Reforming America: Modern Day Slavery

The "slave mentality" is not limited to slaves or their descendants. It is the inevitable outcome of people becoming too reliant on the direction of others in their daily lives. The "slave mentality" can start with people focusing too much on the superficial and becoming slaves to style or fashion. It can come from the rejection of thought and education making people reliant on the knowledge of others to survive. It can come from blind consumption of media without critical examination of the things we see and hear.

Regardless of where it comes from it is detrimental to our lives. For people living in the "slave mentality" there is often a sense of no control over their lives or worse yet a false sense of control where none exists. The reality for most people is that they have a lot of areas in their lives where they can exercise some control but others where they have to live with the judgments of others controlling the conditions under which they live. What is most important is for people to learn to recognize where they can control their own lives and take ownership of those areas.

One of the big areas in which we all have some level of control is how we spend money. In many communities people will sacrifice food and shelter to buy the latest car or jewelry to create the illusion of wealth because they want to emulate the people that they idolize. They become slaves to an ideal that they can never achieve through legitimate means. In some cases they can end up committing crimes and doing great harm to others for essentially nothing. If these slaves to image focused their efforts on pursuits of more substance such as education and career development they might actually break the cycle of poverty and rise above the situation into which they were born. By allowing themselves to be enticed into foolish actions to gain something of little real worth they are condemning themselves to a life of misery as slaves to the producers of the goods they believe they must have.

For too many Americans consumption has become a lifestyle. We buy and buy and buy and don’t really know why. We buy things we don’t need and often don’t use more than an insignificant number of times relative to how much effort it took to earn the money to buy the items. This is an area where we could exercise a lot of control but choose not to. We have been convinced by the powerful that our lives will have meaning if we just have that one thing when that one thing is basically meaningless. Part of the problem is that we have become so accustomed to consuming that we don’t even realize we are doing it without purpose. We like to shop and have shiny new things but never seem to find fulfillment in our purchases because there is none to be had. We are slaves to momentary satisfaction sacrificing real happiness and time with the people who love us working harder and harder to buy things that we don’t need.

We have to break out of this cycle of self-destructive behavior. We need to recognize that we have very basic needs that we need to meet and that everything else is choices we need to make. We all need food, shelter and clothing. Those basic needs are universal to the human condition. Everything else is secondary. In a modern society we may need other tools to acquire the resources we need to meet our core needs but those also can be quite basic. Nobody needs a Lexus to get from point A to point B. Why spend the earnings from thousands of hours of work to get transportation when much less is needed to acquire a vehicle that will do the job just as well? We need to be more pragmatic and less superficial if we are to improve our circumstance. More bag lunches and fewer DVDs will do a lot to improve our financial situations and lessen the need for us to work those extra hours to pay the bills.

Americans are slaves who hold their own chains. We simply need to exercise more good judgment and focus on the really important things in life, none of which are bought in a store. We need less Santa and more Socrates in our lives. We have the freedom to choose. It is up to us to take advantage of that freedom and make sensible choices.

Troy Wilson-Ripsom | Staff Writer | E-mail Comments on this column. | Click icon to Digg this article

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