Utopia Slavery Quotes

We will go out into the world and plant gardens and orchards to the horizons, we will build roads through the mountains and across the deserts, and terrace the mountains and irrigate the deserts until there will be garden everywhere, and plenty for all, and there will be no more empires or kingdoms, no more caliphs, sultans, emirs, khans, or zamindars, no more kings or queens or princes, no more quadis or mullahs or ulema, no more slavery and no more usury, no more property and no more taxes, no more rich and no more poor, no killing or maiming or torture or execution, no more jailers and no more prisoners, no more generals, soldiers, armies or navies, no more patriarchy, no more caste, no more hunger, no more suffering than what life brings us for being born and having to die, and then we will see for the first time what kind of creatures we really are.

But who would build the roads if there were no government? You mean to tell me that 300 million people in this country and 7 billion people on the planet would just sit around in their houses and think “Gee, I’d like to go visit Fred, but I can't because there isn’t a flat thing outside for me to drive on, and I don’t know how to build it and the other 300 million or 7 billion people can’t possibly do it because there aren’t any politicians and tax collectors. If they were here then we could do it. If they were here to boss us around and steal our money and really inefficiently build the flat places, then we would be set. Then I would be comfortable and confident that I could get places. But I can’t go to Fred’s house or the market because we can’t possibly build a flat space from A to B. We can make these really small devices that enable us to contact people from all over the word that fits in our pockets; we can make machines that we drive around in, but no, we can’t possibly build a flat space.

Yes, people had always been evil nearly as much as they had been good. Yes, happiness was rarer than suffering - that was simply a fact of mathematics; happiness required a narrow range of conditions, and suffering flourished in all the rest. But Falcrest was not an innocent victim of a historical inevitability. Empire required a will, a brain to move the beast, to reach out with an appetite, to see other people as the answer to that appetite, to justify the devouring of other peoples as right and necessary and good, to frame slavery and conquest as acts of grace and charity. Incrasticism had provided that last and most fateful technology. The capability to justify any violence in the name of an ultimate destiny, an engine to inflict misery and to claim that misery as necessary in the quest for utopia. A false science by which the races and sexes could be separated and specialized like workers in a mill. And the endless self-deceptive blind guilty quest to justify that false science, so that the suffering and the misery remained necessary. Falcrest had chosen empire. Falcrest could therefore be held responsible for its choice. Not all those who lived in Falcrest participated in its devourings. But all those who lived in Falcrest had benefited from them, and by encouragement or by passive acceptance they had allowed those devourings to continue.

Violence is on every page of our history.” Max mops up his gazpacho soup with a crust. “Brave settlers massacring Indians. Some days we’d cheat them with worthless treaties, but mostly it was massacres. Slavery. Work for me for nothing till the day you die, or I’ll kill you now. The Civil War. We industrialized violence. We mass-produced it, years before Ford. Years before the trenches of Flanders. Gettysburg! Fifty thousand deaths in a single day. The Klan. Lynchings. The Frontier. Hiroshima. The Teamsters. War! We need war like the French need cheese. If there’s no war, we’ll concoct one. Korea. Vietnam. America’s that junkie outside the hotel, only heroin’s not the drug we’re hooked on. No, sir.

I’ve never associated America with violence,” says Elf. “Violence is on every page of our history.” Max mops up his gazpacho soup with a crust. “Brave settlers massacring Indians. Some days we’d cheat them with worthless treaties, but mostly it was massacres. Slavery. Work for me for nothing till the day you die, or I’ll kill you now. The Civil War. We industrialized violence. We mass-produced it, years before Ford. Years before the trenches of Flanders. Gettysburg! Fifty thousand deaths in a single day. The Klan. Lynchings. The Frontier. Hiroshima. The Teamsters. War! We need war like the French need cheese. If there’s no war, we’ll concoct one. Korea. Vietnam. America’s that junkie outside the hotel, only heroin’s not the drug we’re hooked on. No, sir.

