December 23, 2024 - The History of New Zealand through a Libertarian Anarchist lens. Please enjoy the ideas and let me know what you think.

Slave Culture

September 24, 2019

By AHNZ

We’ve all known people whose dominant Moral Culture is Slave Culture (SC.) At various times we’ve all probably had to do things to get by that are picked from the SC quadrant.

Aesop was a slave, allowing him to record for history the stories of Slave Culture Classical Greece. Aesop’s Fables reads to me as a guide book for how to get by and stay out of trouble in a world made of Masters and Servants. In keeping with the guiding principle of SC, the characters are all animals rather than people. This offers the user plausible deniability to inquiring Masters because who would punish a Slave for telling tales about dogs, lions, frogs, and donkeys? However, through an Anarchist Lens these seemingly harmless tales are full of hints and tricks and judgements to help the SC navigate their assigned social role. Try reading some of the stories and see what I mean.

Ruling Days

Though the British Empire abolished slavery in 1834 our genes have yet to get that memo. For many kids, Slave Culture is their dominant strategic position in the environment they are raised within and it becomes their personality. When their generation comes of age, Slave Culture becomes the mainstream in society as has happened many times in New Zealand history. To name a few, Seddon Slave Culture (1890s,) Gallipoli Slave Culture (1910s,) Savage Slave Culture (1937-42,) and Muldoonist Slave Culture (1975-80.)

All the Slave Culture chapters in our history are similar to each other, building on the ‘technology’ of the previous. They read the same books, re-tread the same songs and movies. They chase out a Victimhood Culture every time and are every time dethroned themselves by an Honour Culture. The leaders and rulers, the Prime Ministers, of Slave Culture eras are not themselves SC but succeed by appealing to the masses who are. The SC is a protected class and will vote for a strong leader who promises to act as Big Brother protector; Hence the success of Seddon, Savage, Muldoon, etc.

Means of Production

Charlie Brown’s friend from the Peanuts cartoon named Pig Pen (image top) is a classic example of an SC personality. This is a boy who has learned that his personal boundaries will not be respected. He cannot ask people not to abuse and molest him but he can ensure it by repelling them with his bad hygiene. It’s a sad but effective means of effecting one’s environment. If you encounter a kid with a very messy room then chances are they are employing the only way they know how to hold their personal territory. The SC is willing to soil and break his own property to make it undesirable to others because that’s the only way he can feel secure in what is his. It breaks my heart even to point this out but many obese and unkempt women keep the ghosts of their sexually abused past at bay by deliberately (unconsciously) employing these SC tactics.

“For them that must obey authority that they do not respect in any degree…”- Dylan

The SC is epistemologically convinced that he can never self-author but only meet his needs second hand by influencing someone else, and Alpha, who can do so. Being annoying is his forte and so is begging. So is sacrifice, because he never thinks of his freedom or property as really his anyway so letting someone take it away in exchange for stuff makes perfect logical sense. For example, a SC will give up his gun to end gun violence or sign over his rights in exchange for a promise of mercy. Society as a whole loses its best institutions and The State makes its greatest advances on the SC’s watch.

“While one who sings with his tongue on fire
Gargles in the rat race choir
Bent out of shape from society’s pliers
Cares not to come up any higher
But rather get you down in the hole that he’s in”- Dylan

If a pot hole in the road needs fixing, an Honour Culture person would typically go forward and fix it personally himself. A Victimhood Culture person would protest loudly until someone else eventually fixed the hole. A Dignity Culture person would know exactly who to call and what string to pull to get the hole promptly fixed. However, an SC would anonymously spray-paint giant penises around the potholes thus propelling others into action.

A Slave Culture’s active means of production is to test and push at boundaries to wear them out by attrition. This is useless against a K-selected culture like Honour or Dignity Culture but highly effective against a Victimhood Culture society. This is why SC comes after VC and is its natural predator.

“For example, the Victimhood Culture of Mahatma Gandhi took up the cause of hundred of millions of Slave Culture Hindus in the 1940s. They were up against an ex-Dignity Culture in the form of the British Empire which had by 1947 exhausted its Honour Culture phase in the war and lapsed back into Victimhood Culture. Gandhi’s SC force was able to passively protest and flop around with limp bodies and hunger strikes. They were able to suffer baton blows to their bodies and being shot or imprisoned until the Victimhood British became exhausted by the Slave Culture onslaught.”- How Slaves Invade; NZB3

“Prime Minister, you have traded our future for temporary security. The world leaders who you say are “overwhelmed” and consider your instant Slave Response “extraordinary” have a point that I don’t think you’re sharing. You have painted a target on our backs and made Kiwi Minotaur slayers a hunted out-group.”- How Slaves Defend; NZB3

The SC most certainly does get things done but they do so in their own special way. Their means of combat is not face-on but more in the nature of putting a pin on their teacher’s chair or “losing” their Boss’s tools; They are the masters of passive aggression.

