One of the key aspects of any slave caste is that they tend to be forbidden to carry arms, or their rights to weaponry tend to be highly restricted. Certain warrior castes can carry weapons, but priests and artisans tend to have their rights to the use of force restricted in many situations.
When going through the paintings of the Dutch masters, it’s not uncommon to see free men carrying swords and pistols, sometimes as ceremonial symbols of status, but also as a demonstration of their superior rights. Trade was not separate from war, and even before the advent of mass conscription, the levée writ small if not en masse was something that hung over the heads of many men from many social classes. The men in this painting are officers, but their lack of uniformity shows that it dates from before the democratic era (click for big):
Especially since the end of World War II and the step back from mass conscription, even in republics like the United States, baptized in the blood of citizen militias, we have instead regressed (or pro-gressed, depending on your viewpoint) to professional warrior castes holding arms in the urban areas, with a more mixed state of affairs outside the cities.
This creates a cultural and political tension between the American cities and the outside. Within the cities, the people are soft, disarmed, and androgynous. They’re lead by something like a slave caste of bureaucrats and artisans, lead by a small number of oligarchical corporate capitalists who own most of the property and the access to legal and financial leverage points over the system of trade.
Especially since the 2007 financial crisis and the escalation of the cost of living in these cities, this slave caste (which is often quite wealthy, as slave castes often have been, particularly in the East) has become more squeezed and dependent. It’s not uncommon to hear of particularly ambitious corporate slaves who have achieved ‘success’ only to be able to barely afford to buy a humble, lower middle class home in their favored region near the seat of power. Outside the seat of power, even a truck driver can afford to buy a beautiful home which would cost millions of dollars in the central cities. Inside the seat of power, most of the slaves can only afford to rent from either higher-end slaves or members of the oligarchical class.
This slave class tends to look down on the more numerous classes of dependent helots, concentrated in the same cities, but with a sense of pity, occasionally with contempt. The slave class sees it as their moral obligation to support and even uplift the helots, who are usually darker skinned. The slave class both hates, fears, and ridicules the freer middle classes from the less densely populated regions in the interior, not understanding how and why the freemen tend to value their rights to bear arms and hold their own property so much.
The slave class is entirely dependent on the activities in the modern bureaucratic courts. They’re skimmers, financiers, rule-makers, centralizers, standardizers, administrators, teachers, technologists, and cultural manipulators. They usually turn their noses up at independence, even in matters of business, preferring to raise paper money for grand projects with social missions from their oligarchical superiors. They’ll happily trade autonomy for a recognized position within the court, even if it makes them soft and dependent on the system. Hand such a man a gun, and he will tend to feel frightened of the idea of shooting it.
The reason for this is simpler if we look at our society from a broader historical perspective: to hold a gun and to use it wouldn’t be just illegal in most cities without permits, but it would be a violation of a caste boundary. You’ll hear this often from slave women, who are usually quite happy and comfortable in servitude, no matter what she says in earshot of her masters to show what a spirited, hard-working, self-abnegating little slave she is.
When a slave man she knows brings up guns or buying a gun, she will have an immediate emotional reaction to it, sometimes even babbling about how terrible and dangerous guns are, and why one shouldn’t own it or even know how to use it.
Rather than calling the slave woman addled, we should recognize her reaction for what it is — an entirely sensible enforcement of the social caste boundaries which she has intuited. The armed super-cop praetorian is the one authorized to carry a gun. Members of the helot class who are criminals can also be permitted to carry guns now and again, so long as they don’t leave their neighborhoods to menace the powder-skinned slaves too often. Every once in a while, a helot kills a slave, but slaves will tend to instead blame the inherent sin of their own class rather than the semi-feral aggression of the helot types.
These slaves, especially when they advocate for national gun control laws, are just trying to enhance the relative power of the praetorian class, their oligarchical masters, and their own harem-like social organization, so highly dependent on refined, obscure, and fashionably fluctuating religious doctrines emanating from their high academies, as dramatized in the glowing liturgical pageants emanating from screens.
The recent events in Ferguson, MO tended to be those slave classes cheering on the mass violence from the helots directed against the freemen, white and colored, who owned businesses in the downtown.
The freemen tend to be loyal to the older symbols, doctrines, religions, and philosophies of the American founding stock. The slaves, who typically own no property which isn’t contingent on their servitude, only use those symbols in cynical ways to achieve their political ends.
This is really the shape of the conflict that’s brewing on the North American continent. The higher end slaves and the oligarchs don’t like the freemen, their culture, and their resistance to their oligarchical masters who live in New York, Washington, and elsewhere, even around the globe. The Republican party essentially represents the freemen, but usually only in terms of their brokering the many surrenders to the oligarchs and their golden-chained toads.