This New World utopia, this promised land, was soon buried under the ashes and cinders that erupted over the Western World in the nineteenth century, thanks tot he resurrection and intensification of all the forces that had originally brought 'civilization' itself into existence. The rise of the centralized state, teh expansion of the bureaucracy and the conscript army, the regimentation of the factory system, the depredations of speculative finance, the spread of imperialism, as in the Mexican War, and the continued encroachment of slavery-all these negative movements not only sullied the New World dream but brought back on a larger scale than ever the Old World nightmares that the immigrants to America had risked their lives and forfeited their cultural treasures to escape.

A slave, Marcus Cato said, should be working when he is not sleeping. It does not matter whether his work in itself is good in itself—for slaves, at least. This sentiment still survives, and it has piled up mountains of useless drudgery. I believe that this instinct to perpetuate useless work is, at bottom, simply fear of the mob. The mob (the thought runs) are such low animals that they would be dangerous if they had leisure; it is safer to keep them too busy to think. A rich man who happens to be intellectually honest, if he is questioned about the improvement of working conditions, usually says something like this: "We know that poverty is unpleasant; in fact, since it is so remote, we rather enjoy harrowing ourselves with the thought of its unpleasantness. But don’t expect us to do anything about it. We are sorry fort you lower classes, just as we are sorry for a cat with the mange, of your condition. We feel that you are much safer as you are. The present state of affairs suits us, and we are not going to take the risk of setting you free, even by an extra hour a day. So, dear brothers, since evidently you must sweat to pay for our trips to Italy, sweat and be damned to you.” This is particularly the attitude of intelligent, cultivated people; one can read the substance if it in a hundred essays. Very few cultivated people have less than (say) four hundred pounds a year, and naturally they side with the rich, because they imagine that any liberty conceded to the poor is a threat to their own liberty. foreseeing some dismal Marxian Utopia as the alternative, the educated man prefers to keep things as they are. Possibly he does not like his fellow-rich very much, but he supposes that even the vulgarest of them are less inimical to his pleasures, more his kind of people, than the poor, and that he had better stand by them. It is this fear of a supposedly dangerous mob that makes nearly all intelligent people conservative in their opinions. Fear of the mob is a superstitious fear. It is based on the idea that there is some mysterious, fundamental difference between rich and poor, as though they were two different races, like negroes and white men. But in reality there is no such difference. The mass of the rich and the poor are differentiated by their incomes and nothings else, and the average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit. Change places, and handy dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief? Everyone who has mixed on equal terms with the poor knows this quite well. But the trouble is that intelligent, cultivated people, the very people who might be expected to have liberal opinions, never do mix with the poor. For what do the majority of educated people know about poverty? In my copy of Villon’s poems the editor has actually thought it necessary to explain the line “Ne pain ne voyent qu'aux fenestres” by a footnote; so remote is even hunger from the educated man’s experience. From this ignorance a superstitious fear of the mob results quite naturally. The educated man pictures a horde of submen, wanting only a day’s liberty to loot his house, burn his books, and set him to work minding a machine or sweeping out a lavatory. “Anything,” he thinks, “any injustice, sooner than let that mob loose.

Just as the drivers in Gatsby and Bonfire responsible for crashes left others to bear the blame, so the One Percent seeks to shift responsibility onto the financial victims (“the madness of crowds”). Governments are blamed for running deficits, despite the fact that they result mainly from tax favoritism to the rentiers. Having used FICA paycheck withholding as a ploy to cut progressive tax rates on themselves since the 1980s, the One Percent blame the indebted population for living longer and creating a “retirement problem” by collecting the Social Security and pensions. This is financial warfare – and not all wars end with the victory of the most progressive parties. The end of history is not necessarily utopia. The financial mode of conquest against labor and industry is as devastating today as in the Roman Republic’s Social War that marked its transition to Empire in the 1st century BC. It was the dynamics of debt above all that turned the empire into a wasteland, reducing the population to debt bondage and outright slavery. Livy, Plutarch and other Roman historians placed the blame for their epoch’s collapse on creditors. Tacitus reports the words of the Celtic chieftain Calgacus, c. 83 AD, rousing his troops by describing the empire they were to fight against: Robbers of the world, having by their universal plunder exhausted the land … If the enemy is rich, they are rapacious; if he is poor, they lust for dominion; neither the east nor the west has been able to satisfy them. … To robbery, slaughter, plunder, they give the lying name of empire. They make a wasteland and call it peace. The