We’ll just stand aside, trip them as they go by, and boot them in the ass as they’re falling.”- SC speaking of their idea of fighting for a better world.

As Generation Z comes of age we see an era of SC rising and it will banish the Victimhood Culture in a great clean-out. The process has been under way for some time and is represented by the Jerry Cycle and the Honkler Slave Culture idols.

“Think of a Jerry as a demigod who appears in various forms on Earth in times of Slave Culture, or just think of him as a meme.”- Jerry Cycles; AHNZ

“If war broke out I’d be the last one to know
If there was a fire they’d just leave me to burn
I got just as much to say as any man
But I never seem to get my turn
I don’t want to suffer these conditions no more
Haven’t I the right to say
I don’t want to suffer these conditions no more
Nobody takes me seriously anyway
Nobody takes me seriously anyway
Nobody takes me seriously anyway”
Nobody Takes Me Seriously; Split Enz (1980)

“As much as people who identify with other Cultures try to stop VC it is only the nihilism of the SC who can do so effectively by acts like these.”- Meet Your New God: Scepticism Culture; AHNZ

Falling Down

Victimhood Culture will eventually exhaust itself, every time, trying to cater to the SC. Over time, the marginal returns in power and status the VC can extract fall away while the marginal cost of satisfying the SC’s infinite wants continue to infinity. After pulling out every trick in the book, VC will eventually lose its moral claim to mainstream influence as it becomes clear to all that they have only been harvesting SC grief all along. VC will have to go back to the drawing board until their time comes again and the meek shall inherit the earth…

…but not for long! Honour Culture is the natural predator of Slave Culture. Where a VC would create ‘Safe Spaces’ and ‘Welfare States’ and wheelchair ramps etc for the SC, the HC offers open contempt.

“I pity the fool”- Mr. T

Gandhi Slave Culture would have a snowflake’s chance in Mumbai up against an Honour Culture. Weaklings are shunned, hated, ignored, and even beaten up. The vikings, warlords, gangs, and barbarians etc who make up the HC world are immune to the sacrifices, begging, weaknesses, and suffering that was cash currency in a VC-dominated world. Rather than sympathy, they kick sand into the face of the weaklings or outright bash them just for being out in public. Certainly, the SC will be terrified and use what means they have to be protected but it’s all futile.

The SC will return to being a sub-culture for a generation but from that vantage point create much of the best music, movies, literature, jokes, and technology known to man. In some rare cases, he may also star in those movies and sing those songs, use that technology, and claim the wealth he has created. Usually though, someone else lives up to the SC’s expectations by telling him his shoelace is untied while stealing his lunch money.

It’s a great combination if one can have the creativity and introspection of an SC who ‘got out’ of the jail of that old life to also set healthy boundaries to self-author. This is the legend of the geek who metamorphed into the ubermench, the Clark Kent who becomes Superman. For Americans this is instilled in the culture as the American Dream, the upward mobility of a Walt Disney or Bill Gates. The New Zealander who wants to change is stars has an uphill battle fighting Tall Poppy Syndrome or what mid-90s Slave Culture called being a “try hard.” SC members are their own worst enemies, enforcing horizontally (slave on slave) the rule of how high anyone is allowed to rise. 95% of SC…“Cares not to come up any higher…But rather get you down in the hole that he’s in.” After all, if you could break your slave chains and be an individual then so could he! And he, the SC, is afraid to do that because he remembers so well the hurt inflicted upon him when first his SC soul was wrought as a desperate retreat for the sake of survival. A SC who jail-breaks himself is a living challenge to his fellows to do the same: Grow. Far easier to decapitate the offending Tall Poppy as an anonymous mass activity than to grow and overcome as an individual person. Far easier not to confront this hurdle. Procrastinate and languish and remain a slave. New Zealanders are world leaders in this.

 

 

 

2 thoughts on "Slave Culture"

  1. frances jane says:

    omg so fucking true plus I had to think about how SC kinds got me a long time ago, insidious and unnoticeable, a horror scenario dressed as a confusing, non sequitous joke. A lot to think about here, thank you. The Owen Wilson clip is pure gold.

    1. AHNZ says:

      Thanks. That reminds me I need to give this treatment to the other 3 Moral Cultures too.

      Current era we’re living through: COVID Slave Culture.

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Anarchist History of New Zealand: Nothing new under the sun