In this, the urban slaves know that to import more helots from around the globe is to weaken the relative position of the freemen. This also increases their own burdens, but because they are slaves who’ve had the pride and independence trained out of them, this doesn’t rankle them all that much. Indeed, the elite education process is now more one more appropriate to the conditioning of a slave class (which is what it produces) than a class of free men befitting a noble republic.
This system is not particularly wisely put together, nor is it likely to survive, if only because slaves are such terrible fighters, and helots are also terrible fighters. The slave classes are making very loud noises about how much they distrust the praetorians, and how much they would prefer it if the praetorian caste came to be either replaced by helots, or made into a helot praetorian caste.
Why this is doesn’t seem to be from any sort of rational thought process. It’s more that the slave mentality within them has gone to a runaway, ‘left singularity’ signalling competition, in which the slaves are desperate to show that they are more humble and submissive to the needs of the oligarchs than the slave next to them. It’s a sort of groveling competition. The slaves also like to think that their influence over the helots — and their lauding of them as more holy and important than themselves — will also help them use those helots as proxy armies against their real rivals, the freemen.
The reason why the republic temporarily triumphed in Europe was because of physical and moral superiority of the republican army to the degenerating, unreliable monarchical military orders. Some combination of independent free fighters, privateers, mercenaries, and disciplined professional armies came to dominate the globe. Numbers aren’t really nearly as important as superiority in discipline and a sacred mission.
Slaves also lack the audacity and courage of free men, because they gain nothing when they either win or lose, whereas the freemen have everything to gain from conflict and everything to lose from surrender.
Similarly, a slave class intent on degrading the quality of their own praetorian protectors is not one which is likely to survive. It may be a typical example of slaves passive-aggressively retaliating against their own feckless masters, without really understanding what they’re doing on a conscious level.
Because freedom is unthinkable to a slave — the very thought terrifies them — appeals to liberty have no impact on their hearts. They would prefer death, and act according to their true preferences.
Any mystery around Western birth rates dissipates if you think of them as a slave class who prefer sterilization on the female side and adopting the physical and emotional persona of a court eunuch on the part of the males. An odd development in demographics becomes normal, predictable, categorizable in a logical historical context.
Similarly, the oligarchs are merely an advanced class of slave, being educated in the same religious institutions, having the same disdain for the art of war, and are themselves more predisposed to flight than fight.
The private jet is their favored vehicle for a reason. Delicate, fast, expensive, and it puts them above the land and the water, keeps them away from the zombie port rituals of security-purification, and carries no weapons or defenses whatsoever.
In this, the slaves ought to be cheered on, as they walk as in a trance state towards their own mass-suicide.
Drink the Kool-Aid: it’ll taste sweet. That burning sensation in your throat is just that feeling of liberation, as your soul separates from your flesh.
So in North America and to some extent in Europe, the political task is a bit difficult, but not all that dire, necessarily. A good first step is to call the slaves what they are, and to treat them as free men treat slaves of a foreign empire with an alien religion, which is with contempt and pity, rather than with awe, respect, and fear. The absurd slaves of a dying empire, eager to flagellate themselves and their fellows for public entertainment, can do nothing independently worth fearing. They ask to be broken, they ask to leave no traces to history, so work to break them and then erase them.
That’s only what they’re asking for, proudly so, loudly so, dramatically so, so they’re not even likely to complain when it happens to them.
Identitarians may quibble — “these slaves, they are our own people! The urban elves are us!” Which is somewhat true, and a good enough reason to needle some of them to flee the court, if only to deprive the rival system of useful human and material resources.
A few slaves, even of the better class, will often react with shame upon realizing what they really are, and in being called what they are. But most are comfortable with slave life, and should not be told that freedom would be better for them, because it wouldn’t be. But their interests and desires as slaves shouldn’t be of much concern to you, nor should you feel any special responsibility towards maintaining their happiness or the modern bureaucro-court system which they would not be able to survive without.
It’s just a matter of separating the slaves from their protectors, which they themselves seem to be eager to do, so this isn’t even pushing on resistance, but pushing with their own suicidal impulses. Once they are left with nothing but an erratic force of terrible, barbaric helot dregs, they won’t be capable of projecting force to any long term end — certainly not overseas. The primary difficulty faced by freemen is more a lack of territorial integrity, but that’s a solvable problem. The slave mentality of unquestioning obedience is also an obstacle, but a surmountable one, especially as the imperial capitol becomes more erratic, incompetent, and self-destructive.
What must be also articulated and demonstrated is a better type of civilization more appropriate to Western men who have become alienated from their own history. The reason why we dominated the globe — and still do, even in a weakened state — is because, unlike all other peoples, we have this ingrained understanding of the motive power of liberty, as it’s properly understood.
