A lot of discussions around big topics seem to forget that a majority of the “great” things done in the past were only possible because of brutal slavery. We slowly realized slavery is evil, but inherited systems that need it, so, shoehorned modernity into that framework.

It is difficult to overstate just how much depended on slaves– on a civilization’s and individual’s ability to not remunerate someone’s time and labour. To own someone as property. Pick a topic. Ask an expert of the field if its success was enabled by slaves.

Everything from farming to maintaining buildings & cities, growing the human population, fighting wars, building beautiful monuments, roads, to trade, exploration, travel all the way down to individual productivity of pioneering leaders, philosophers, scientists and artists: this particular type of ambition & the habits we’re now used to were enabled by slavery, exploitation and murder.

Man’s first taste of *scale* and economies of scale in most endeavours was enabled by slavery or exploitation. And the descendant productive/logistical systems of those endeavours still struggle to work without it.

Every culture or empire we admire or Great Man theory we subscribe to before the World Wars– they were enabled purely by slaves. They survived as long as they did because they had slaves. Not as much because they were “based” or “Lindy” on their own.

And if we happen to be of a nationality different from that of the nation or people we admire– remember if we were alive then, there’s a good chance we’d have been one of the slaves. And our fate would not have been pleasant whichever gender or race we are.

So if we’re trying hard to make something about our world fair, consensual & sustainable, the first thing we may want to consider is if it can be done at all with the present system and values. Are we catering to a need, a want or taste? Or is it simply habit, an entitlement?

It may be an instance where if we see Chesterton’s fence, we might need to abandon the entire land, not examine the fence from a puffy intellectual and theological level or burn it down from pure moral outrage.

It may be that the logistics will *never* work out.

I’m continuously encountering otherwise smart people who claim something is sustainable– from climate interventions and “rengenerative practices” to their chosen form of power production or human sustenance– because they conveniently stopped asking “ok but where does the [x] for *that* come from?” at the point in the line of enquiry they found most personally, politically or aesthetically pleasing.

This is a humbling thing for both pro-capitalists *and* anti-capitalists to keep in mind, as well as adherents of all sorts of ideologies.

It’ll help us remember where our species came from, and where it wants to go.