What makes a person think it is ok to keep a slave?

Question

How can this be ok in ANYONES mind?

Are there not human instincts built into most of us to make us want to protect or comfort a person?

How can a culture of humans treat other humans so badly and proclaim ownership of another being and not feel any remorse???

I am reading a book at the moment called Slave by Mende Nazer it is breaking my heart to read and it is not a history book this is a true story of a girls plight that only took place in the late 20th century early 21st century!! - we are only talking a couple of years ago!!!!!!!!!

I am horrified by what I am reading. How can people be so cold and cruel? I can not comprehend how a women - a mother can treat a person - a child, in the ways described in the book.

Answer 1

First of all, I by no means support slavery but here are the facts.

Slavery has been a normal thing for many cultures around the world throughout time.  It is a new concept created by the west for all to be equal.  Slavery is a normal condition for the world and equality is not the norm.

Depending on how you want to look at it, everyone is a slave to some extent and there is no such thing as freedom.  True freedom would be chaos and the world would not survive.

The wiki article has a line which does a good job at explaining things:  "Slavery is a social-economic system under which certain persons — known as slaves — are deprived of personal freedom and compelled to work."  In the west, we are slaves by definition.  We have to work for money or we go hungry, that pretty well fits the definition.

Answer 2

The slave trade is alive and kicking all over the world, it's only the developed countries that really made any major effort to kill it off (they failed). It still thrives in the form of the forced s*x industry worldwide, child rug weavers in India, cocoa bean pickers in West Africa, domestic service in the Arab world... the list is pretty long.

You should remember that at least one major world religion accepts slavery as approved by 'the prophet', so they aren't going to fight to stamp it out. At least a couple of Saudi Imams have called for slavery to legal again.

It's a matter of perception, if a person is property, they become de-humanised, like a dog, so people can get very nasty if their 'possession' doesn't do what 'it' is told.

Answer 3

One of the ways is by thinking of the enslaved as not people.  Look at how black people were, and often still are, thought of in the US.  They were compared unfavorably with animals and were considered less intelligent than whites and in need of guidance from whites.  This attitude persists even today, over 150 years after slavery was abolished.

Answer 4

Obviously no, there are not human instincts built into most of us, that blah blah blah blah.

Most people who think it's ok to keep slaves, think so because that's what they were told all their lives.  

And if you lived in a society that told you that all the time, you'd probably believe it too.

Then again, I'm sure a lot of slave holders don't consider what they're doing especially cruel.  I've read that southern American slave holders often had elaborate rationalizations for what they were doing.  The slaves were happier in captivity.  It was an act of charity to take them out of the wilderness and provide them with a structured life in the civilized world.  They weren't mentally equpped to handle freedom anyhow, it would be cruel to release them.  And so on.  

You should also bear in mind that nature itself imposes a lot of cruelty into life in general that people just have to put up with, more so in previous times here.  So people often tend to be conditioned to accept a certain amount of cruelty in life, as part of their idea of 'the natural order.'  And so on.

Answer 5

We have plenty of instincts, just like every animal on this planet.  We just tend to make up a lot of hooey to explain our instincts to ourselves and others.  

To answer your question, however, look up the following words:

enculturation,

socialization

and an anthropological definition of "naturalization"

Sickening business.. this ... culture...