The whole comment above is excellent.

I can’t imagine owning slaves. It would drive me nuts. Having had to supervise people I hate trying to get people to function properly.

I guess if I could whip them it might make it easier but don’t care to whip people either unless they deserve it.

Yes–this is Peter Turchin’s “elite overproduction.” The British could send their excess to America or India or Australia. We have nowhere to ship ours off to.

There’s a decently strong history on the degrading influence of a slave society on the master class, though, and it’s not quite eliminated by removing all the overwrought, bodice ripping mandingo fiction. It pervades post-1865 Southern writing, and some American fantasy literature.

The thing I find most striking about that passage, though, is that such a race-conscious society would have so poorly inculcated its core distinction in those boys’ minds. Presumably tearing up the white townsfolk and their shops had unexpected consequences for them. If it didn’t, that really showed an example of society kowtowing to the Slave Power.

This too!

As usual, Kirk finds the decisive angle.

Today, while reading an article about Thomas Jefferson and his plans for education reform, I came across this passage about his experience as a student;

…”Taylor demonstrates that Jefferson, who had begged to enroll at “the College” at age 16, nurtured an ambivalence about William & Mary that eventually hardened into distaste. His late-in-life accounts of his time there almost invariably cast the school in a negative light. The campus was full of rowdy and haughty young men who looked down on the townspeople of Williamsburg and were given to drink, debauchery, and violence. Jefferson admitted that in his earliest days there he had participated in some of the riotous battles himself.

Taylor cites an example from Jefferson’s first year, when “students gathered in the gallery of the Williamsburg church during services and spat and urinated on the townspeople below.” The capstone of these chaotic events had the students shooting off guns and whipping “some captive apprentices.” The students’ adolescence was part of the problem. They lacked judgment. But these young men, born and raised in a slave society, were also used to having unbridled power over other human beings. They carried this sense of entitlement with them to college….”

If you pause to look at it from a particular angle, that “lost status as master” explains and illuminates an awful lot of the entire issue we’re currently dealing with around the world. The slave master thinks they’re owed fealty and that the world should order itself to their desires, when the reality is that they’ve lost their primacy, hopefully forever. It’s a mental disease that they’ve retained, wanting to tell everyone around them what to do, when to do it, and how to do it. Free men don’t think that way, or really understand the drive to mastery that these ass-clowns have.

Similarly, the Chinese oligarchy sees itself as heir to the Confucian mandarin class, entitled to tell their social inferiors what to do whenever they like. This disease is transmitted along the same lines as power generally is, and if you look at the power-seekers like Lenin or Mao, they’re all frustrated little men who feel entitled to the prerogatives of the old nobility.

It’s also true of the over-educated excess numbers of the elite we’ve bred up in our education/indoctrination system. They all feel entitled to run things, and they’ve been brainwashed to think that they can run things better than anyone else, but the sad reality is that they’re merely the latest version of the sad old “ancien regime” excess of nobles.

Our schools churn out myriads of these losers every year, and like the old aristocracy, there’s not enough room for them at the table–Which is why they churn so self-destructively at the door, demanding power that they think they so richly deserve. The reality is that the vast majority are no more suited to responsible wielding of civil power in our society than a howler monkey.

There are lots of interesting things about the disadvantages of slave economies, and one of the best examples is the damage done to the Roman equivalent of the Roman “working class” by the slave economy…