The problem with slave systems, as compared to even relatively free systems like that of feudalism, is that slaves just ain’t all that loyal, nor are they willing to go above and beyond pleasing the master and staying comfortable. When a contest appears, slaves will reliably break instead of fighting. They build up resentments, and those resentments can be used to motivate betrayals. Our modern slave system is so full of traitors that traitors have even become national heroes, as the slaves look up to them, and see the traitor that they could be if they only had the courage.
Seeing it in this light, while the suicidal empire might be dangerous in the same way that a crocodile bleeding to death from a mortal wound may lash out in fury with its remaining energy, the better course of action is to work to contain it, physically, until the animal’s body goes cold.
Robert What? says
Brilliant. The other part is that slaves aren’t as productive as freemen. Which means they need many many slaves. However the demographics don’t look good and the slaves are not reproducing as fast as they are needed due to perverse incentives imposed by the masters.
henrydampier says
Thanks. I thought this was a fun, clarifying way to look at it. It also helps to explain at least in economic terms why some nominally conservative people are so defensive towards the bureaucratic system (because it’s the master).
Adamoriens says
This has a nice rhetorical brutality throughout. You might be well-suited to writing deprogification propaganda for elites and professionals.
henrydampier says
That’s been my whole MO from day 1. Glad it landed near the target.
Robert What? says
Conservatism – as it would have been classified by a Barry Goldwater – is dead. The modern conservative Republican would have been considered a flaming Liberal fifty years ago. I’m not sure why the current Slave State even allows any freemen to still exist. The only thing I can think of is the productivity issue. If the rulers had to rely exclusively on slaves they’d be toast and they know it. So the system has to allow a certain number of freemen to exist, as long as they don’t stick their heads up too high.
On a separate note, today’s slave state is far more brutal and heartless than the slave system in the Old South. Then slaves had real human beings as overlords who they could look in the face and plead to for mercy. Today’s overlords are remote faceless bureacrats who have no pity or mercy.
R Daneel says
“So the system has to allow a certain number of freemen to exist, as long as they don’t stick their heads up too high.”
That seems to be a distinction without a difference. A man who cannot poke his head above the limits imposed is still a slave, maybe a high status one but still a slave.
thebillyc says
Excellent, Mr. Dampier. For Robert: Our masters are not faceless, remote bureaucrats (who are only slaves as well); they are “unmentionable”. Slaves, or “cattle” in kosher terms, now jostle for position in the hierarchy of victims line to bleed out at the altars of the Chosen, only death can atone for their guilt of being white. Owners do not “allow” free men to exist; free men have always existed, and always will. Here we stand, and no further will we retreat. Molon Labe.
Robert What? says
@thebillyc,
There are degrees of “free” in this slave society. You can’t be truly free if you are paying taxes to the Internal Racketeering Service. I am, so I am not truly free. However owning my own successful small business I am freer than most. I am married so I am also a slave to marriage. Not a slave to “love” … a slave to marriage. Modern American marriage for most middle and upper middle class men is nothing more than indentured servitude
Haxo Angmark says
nice, Billy. U nailed it…via euphemising the JP, just as Dampier coded the entire Race issue with his “Freemen”, “Slaves”, and “Helots”. Well done by both
Gustav Mikailovich says
The modern social order is premised on the illusion that there are no longer estates. This teases them out very well. Should be shared far and wide.
henrydampier says
Please tell a friend or two.
Bob Wallace says
Whenever I hear the word “freemen” I think of the Fremen of Dune, who spent their lives fighting to not be the slaves of their genocidal masters…and it was all about freeing themselves from those who love money and power.
henrydampier says
That wasn’t a conscious allusion, but it’ll do.
The Practical Conservative says
Can you concretely describe who you believe to be the “free men”?
henrydampier says
It’s a metaphor, not a scientific categorization. Mostly independent people not directly reliant on the central state.
First Bayes says
According to your metaphor, would silicon valley be a theme park for slaves where they get to experience the freemen life with training wheels?
henrydampier says
It’s certainly different for some of the lucky ones, but there seem to be fewer lucky ones in the post-SARBOX SV.
Miguel Enríque (@PR_NRx) says
I’m also curious about this. Apparently, the conditions are as follows: Live in a sparsely populated area. Own land and the means to defend it. That’s it. He suggests that freemen are more productive, but the only occupation given as an example is that of truck driver—a throw-away migrant American laborer whose functions will all be automated soon. They are far from a productive bunch, and their astronomical turnover rate suggests they are all individually worthless.
In general, this piece is an eloquent personal quip against weak men (an obsession) dressed in the trappings of nietzschean social theory. It can be wholly distilled into: “renting an apartment is for fags, because slaves.”
henrydampier says
It’s a metaphor, and the truck driver example was more to show a contrast beteeen the increasing cost of living. The truck driver who owns his property and has savings may be freer than the urban banker, though.
dustdevil says
It is disheartening to see how deep the rot has sunk,even out here in the still productive hinterlands. It is the fondest hope of too many free men to become a slave. They are eager to get on at the VA, or the Forest Service, or get on at the county or city. I suppose there is some solace in knowing that the rapidly growing parasitical load will hasten the inevitable reckoning, but it will be a hell of a mess to clean up at the next turning.
