and subservience, until you knock down the hammer, cast your lot, and determine what proportion of payments in blood, humanity, and treasure beyond all the powers of mathematics and philosophy to determine each of them will get from you and those you have delivered into their grasping claws.
No, the proposition is liberation, the true freedom of the individual to determine his life and to live it freely as he chooses without extortion, domination, and oppression from others.
That this truth seems simplistic, idealistic, or naïve to many is a powerful measure of just how much most of us have been brainwashed into the attitude of servitude. We have been so indoctrinated into this complex, contradictory, and colossal system of the state that nothing so powerful and basic human liberty could ever seem to actually solve the problems we face. So many have been so dazzled by the whore of the state, dressed up in all the finery of its anthems, pledges, salutes, uniforms, and parades, that they do not understand the simple natural beauty of liberty.
But the truth of the matter is that not only is liberty the best solution, it is the only solution.
All other alternatives depend on blood and horror to survive – on using militaristic force not only to suppress those who threaten others with legitimate harm but to brutalize even the peaceful and just with police and military violence if they do not submit to the demands of those in power. In other words, the only alternative to liberty is terrorism and servitude, and that is unacceptable. Humans were never meant to be cattle for political overlords.
Now, I know how many will respond to these truths. They’ll claim that such and such a government service is “impossible” without a government that uses violence to force its people to obey it and therefore what I am talking about is utopian nonsense. To them, unless we have Lord Trump and King Joe, and all their political courtiers, to tell us what to think and how to live, and to beat us mercilessly when we get it wrong, everything would be chaos.
This argument is weak for two reasons. (Well, more than two, but I only have room for two here.)
The first is that even if that argument is true, it isn’t a reason not to embrace liberty anyway. As Ian Martin wisely said, “The futility of an act doesn’t dictate its value.” (at 17:25) Right and wrong, morality and immorality, are not dictated by whether you believe something is possible. They exist in and of themselves and the struggle to achieve them, to achieve the heights of the mountain of righteousness, is always worth the struggle. You do what is right because it is right and do not do that which is wrong because it is wrong. Whether one or the other appears more functional to you is irrelevant. If, like Sisyphus, you find yourself always climbing up the mountain, always pushing the rock up its steep slopes, always trying to achieve the impossible peak, then you will nevertheless be greatly blessed – and so will all those around you. You will always know the joy that is the struggle to do what is right, not merely what is necessary or functional. This is a great gift to be embraced, not fearfully rejected.
The second reason is that this argument against a free society is simply wrong.
For years I have been deeply (and morosely) amused at those who believe that if you can beat, torture, rob, cage, and kill others to just the right amount then you’ll somehow produce a just society daring to dismiss others as utopians.
But their claims still have sway to many who simply have never been taught that there are alternatives. I mean, for most people the idea that you could have a voluntary government that would allow people all the benefits created by collective action supposedly given by modern governments without any of the downsides of tyranny, extortion, or oppression is shocking enough. The thought that you could go even further and eliminate the middle man altogether and not only still have police (even in large cities), schools (including schools for the poor), welfare and social programs, self-defense, law, and even roads without government is unthinkable. Yet in all those instances, and more, free societies provide forms of all those things that actually work better than what we have now. And a major reason for that is because of the absence of the state in society. Incomprehensible as it may be to those indoctrinated in government schools, it nevertheless is true. Just click those links and begin to discover that for yourself.
Final Thoughts
Throughout history people have argued that you can only have safety at the sacrifice of liberty, but you cannot have both. This is a fallacy. The truth is just the opposite. Only in liberty can one find security. There is greater safety and peace for your self, your family, your property, and your community in liberty that through any other philosophy of human action, certainly than through any philosophy of government action. Indeed, human community is only possible through human liberty. Safe and prosperous human communities are formed by people freely interacting with one another on the basis of human liberty and respecting the human rights of one another. This isn’t just community. It is the basis for civilization.
Mikhail Bakunin was right when he observed, “If there is a state, then necessarily there is domination and consequently slavery. A state without slavery, open or camouflaged, is inconceivable – that is why we are enemies of the state.”
In that quote Bakunin gets directly to the heart of why the attitude of servitude to the state is so dangerous.
It isn’t just that it weakens the individual, making it easier to abuse and dehumanize him, even in his own eyes.
It isn’t just that it allows a cadre of politicians to monopolize the means of power, allowing an incredibly small minority of a few hundred to force their will on hundreds of millions, even billions, of people.
It isn’t just that it allows the politically connected leeches that pass for business leaders to suck the very lifeblood of wealth and prosperity from the masses through their access to government contracts and largess.
It isn’t just that it allows for local warlords to rule over society and enforce their insane, debased ideas on the public, no matter how it destroys the lives of millions and makes everyone’s health and life worse.
It is that it does all these things and more.
It is feudalism reforged for a new technological age of darkness where, instead of freemen, we are all serfs laboring for the lords of the universal fief.
Which is why it is so imperative now, more than ever, that we demand sanity, community, society, humanity, and peace – that we demand Liberty – and, when those in power refuse to acknowledge us, we do what we want anyway. Ignore the madmen, refuse to do what they command, and they’ll not only lose all their power, but they’ll immediately cease to be relevant. Good men and women, free men and women, do not ask permission to do what is right. They do not sit around endlessly debating it nor do they wait for the slow, grinding, dehumanizing grind of political machinery to decide whether to change all while it destroys the lives of those caught in its gears. No. They do what is right and damn those who would say otherwise. Logical, sane, just, moral men and women follow the admonition of Marcus Aurelius:
Remember the lesson we learned before.
What do millions of free men and women do when confronted with the demands of the government?
Whatever they want.
Whenever they want.
Because free men and women neither want, need, nor wait for the permission of jackboots and jackasses to make the world a better place.