HUMAN FARMING
BY: Stefan Molyneux
Like all animals, human beings want to dominate the resources around them. At first, we mostly hunted and fished and ate off the land - but then something magical and terrible happened to our minds. We became, alone among the animals, afraid of death, and of future loss.
When we became afraid of death, of injury, and imprisonment, we became controllable -- and so valuable -- in a way that no other resource could ever be. The greatest resource for any human being to control is not natural resources, or tools, or animals or land -- but other human beings.
You can frighten an animal, because animals are afraid of pain in the moment, but you cannot frighten an animal with a loss of liberty, or with torture or imprisonment in the future, because animals have very little sense of tomorrow.
Human farming has been the most profitable -- and destructive -- occupation throughout history. Some people get confused because governments provide healthcare, water, education and roads, and thus imagine that there is some good at work. Not entirely.
There have been four major phases of human farming. The first phase, in ancient Egypt, was direct and brutal human compulsion. Human bodies were controlled, but the creative productivity of the human mind remained outside the reach of the whip and the brand and the shackles. Slaves remained woefully underproductive, and required enormous resources to control.
The second phase was the Roman model, wherein slaves were granted some capacity for freedom, ingenuity and creativity, which raised their productivity. This increased the wealth of Rome, and thus the tax income of the Roman government - and with this additional wealth, Rome became an empire, destroying the economic freedoms that fed its power, and collapsed.
The increased productivity of the late Middle Ages created the excess food required for the expansion of towns and cities, which in turn gave rise to the third modern Democratic model of human ownership. As displaced peasants flooded into the cities, a huge stock of cheap human labor became available to the rising industrialists - and the ruling class of human farmers quickly realized that they could make more money by letting their livestock/people choose their own occupations.
Under the Democratic model, direct slave ownership has been replaced by the fourth phase called the Mafia model. The Mafia rarely owns businesses directly, but rather sends thugs around once a month to steal from the business "owners." You are now allowed to choose your own occupation, which raises your productivity and the taxes you can pay to your masters.
Keeping people securely under the ruling classes is a three phase process.
The third phase is to invent continual external threats, so that the frightened livestock cling to the "protection" of the farmers (think of terrorism and disease).
If human beings believe that they are free, then they will produce much more for their farmers. The best way to maintain this illusion of freedom is to put some of the livestock on the payroll (i.e. police, military, gov’t agents, etc.) of the farmer. Those cows that become dependent on the existing system will then attack any other cows who point out the violence, hypocrisy and immorality of human ownership.