I want to begin my fight for the future of our world with the sharing of a vision. Everyone has, or should have, a vision. This is mine. It is a simple vision, really. It begins with the creation of a single, sane, planetary civilization. That will have to be very much like a utopia. People will deny the possibility of such a dream. They will say that people have always been at each other's throats, that this is just human nature, the way of the world. That we can never change the world. But that is just silly. That is like saying that two battling brothers, children, will never grow up to be the best of friends who watch each other’s backs. Once, a long time ago, people lost their sons and daughters to the claws of big cats. In classic times, the Greeks and the Romans saw slavery as evil, but as a necessary evil that could never go away. Only seventy years ago, Germany and France came to death blows in the greatest war in history; now they share a common currency, open borders, and a stake in the future of Europe. The Scandinavians once terrorized the world as marauding Vikings gripping bloody axes and swords, while now their descendents refrain from spanking their children, and big blond–haired men turn their hands to the care of babies. We all have a sense of what this new civilization must look like: No war. No hunger. No want. No very wealthy using their money to manipulate laws and lawmakers so that they become ever more wealthy while they cast the poor into the gutters like garbage. The wasteland made green again. Oceans once more teeming with life. The human heart finally healed. A new story that we tell ourselves about ourselves and new songs that we sing to our children. The vast resources once mobilized for war and economic supremacy now poured into a true science of survival and technologies of the soul. I want this to be. But how can it be? How will we get from a world on the brink of destruction to this glorious, golden future? I do not know. It is not for any one person to know, for to create the earth anew we will need to call upon the collective genius and the good will of the entire human race. We will need all our knowledge of history, anthropology, religion, and science, and much else. We will need a deep, deep sympathy for human nature, in both its terrible and angelic aspects.

ONE of the evil results of the political subjection of one people by another is that it tends to make the subject nation unnecessarily and excessively conscious of its past. Its achievements in the old great days of freedom are remembered, counted over and exaggerated by a generation of slaves, anxious to convince the world and themselves that they are as good as their masters. Slaves cannot talk of their present greatness, because it does not exist; and prophetic visions of the future are necessarily vague and unsatisfying. There remains the past. Out of the scattered and isolated facts of history it is possible to build up Utopias and Cloud Cuckoo Lands as variously fantastic as the New Jerusalems of prophecy. It is to the past — the gorgeous imaginary past of those whose present is inglorious, sordid, and humiliating — it is to the delightful founded-on-fact romances of history that subject peoples invariably turn. Thus, the savage and hairy chieftains of Ireland became in due course “the Great Kings of Leinster,” “the mighty Emperors of Meath.” Through centuries of slavery the Serbs remembered and idealised the heroes of Kossovo. And for the oppressed Poles, the mediaeval Polish empire was much more powerful, splendid, and polite than the Roman. The English have never been an oppressed nationality; they are in consequence most healthily unaware of their history. They live wholly in the much more interesting worlds of the present — in the worlds of politics and science, of business and industry. So fully, indeed, do they live in the present, that they have compelled the Indians, like the Irish at the other end of the world, to turn to the past. In the course of the last thirty or forty years a huge pseudo-historical literature has sprung up in India, the melancholy product of a subject people’s inferiority complex. Industrious and intelligent men have wasted their time and their abilities in trying to prove that the ancient Hindus were superior to every other people in every activity of life. Thus, each time the West has announced a new scientific discovery, misguided scholars have ransacked Sanskrit literature to find a phrase that might be interpreted as a Hindu anticipation of it. A sentence of a dozen words, obscure even to the most accomplished Sanskrit scholars, is triumphantly quoted to prove that the ancient Hindus were familiar with the chemical constitution of water. Another, no less brief, is held up as the proof that they anticipated Pasteur in the discovery of the microbic origin of disease. A passage from the mythological poem of the Mahabharata proves that they had invented the Zeppelin. Remarkable people, these old Hindus. They knew everything that we know or, indeed, are likely to discover, at any rate until India is a free country; but they were unfortunately too modest to state the fact baldly and in so many words. A little more clarity on their part, a little less reticence, and India would now be centuries ahead of her Western rivals. But they preferred to be oracular and telegraphically brief. It is only after the upstart West has repeated their discoveries that the modern Indian commentator upon their works can interpret their dark sayings as anticipations. On contemporary Indian scholars the pastime of discovering and creating these anticipations never seems to pall. Such are the melancholy and futile occupations of intelligent men who have the misfortune to belong to a subject race. Free men would never dream of wasting their time and wit upon such vanities. From those who have not shall be taken away even that which they have.

