Frons domini plus prodest quam occipitium. A master’s face produces more work than the back of his head (Pliny the Elder, Natural History, 18. 6. 31). Have things really changed that much in 2,000 years? If you’re management, you’d say that your workers have it much better than Roman slaves; if you’re a worker and want to keep your job, it’s best to keep silent. When the slave owner supervises what his slaves are doing, this is time well-spent since the slaves are more productive than they would otherwise be. It’s a good day for management, which has gotten its money’s worth.

Any foreman today on the factory floor would agree, with the obvious difference that the employees aren’t called slaves, although if you were trapped in a minimum-wage, dead-end job, with no health benefits amidst unhealthy and unsafe working conditions, you might beg to differ and consider yourself a “wage slave,” exploited and resentful.

You read the initial quotation and believe that slavery is wrong. You don’t see how any civilized society could tolerate such a demeaning condition. Then you recall that it was only a little more than 155 years ago that the American South had slaves and fought the Civil War to keep them; that the morality of slavery was preached from Southern pulpits; that it was permitted in the Old Testament; and that St. Paul in the New Testament says, “Slaves, obey your masters” (Ephesians 6:5).

You’re confused. You know that you would never have wanted to be a slave. Then you wonder whether, had you been raised in the South, you too would have thought that slavery was moral because that’s the way you would have been taught? Environment is a powerful influence. But then you think that the South was prejudiced, but a Southerner would have thought the same thing about the North with its wage slaves.

Huck Finn

You then recall that scene when Huck Finn is rafting down the Mississippi with his friend Jim and has a crisis of conscience. He’s been raised to think that Jim, a black man, is only a piece of property and that he must return him to his rightful owner because that’s what he’s been taught all his life. And if he fails to do so, he’d be committing a sin and be going to Hell.

But Jim’s his friend and he’s just like Huck, only older and a black man, but if he doesn’t take him home, he’ll go to Hell. He’s in turmoil. So, finally he says, “All right, then. I’ll go to Hell!” And at that moment, he becomes a mature moral person with a conscience, one of the most moving scenes in Western literature comparable in moral grandeur to Sophocles’ Antigone disobeying the law of the land under pain of death by burying her brother.

If you’re a Northerner, you know that Huck did the right thing, but if you’re a Southerner, either you’re not sure, or think that he would go to Hell, or that you’d leave it to God, or that the Southern churches got it wrong, but the question is how do you resolve such questions? Are we creatures of our environment, helpless puppets of where and when we’re raised, or are we morally free agents?

And then there’s this consideration: if you were a Southern white but could imagine yourself a black slave, you’d naturally have thought that slavery was wrong. So why wouldn’t you think it’s wrong being white? For one obvious reason: you’d be letting your white skin do your thinking for you instead of your reason.  

That being so, wouldn’t you feel a moral obligation to resist your Southern white racism, or would you be helplessly trapped by your conditioning, afraid to go against it and lose the approval of your fellow whites by claiming that slavery was wrong?

The Golden Rule

So, is the key to the problem be the Golden Rule of doing unto others as you would have them do unto you? You wouldn’t have applied that same moral reasoning to black slaves because you lacked the moral courage to do so, and if you were honest with yourself, you would realize this. Is the Golden Rule, then, the infallible guide to follow if you’re ever unsure what’s the right thing to do?

Or is it always a matter of knowing what’s right but lacking the courage to go public with it because it would mean losing your friends and being rejected by your society? Or would losing your friends be better than living a lie for the rest of your life?

Question: If your friends keep you from acting on your beliefs, should you reject your friends or your beliefs? Or is it knowing that you should reject those friends, but again lacking the courage to do so? Is it only when a decision costs you pain that you know that you really do hold that belief and are willing to suffer for it?

College-Debt Slaves

You may meet people today, even college graduates, stuck in low-paying jobs who will tell you that they’re in much the same predicament as those Roman slaves. Nothing has changed since they’re forced into these dead-end jobs out of desperation because there is so much resistance to raising the minimum wage, although conditions have improved in some states.

And those who were in college and forced to drop out see themselves not only as “wage slaves,” but also as “debt slaves,” trying to pay off their college debt while at the same time trying to survive. This makes it necessary, through no fault of their own, to move back home with their parents, where they’re forced into a kind of prolonged adolescence, deferring marriage, starting a family, buying a home, and moving on with their lives.