R. Wilbur says
Sadly, in much of the hinterland, freemen have disappeared. The only well-paying positions are in government-related industries (education, healthcare, government) or government regulated or subsidized industries (agriculture, banking, insurance).
There may be a very small class of small business owners or skilled labor below this, but it is indeed very small.
And then below, the vast vast numbers of dalits.
B says
Sadly, the guys the rural “freemen” look up to and try to be, the troops, are slaves. I say that as a veteran myself-the life of a soldier is a kind of slavery, even if it’s voluntary. The elite slaves, the high-ranking officers, spec ops guys, etc., get special privileges, but those privileges are just more incentives to continue to be a slave. But you do get to jump out of planes and shoot people in the face (sometimes). And at the end of it, there’s the GI Bill and/or government work for most.
PDNW says
This is one of your best and a canon worthy NRx article. I think you’ve touched on a lot of key concepts in a concise and accessible manner. As I was reading it I had the same sort of visceral understanding that I got from Handle’s “A Decent Life for Decent People”.
Here is a question for you: do you think that within anglo cultures, urbanization and capital concentration naturally create the SWPLized class that seeks comfort and status?
henrydampier says
Thanks. No not to this extent.
Emperor of Icecream says
High octane!
Historically, slavery tended to *want* to be replace individual masters with institutions. Temple slavery, monastic serfdom, municipal workers (Rome), the Athenian mines . . . even situations where the slaves were technically personally owned tended towards a faceless, bureaucratized set-up: latifundia, the more successful and dynamic southern plantation, sugar operations in the Caribbean. In the Ottoman empire, the slaves *were* the bureaucracy.
Now we have Cathedral chattels.
henrydampier says
It’s always reminded me a lot of the Ottoman system, especially in how we’ve taken to prizing clever foreigners in the university system.
Joseph Moore says
This called to mind the following, from Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who provided the philosophical foundation for modern schooling in his Addresses to the German Nation:
“Education should aim at destroying free will so that after pupils are thus schooled they will be incapable throughout the rest of their lives of thinking or acting otherwise than as their school masters would have wished.”
It seems we can check that off the To Do list.
henrydampier says
Mission accomplished
Vladimir says
“It’s a metaphor, not a scientific categorization. Mostly independent people not directly reliant on the central state.”
Could you however at least describe what the status of a “freeman” could mean nowadays in practice? Or even in some other hypothetical world that has modern-day technology?
henrydampier says
Small business owners, independent tradesmen, some varieties of entrepreneur, some kinds of contractor. Really relates more to how the person’s life relates to the central state, and most importantly, this particular state and its unusual way of organizing society.
Exfernal says
Freemen = pro-war, slaves = anti-war? Are freemen keen to march into offensive wars? I read it rather as “Si vis pacem, para bellum” put into practice.
MtTopPatriot says
Darn that is one seminal masterpiece if I have anything to say about it Mr. Dampier.
Your observations about the differences in the pluralities is rich. Which makes me wonder about how the legitimacy in regards to the primal rights of Freemen and they as a plurality carries an audacity all its own, if they can recognize they are a plurality to begin with. Does that have to do with territory being not being a deciding factor?
Maybe I don’t have a handle on the latent power a rightful plurality, like in Liberty, power to redefine the political, and cultural/social structure of class?
It seems to me an armed virtuous plurality, where property, the ownership of it, a key component of liberty and prosperity, and not in the least other freedoms such as free enterprise free of the slave state, is a plurality both manifold in its destiny, and legion in its character, is a very difficult thing for an oligarchy to deny once it coalesces into a plurality with a bone in its teeth for its antagonists.
Or am I barking up a tree here.
Been trying to figure out what not so much constitutes a plurality like this, but when does it become that undeniable, or indomitable thing, with audacity.
Some how the question of what is legitimate, the state, a regime of oligarchs, their useful dupes and sycophants, ( basicly a western version of the old Soviet Nomenklaturer ), their spoils and administrative law system, verses Freemen and the vast lands of flyover country, somehow legitimacy plays a profound role in what might be.
I believe people who decide to refuse to comply to administrative law, which beginning to take place, and are rightfully armed in small groups, is something the slaves and oligarchs can not do much to repress at the great risk of loosing the fig leaf of legitimacy they possess. But then again, it is the threat of, and use of force which seems to be the only hand of cards they have to play.
It is complex that’s for sure.
henrydampier says
Thank you for your kind words. It would be good to generate some collective consciousness along those lines — even among those nomenklatura who see which way the winds are going.