A day later, he was reading a book. Something on history I’m guessing because he stopped and said, “We have breed slaves for thousands of years. The Greeks and Romans bred slaves for servants, sport, and pleasure. Their descendants became the peasant farmers of Europe. From the beginning of the earliest civilizations, we have bred slaves to do the necessary labor for building civilization. By having a slave population, we can more easily keep the rest of the population in line. The managers are made up of special class of slave, sometimes called the middle class, which believes itself to be free. Regardless of what they are called, they are given a special status, and they know it. This is enough to keep them in line, and working for us.”
I could tell he was still trying to justify his heartless reaction to my pain. He continued, “This managerial class of slave oversees the other slaves. They are given power over the lower slave class so that they can feel superior in their position and are more obedient to their masters. They live with the knowledge, that they can be demoted to the lower slave class anytime they don’t conform and work efficiently. If a slave won't behave, we take away their shelter by taking away their access to money.
“Another special class of slaves are made up of the privileged servants of the elite class. For centuries we have hand picked special slaves from the lower classes of slaves.”
“It is a rather beautiful system when one thinks about it. The different classes of slaves playing off each other, encouraging the other slaves to work hard and be obedient. Also, By having different classes of slaves, they are more easily bred for specific purposes. It essentially is the same structure we use here, only on a larger scale. ”
He paused, and I felt he was leaving this open for me to ask questions about it, so, I asked him, “What purposes? How do you breed slaves?”
“It is very much like how farmers selectively breed livestock. We selectively breed humans as servants, entertainment, and labor. Like any animal, we would favor the docile obedient slaves, and kill off the trouble makers. We would select and breed slaves for the qualities we want and need. Some are bred as servants, some as gladiators, some as artists or scientists. We still do it now, but instead of choosing directly, the slaves selectively breed themselves.”
I asked him, “How do slaves breed themselves?
He responded, “We designed a culture where they admire certain values like beauty, hard work, athleticism, eternal toil, and suffering as desired values. The culture favors obedient alpha males that keep the others in line. We set beauty standards which we desire, and encourage creativity within limits. We train people to recognize suffering as individual responsibility. Then, We use social pressures to direct their selections, and limit their choices. No one wants to have a child with someone who is strange or different or ugly. We define the standards which people live by. We define success and failure through entertainment, marketing, and publishing. Humans will naturally encourage others to adopt their own culture, through promotion and discouragement. When necessary, we imprison those we want to remove from the breeding populations.”
“So prisons are a form of population control?”
“Oh yes, they always have been. It is their primary purpose. If we imprison someone during their primary reproductive years, it is much less likely they will have offspring. Even if it's just for a few years, it's enough to stigmatize them, so that people will avoid them for breeding.”
I had not thought about this aspect of prison before. I always thought of it as a form of punishment, but of course people ca not reproduce in a prison environment. We have known some time that the punishment and reform aspects do not work. The aspect of population control explains the persistence and expansion of the prison industry in the face of it’s failures.
I thought about society and how people, particularly parents and those close to a person, will use any means they can to push someone they care about to adopt their own cultural standards.
I thought about how rich men like to marry models and movie stars and how the slave women here are all rather beautiful. I have suspected our selection to be brought here was not random. I was at a low point in my life when I was offered the job. Did they manipulate that too? I felt like the whole reason I was brought here, was to be raped by these men.
“If slaves are so far beneath you, why do you have babies with them?” I did not know how else to ask, but I wanted to know.
“It is a way for us to avoid inbreeding. We need enough genetic diversity to keep our population healthy. So we have children with slaves from time to time. We learned from certain royal families that inbreeding could lead to rather eccentric and unpredictable behaviors, and degraded health over time.”
He paused as if he were thinking about something, then said, “Also, we don’t just breed with any consumer. We choose the beautiful ones, creative ones, the intelligent ones. Slaves that show qualities that are important to us. We select for the qualities which we would like to integrate into our own population.”
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