What they have to endure requires great patience and courage, and they are to be commended for the dignity and grace with which they bear their cross. Everyone sees this as the government’s fault for failing to address this problem of its own making.

Betsy DeVos

Many millennials are angry at the unfairness of their situation when it wasn’t this way when their parents’ and grandparents’ generations attended college on low-interest government loans, whereas the young were abandoned by the previous GOP administration in the person of Betsy DeVos, Trump’s Secretary of Education, who even protected these predatory lending institutions that defrauded tens of thousands of students with exorbitant rates of interest.

Forty-four million Americans are presently paying off student debt to the collective tune of 1.5 trillion dollars, at an average of $34,000 per student, though President Biden has been fighting the usual MAGA GOP obstructionists to do what is right.

This neoliberal policy exploits the young, making it virtually impossible for them to receive a college education, so that they become discouraged and finally drop out. In the meantime, the GOP decries this waste of taxpayers’ money when it could be put to far better use by billions in tax cuts for the already wealthy.

Class Warfare

Many see what is going on today as a continuing class warfare against working-class students as part of a larger GOP political agenda, lest the civil rights and student protest movements of the1960’s repeat themselves now with demands for political freedom and economic justice. Those protests gave rise to the famous GOP “Powell Memorandum” and the Trilateral Commission Report, both of which saw this student activism as an aberration of an “excessive democracy.” 

Corporate America

Those students, however, saw their protests as the legitimate demands of their citizen rights in the face of an illegal takeover of our government by the entrenched vested interests of Corporate America, which felt that this generation of students was getting above itself by overstepping its proper bounds and that countermeasures had to be taken to remedy the situation.

This remedy took the form of government for the next several decades discouraging working-class students from receiving a college education by discontinuing federal funding and low-interest college loans. 

Only students from predominantly upper-middle class and wealthy homes could be trusted with power and deemed safe enough to be granted entry to a college education to staff the traditional professions, corporations, government bureaucracies, and Wall Street with bankers, lawyers, and technocrats. These students were in no need of such loans since their parents could pay for their education. 

What was feared by the GOP was an entire generation of college-educated students of a working-class background who would then use their education and political savvy  to resist the ongoing GOP agenda of oppressing the American population.

Noam Chomsky

Some background about what happened to American higher education after World War II?  Noam Chomsky explains: In the 1950s, the United States was a much poorer country than it is today, but education was pretty close to free. The GI Bill gave, literally, free education to huge numbers of people who would never have been able to go to college. For a lot of reasons, I don’t think you can believe that it’s an economic problem. So, what is it caused by? It hasn’t really been studied, but there are a number of factors that you can see acting.

One is that since the 1970’s, in colleges and universities, the percentage of administrators has gone way up. There’s a book by a sociologist named Benjamin Ginsberg called “The Fall of the Faculty,” which discusses the changes that have taken place. Faculty and students stay sort of steady, but administrators are shooting way up. There’s a big growth of salaries at the administrative level.

Another thing that’s happened is that colleges, for whatever reason, are building facilities to make student life more exciting, social things, gyms, and better dormitories. Going back to the 50’s, it was all very serviceable. You went to school. Everything was there. It wasn’t super fancy.

Disciplinary Technique

But I suspect the main reason, and this hasn’t been studied, is that debt is a disciplinary technique. It controls people. There was a big, elite reaction to the activism of the 1960s across the spectrum. There was too much freedom and too much independence. There were even, literally in these words, calls for criticism of institutions responsible for the indoctrination of the young. They weren’t doing their job. They weren’t indoctrinating young people properly in order to train them to be disciplined and obedient. There was a lot of criticism that the country was getting too democratic — literally too much democracy.

People have to be passive and apathetic and obedient. This coming from liberals, incidentally, not from the right wing. And part of this, right about that time, student debt started going up. Whatever the purpose is, it is a way of trapping people. Once you have a big debt, you can’t do things you might have wanted to do.

You might have wanted to graduate from law school and do public interest law, but if you have a $100,000 debt to pay off, you’re going to have to go into a corporate law firm. Once you get into it, you’re trapped by the culture and forget about public interest law. And that happens all over. (Interview with William Hodgkinson, Breakwater Review, May 14, 2013.)

Entering Politics

Is politics, then, the answer? Is voting people out of office who are insulated from the lives of average Americans and the sorry conditions under which most of them are forced to endure? And voting into office those who have come up the hard way and understand the injustice of present-day America and the universal misery it’s causing?

