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Comment by squirrelicus | Hacker News Reader

My God really? Slavery was the uniform norm for almost all of human history [0]. If nothing good can come of a society that enslaved others, then the logical corollary is an incredibly short sighted and unnecessarily nihilistic view of the journey of humanity. Can we give history a break?

[0] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/92/Sl...

Edit: before somebody says blah blah race, there isn't a race on Earth that wasn't subjected to slavery in history.

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Yes, it’s different. Of the many flavors of slavery, the Spartan version was particularly brutal.

A very great deal of good can come of exploiting others; a whole lot of good - for me. As for them, fuck 'em. They're only <insert rationalisation here>.

Owning a slave pre-industrial revolution doubles your manpower. Owning ten multiplies it by 10.

And BTW slavery still exists, either literally or functionally. Plenty of sweatshops in the world, and I hear chocolate isn't always grown in happy edens.

"Functional" slavery as your implication describes is so catastrophically different from actual owning of persons that it's incomprehensibly dishonest and devalues the very real reality of slavery in past and present in the developing world. First world perspective, when you think having a job is the same as being owned.

Slavery was the norm. Slave societies, where slaves made up the vast majority of the population, were definitely not the norm.

Social practices where an underclass of people are locked into agrarian or manual labor largely on the basis of hereditary differences is something that spans most agrarian societies. Serfdom, caste systems, slavery, etc. all essentially lock large demographics into limited labor opportunities. Certainly each of these things have significant difference, and there's substantial differences even within them (e.g. Feudal Japan's caste system of farmers, warriors, artisans, and merchants is different from South Asian caste systems. Classical slavery is not identical to transatlantic slavery). But people in power using social institutions to ensure that significant portions of the population are unable to acquire wealth or power beyond subsistence is fairly universal across agrarian civilizations, and didn't really change until the industrial revolution.

It's a weird argument though. Infanticide was also the norm for almost all history, but you wouldn't defend any relation between it and whatever progress the society made, or things it produced.

It's just unrelated in my opinion.

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