You are a slave. From Joshua Stylman at stylman.substack.com:
A Mirror We Refuse to Look Into
“The best way to keep a prisoner from escaping is to make sure he never knows he’s in prison.” —Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Most people hear ‘modern slavery’ and picture trafficking victims or sweatshop workers—suffering that’s clearly visible, obviously wrong, and comfortably distant from their daily lives. What if the most effective slavery in history isn’t hidden—but public, celebrated, and defended by the very people it enslaves?
I understand that comparing contemporary life to slavery will make some readers uncomfortable. That discomfort is the point. We’ve been conditioned to reserve the word ‘slavery’ for its most extreme historical forms, but slavery is fundamentally about the extraction of labor through coercion—regardless of whether that coercion is applied with whips or withholding.
To be clear: I’m not minimizing the horrific brutality of historical slavery or the ongoing horrors of contemporary trafficking. Chattel slavery involved unimaginable physical cruelty, family separation, and dehumanization that scarred generations. The whip, the auction block, the chain—these were instruments of terror that reduced human beings to property through violence and degradation.
I recognize that freedom and slavery exist on a spectrum. Between the plantation owner’s whip and complete autonomy lies a range of arrangements—serfdom, indentured servitude, debt bondage, and various forms of regulated participation in society. Most people would place our current system somewhere in the middle of this spectrum, arguing we have enough choices and protections to avoid the ‘slavery’ label.
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