Contemporary citizens have become more deluded in their servitude than any previous generation. Somnambulant automata, many critics have observed, sadly allowing slavery to be packaged as liberty; the chicanery of cheap alcohol, soft drugs and casual sex making most Englishmen mindlessly thrall to the type of trivial indulgence which prevents a full flowering of the inmost Self. Such a populace, it hardly needs stating, is estranged from all notions of a historical continuum that doubtlessly emancipate a man. In fact, they are merely members of a restless political un-dead. Believing, quite inaccurately, that their deeply disoriented wits have found a futurist’s utopia through the medium of cultural dissolution! Cut off from antiquity and psychologically disabled through elitist machination, such narcotized natives taste little apart from death between their already dry, blackened, lips.

South Carolina’s rulers did not “seek to replicate rural English manor life” like their Tidewater neighbors, “or to create a religious utopia in the American wilderness,” as settlers in New England attempted; “instead it was a near- carbon copy of the West Indian slave state these Barbadians had left behind, a place even then notorious for its inhumanity.”43 They brought their slaves to South Carolina and pushed them to the limits of human endurance. Slavery was South Carolina’s foundation, not an afterthought or later development: “No other Southern regime was as committed to eighteenth- century elitist principles or so resistant to nineteenth- century egalitarian republicanism. South Carolina’s balance of despotism and democracy, tipping unusually far toward old- fashioned imperiousness, gave its masters strong confidence in contained, hierarchical dominance, and special contempt for sprawling, leveling, ‘mobocracies.

There could be nothing more paradoxical in historical terms than this change: man, at the begining of the industrial age, when in reality did not possess the means for a world in whic the table was set for all who wanted to eat, when he lived in a world in which there were economic reasons for slavery, war, and exploitation in which man only sensed the possibilities of his new sciene and of its application to technique and to production- nevertheless man at the begining of modern development was full of hope. Fourhundred years later when all these hopes are realizable, when man can produce enough for everybody, when war has become unnecessary because technical progress can give any country more wealth than can territorial conquest, when this globe is in the process of becoming as unified as a continent was fourhundred years ago, at the very moment when man is on the verge of realizing his hope, he begins to lose it. Afterword on George Orwell’s 1984

Slavery or barbarism is the result of those who failed to catch up with widespread civilization, or sentimental utopianism, during their generation.

The natives who populated the New World were a problem, but they could be killed or “civilized.” To avoid staining their utopia with the scourge of backbreaking labor, the settlers turned to slavery, bringing millions of men, women, and children over from Africa in chains. They realized that this utopia offered something that no other utopian society had ever offered before—profit. In America, one could live in the kingdom of heaven and get rich at the same time. Truly, this was the land of plenty. The trick was to revise the idea of utopia to include slaves. To do this, they amended the teachings of Christ. He had created Africans to free his followers from endless toil. Immoral became moral.

There are three ways of enslaving people: oppression, religions, and subsidies.

Perhaps in a century or so we’ll look back on these boundaries the way we look back on slavery and apartheid today. One thing is certain however: If we want to make the world a better place, there’s no getting around migration. Even just cracking the door would help. If all the developed countries would let in just 3% more immigrants, the world’s poor would have $305 billion more to spend, say scientists at the World Bank.56 That’s the combined total of all development aid—times three.

If slavery was not quite what Virginians really wanted, it carried them closer to their conservative utopia than any alternative which lay within reach.