Self-Knowledge

Just the way it is.— Our age is subject to normalcy bias on a scale that would be utterly unthinkable and practically impossible without a century of compulsory government schooling designed to indoctrinate every human being to spiritual submission and the matter-of-fact acceptance of bondage.

Does that sound extreme to you? Then you are Exhibit A.

A cute sign of the times.– The first era in history to smugly declare itself above such an inhuman atrocity as slavery — so far above it that it has the moral authority to condemn as fundamentally evil all past eras — is also the first era in history to universalize slavery. And I am not using an incendiary image to be controversial. I do not speak of metaphorical slavery, but of the genuine article, as Socrates and Plato, the founders of political philosophy, understood the notion to encompass the condition of man under tyranny — the loss of all practical power of self-governance and self-ownership.

Know thyself.— It is neither hyperbolic nor even particularly special to define oneself accurately, employing vocabulary such as bondage and slavery, merely because that definition might happen to be disturbing to the delicate and deluded. Such accurate language is simply an instance of self-understanding, and therefore a philosophical imperative.