However, and this is important, is it also possible for someone of the middle or working class to be voted into office with good intentions to reform the system, go to Washington or a state capital, and become corrupted by that very system?

If you’re thinking of entering politics while you’re still in college, talk to reporters, journalists and professors of journalism about these questions. Ask them to be up-front with you about the pros and cons of political office. They see what’s happening every day.

Salt of the Earth

Reporters and journalists are the salt of the earth and you can trust them! Reading books is fine, but talk to these people in the trenches who are devoting their lives to an ideal at the heart of our democracy — freedom of the press to report the truth as they see it. Sit at their feet and learn from them for you’re in the presence of greatness.

Should the churches, synagogues, mosques, and other places of worship do more in speaking out against this social injustice? Should they protest? If you feel that the clergy are the conscience of our nation, should they be critical of the government when they see that it’s not living up to its moral obligations of helping everyone, not only the rich and powerful? Or is this politics into which the clergy should never intrude?

Or is standing up for what they see is morally wrong, the essence of these men and women who have given their lives to God and feel compelled to speak truth to power about social injustice as the Old Testament prophets once did long ago? 

Politics embodies any number of moral questions about which the clergy have a duty to address as central to their calling.

Government & the Poor

But isn’t this the responsibility of the State? Doesn’t the government have an obligation to the poor, the sick, the elderly, and the disabled, or only to the wealthy and powerful who need no one to speak up for them for they simply bribe the politicians to do their bidding by re-election contributions?

Since it is the government’s responsibility to care for all of its citizens, and when the clergy see that this isn’t happening, shouldn’t they speak out to remedy these social wrongs?

Isn’t love thy neighbor as thyself as true today as it was centuries ago? Or is it every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost? FDR, where are you now when we need you? Don’t we have an obligation to help those in need, and, if so, how can we, as a supposedly civilized nation, help make this happen?

Progressives see the problem as economic inequality with the top 1% of American families owning 40% of the wealth, a situation that cries to heaven in its shocking injustice. They claim that it’s an open secret that these families and their lawyers have rigged our economic system for themselves alone.

Financial Armageddon

Corporate America and the Super-Rich are bleeding our nation white in a financial Armageddon that is leaving in its wake an America of gated communities within a no-man’s-land of a marginalized proletariat in an apocalyptic landscape of despair.

This Minority alone lives the good life with an elite education and lifestyle. They are served by an underclass of obedient wage-slaves, the Majority, who eke out a precarious existence on the margins of society. This explains what has been happening in America since the 1980’s. In a word, a quality education for the few, and vocational training and education-as-obedience-and-rote-memory for the many. 

And then there is privatized education with its mantra of “choice,” a dog whistle for old-time racial segregation repackaged to soothe the country-club set.

The curse of the modern world has been Neoliberalism. It cares for no one but the Rich and the Privileged. It does not view the 99% as human, but as drains on the treasury, which the wealthy believe is theirs, although refusing to pay taxes!

Social Darwinism

It is, in essence, Social Darwinism that says that only the Rich should survive and flourish. Riches, Power, and Privilege are all that matter in this modern jungle called America! Look around to see the results of this inhuman philosophy with the GOP, its faithful flamekeeper.

Their creed is simple. Government isn’t there to solve problems. Government is the problem. It is too large, unwieldy, inefficient and needs to be starved. What is important is Big Business and Big Business alone as the solver of our nation’s woes. It should pay no taxes! There should be no regulations on Business! What the government has traditionally done should be turned over to Business, which is much more efficient. In a word, everything must be privatized.

It is a recipe straight out of Hell. Business is the reason for so many of our problems today — Big Business, the Corporate State, Wall Street, and the Banking Industry with its tentacles around everything, with the Rich and Powerful devoid of conscience. They are ruining our nation in their denial of Global Warming if the rising seas don’t drown us first. And into the vacuum will stride, as he always has, that pestilential would-be Savior who will make everything great once again.

Thrasymachus 

He steps right out of the pages of Plato’s Republic, Book Seven, the Eternal Pied Piper, to whom so many of the credulous always succumb, held spellbound by his silken promises. If only they would vote for him, everything would be fine. He will bring about a Golden Age. But once in office, as night follows day, he will turn on them. His name, Thrasymachus, in our modern times spelt with five capital letters emblazoned in gold, fool’s gold: TRUMP!

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