The Slave Mentality

[This piece deals in very broad strokes]

Every decent man of our time is and must be a coward and a slave. That is his normal condition. I am deeply convinced of it. He's made that way and arranged for it. And not in the present time owing to some chance circumstances, but generally in all times a decent man must be a coward and a slave. That is the natural law of all decent people on earth. If one of them does happen to get a bit of pluck in something, let him not be eased or pleased with that: he's still quail before something else. 

Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground. 

The character uttering the above is full of cynicism, touching on despair, so there is an element of revenge in his utterances about cowardice and enslavement, but there is still at least a strong foundation of truth in his observations or claims.

There have, as long as recorded history, been masters & slaves with varying degees between the two extremities; masters here in the sense of the ruling elites of the societies. It is in the interests of the masters that the slaves' lot not be too traumatic lest, like Spartacus they revolt, and also in the slaves' interests that they be content with their lot as the odds tend to be stacked radically against them if they ever do feel like risking a revolt, Spartacus not ending particularly well after all. And so it is natural that a slave philosophy to have subconsciously developed to justify to oneself the social order so as not to be forever reminded of one's abjectness before the masters of this order. Such a slave-mentality would broadly advocate an obsequious attitute to one's masters and in the absence of especial misery the rightness of the social order. 

Since slavery & mankind go back such a long way, this philosophy becomes like a computer programme hard-wired into the mind's mechanism, and such a mental hardwiring of the mind will not simply disappear overnight. Over long stretches of our history, the lot of the what we may broadly term the slave populations have improved though the same broad master-slave relationship is being enacted. To the subject of the slave mentality in his purest form, the notion that he is a slave is an impossible one to comprehend since his very mind mechanism has come to be identical with this very slave mentality. The modern archetypal slave would have pious faith in the entire order of things as ordained by the political leaders of his state, and the economic leaders whose interests are represented by the political system. He believes essentially all that is told him by the truth revealing mechanisms of the rulers, ie the media, believing his opinion to be formed by his own objective analysis of objective facts, unaware that his gaze is merely being pointed in desired directions by the means of propaganda of the ruling masters.

 The slave equates his own desires with those of the masters & we can see this in the form of patriotism, or at least a toxic form of patriotism, where the slaves achieve a personal satisfaction of their will to power through sublimation of their desires into the achievements of the State, and this identification of the individual ego with the projected national ego is an immense potential tool of manipulation for the masters of the social-political system. 

 In the pure form, because of the absolute alignment of the person with the slave mentality, a truth revealing attack on the social order of things is experienced as an attack on his personal being, and despite the power of the evidence presented to awaken him to reality, the structure of self which he believes himself to be acts as an impenetrable force-field exactly like in those sci-fi films where incoming misssiles are annihilated by this defence mechanism. This shield is doubly effective in that it actually tends to re-direct the attack back on the person trying to wake him up- this typically rendered where the messenger of the uncomfortable truth is mocked as a conspiracy theorist or madman, and the slave strucure left intact & even reinforced. As in the films, however, in all but the purest slaves this defence-shield can be weakened if enough outside force generated, or ideally from an enlightenment experience within where this hallucinated or imprisoned self vanishes in tandem with its own liberation. He might tell himself for example, “Wait a minute - the Fake News really is fake news!”