Slavery No Longer Matters: Essay One.

We mustn’t concern ourselves at all with what the slave regarded as the Fourth of July. The most important question is this: what is it to the slave’s descendants? That remains to be decided, but it seems fair to say this much: a great many of them enjoy both the food and the fireworks, especially the barbecue and the beer. Such is the nature of progress: once the slaves are freed, slavery itself is largely drowned out in a more collective freedom; this is, in fact, the goal for all forms of “inclusion” which are not Leninist forms of seizure. Those who remain “slaves” are simply those who cannot avail themselves of such collective freedoms, since their minds are still in bondage to an identity which lives only in the past, customarily excavated from ruins and polished to look contemporary by that same sleight of hand which would pass a modern fabrication off as an historical artifact. The only slaves in this country have, for over a hundred years, been what Huxley’s generation referred to as “television and radio fodder”: disenchanted adolescents, some well into their forties, who have neither a sense of immediate connection to their surroundings nor a feeling of solidarity with their society and its constituents, who would gladly submit to the first identity which is imposed upon them, only to buy into the first revolution which is sold to them. Liberalism, especially in the Marxist school, aimed primarily to set people free from these forms of conditioning; corporate liberalism, as presented by a centralized media, only perpetuates this feeling of disenfranchisement, all the while obscuring the phenomenological facts of free, willing choice, vilifying the collective concept of responsibility, and promising, by implication, a form of liberation which it is never legally obligated to provide upon purchase. It is because so much of our information is streamlined, presented as if it conformed to the Aristotelian Law of Non-Contradiction, that these perpetual adolescents who comprise the consuming public gladly take up arms against an enemy on that same enemy’s say-so, dismissing any intimation of an underlying paradox as if it were NOT the start of philosophical insight but rather the End of Reason.

[({Dm.A.A.)}]