Most people are not moved by the mind-but by spinal cords.
Now the people have been programmed to love their bondage and are left to clutch only mirage-like images of freedom, its fables and fictions. The new slaves are linked together by vast electronic chains of television that imprison not their bodies but their minds. Their desires are programmed, their tastes manipulated, their values set for them. Whereas the black slave was chained to a living master, the new slave has become a number, a mere item of production that is expended by an invisible master without heart or soul.
The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in so called democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power. Were dominated by the relatively small number of persons. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind, who harness old social forces and contrive new ways to bind and guide the world.
I argue that an awakening is the first step to freedom, for unless we understand our enslavement, we cannot reject it; unless we become aware of our imprisonment, we cannot free ourselves.
Nearly every great nation in history was built on the backs of slaves the Romans, the Egyptians, yes, the castles of the English lords. The human race has advanced on the crumbling bodies and endless sweat of those whose lives were stolen from them by those in power. The foundation of Western nation, too, was a system of slavery.
Nothing changes. But we have learned to cloak slavery with the myth of freedom. That is quite an accomplishment. Yet remember, the slave had a guaranteed sustenance. He had a pallet of straw to sleep on and he was fed, although little and cheaply. When he died he was buried in a shallow grave by the master.
Ask the millions of unemployed today who desperately search for work if they are slaves slaves without masters. Parents struggle and sacrifice to send their children to college so they can become slaves of corporations that will use them up, and when they are finished with them, cast them out, nowadays often without pensions. In the old slavery, a child was taken from his parents and sold. In the new slavery the child, born in Canada, will leave his family to be educated in America and to work for a corporation in, say, Los Angeles. The family is no longer a unit that protects its members. The tribe is gone (unless by becoming a fan of a football or baseball team one joins such an impersonal tribe.) If we work for others we are slaves with few rights. When the dead master (the corporation that is and never has been alive) is finished with the slave the slave joins the ranks of the unemployed, feels worthless, worried, lost and wasted. If we work for ourselves we are slaves to the system, to taxation, to rules of law, to endless regulations that, at last, are mostly intended to benefit the money interests of the nation. No one can escape the slavery. The farmer works himself to the bone to reap his crop, but the price he gets is the price that all farmer slaves get the amount that the corporate system will allow.
But at the bottom of this whole mess of rules, customs, the philosophy of free enterprise, the stock market, the entire business world, the laws and the court system is the overriding interest of power. We protect money before we protect people.
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