So, hypothetical world where chattel slavery is a thing in the whole of your country and has been going on for hundreds of years.
You’re a fairly well to do person, society expects someone in your position to own slaves and you’ve just inherited 20 of them, some of whom may be your half-siblings.
It’s generally considered pointless to educate slaves to any level beyond the most basic maths and reading. There’s nowhere to release them to and laws against cruelty to slaves or neglecting/abandoning them.
Assuming current technology levels, how would you make the best use of your slaves?
I’d educate them to as great an extent as I was able, certainly at least to the level of a modern high schooler. Maybe the society I’m in considers that pointless, but I don’t.
And I’d ask them what they want me to do with them. Again, society might think that there’s nowhere to release them to, but they might have different opinions. If nothing else, there’s the option of releasing them right there, and offering them paid jobs.
Firstly pay them for their labours so they are no longer slaves.
Give each of them a certificate of their freedom and laws which free men must obey.
Then as free folk they can choose to either work for pay or leave.
It is not about education or making amends for past mistakes, its about ending their status as a slave.
What were they doing before? You may be unaware but slavery was common throughout the world until relatively recently and slaves could rise to positions of considerable power. Indeed, powerful slaves could themselves own slaves.
Hard to say what I’d do if I had lived all my life in a society where slavery was normal. This theoretical me would have far different ideas than the ones the real me has.
But if we assume that I’m somehow essentially the same person I am now in this different situation, I’d seek to use some of my wealth to relocate these slaves to a place where they were free and help to set them up in some kind of situation where they can sustain themselves. Send them to Canada and buy them a farm or something like that. I figure I owe them; presumably a good portion of my wealth was produced by their labor.
If slavery is universal and there’s no place for a freed slave to live then I guess I’d try to make the best of the situation by setting up something where they could have a simulated free life. I’d retain ownership of them for legal purposes while not exercising any of the powers of ownership. Give them the use of a section of land on my property and let them run their own farms.
They ran your father’s lands, farming & tourism. The lands were lost in legal shenanigans so you’re left with just slaves.
Slaves need special permission to leave country with you and all other countries will return them if you try to dump them & you’ll be fined for slave abandonment.
You can give the slaves money if you want but it will still legally be your money, slaves may be beaten for theft if they’re treating your money as their own.
I’d just treat them as people who lived in the house with me, and happened to do all the housework - largely because I suck at things like housework and cleaning. If for some reason they didn’t want to do the housework, well, whatever. I’m used to that too. I’d appreciate them not walking off with the remote, though.
Twenty housemates is a lot, though. I hope I live in a pretty big place or it’ll be awfully crowded. And presuming I did live in a pretty large place, I wouldn’t be bothered if my slaves didn’t want anything to do with me. I’ll stay in my rooms, they stay in their rooms, and if none of them feels inclined to cook for me, well, I guess I’ll keep eating deli food and takeout. Whatever, I’m used to it.
Regarding money, if they earn it for the household, then I figure it’s reasonable if they also benefit from it. Good food, comfortable furniture, Netflix accounts for everybody. Personal possessions are absolutely allowed, if they bring in the funds for it; yes I’ll have to manage the budgets and technically hold the money because laws but seriously. Of course I’m not all altruistic; if the household is doing well I’ll probably be happy to join them for meals and let them feed me, maybe even let them pay for my living as well if the house can afford it. Hey, the culture tells me I should, so who am I to argue? It’s too much work to be all tyrannical about it, though.
Any of them want to learn stuff, that’s fine with me. I don’t figure I’m much of a teacher, so I won’t be doing it myself, but if the household can afford it I’ll totally send them to all the school they want to attend (and are allowed to attend); it’ll make them better breadwinners, and the household benefits from breadwinners.
And if having given them access to the kitchen knives one of them murders me for being a slaveowner, I’ll be seriously annoyed.
I was hoping for more of a ‘how practical would owning slaves be in an industrialised nation’ discussion.
I think we can assume that everyone here thinks slavery is bad and if you were a slaveowner in the past, you would have bucked the trend and emancipated them all.
In this hypothetical, you can’t get rid of them or free them. You can have them as roommates if you like but they’ll probably be pretty confused by the arrangement and society will vies you as mad/perverted.
It’s not practical at all if you artificially create conditions that permit only the continuation of human slavery. I might as well arm them with AR-15’s and create a terrorist cell to wage war against an inhumane economy. Under your restrictions, becoming outlaws is the only sane response.
Hey now, how is getting all your slaves killed a sane response? Shouldn’t you at least ask them if they want to all be killed? (And yes, they’d be killed. You’d go to trial, if you survived your initial confrontation with society/the police, but they wouldn’t.)
Stray cats aren’t an “ecological disaster.” Whatever effect they have on the ecosystem is totally negligible compared to a thousand other things. If they were an ecological “disaster”, why is it that there’s not a single time in my entire life where I’ve been bothered in any way by a stray cat? A “disaster” is something that effects everybody. This country used to have huge wild cats roaming all over the place, just be thankful the only ones now are too small to pose a threat.
An ecological disaster is when thousands of people starve to death because crops don’t grow, or die of dehydration because of a drought, or are suffocated in a mudslide, or die of radiation sickness and cancer from the effects of a nuclear bomb. Your idea of a disaster is fucking distorted.
Oh, and about this - I don’t imagine slaves would be all that practical in an industrialized nation, because “industrialized nation” means “sending them off the property to go work”. That means constant opportunities for slaves to at least try to escape - though I suppose that could be mitigated by transporting them to the factories/offices and back in prison buses. (…Driven by other slaves?)
Though of course, if the slaves would be “pretty confused by the arrangement” of being treated like basic equals in a household, then perhaps they’re stupider than actual slaves made by enslaving people - perhaps they’re robots or something. (Even for the sake of argument I’m unwilling to accept that actual humans become subhumanly stupid or docile while enslaved.)
I have loads of slaves in this technological age. I have slaves who transport my sedan car, and who fan me and keep me cool while I travel. I have slaves who do my laundry. I have slaves who light my lamps, and heat my house.
Oh, you mean human slaves…
In all honesty, if I had been born as a slaveowner in a world where that was commonplace, I probably wouldn’t have freed them. I am not a revolutionary thinker. I would likely have tried to treat them decently by the standards of the day, perhaps freed one or two who seemed to have a lot of potential to succeed on their own, but mostly maintained the status quo.
But your hypothetical is weird. As best as I know, there’s never been a place where it was impossible to manumit a slave, and most of the societies that had slaves included a fair number of wealthy powerful slaves who lived pretty well. So I don’t know if we are just in a world where you control wage-slaves who have signed an extremely tight non-compete, and have no practical alternative but to do your bidding, or if we are in a world that wants agricultural slaves en mass, or a world with legislated sadism, or what.