A question about Psychology of people in the past.

[OzzyRules]

Originally Posted by YuMart

So then why has it always been very common place and viewed as acceptable by the majority everywhere from the dawn of man till the last 100-200 years?

Slavery is still commonplace today. Anyone who "works" at a desk job or does some kind of similar easy (non-physical) thing for a living is depending upon a working class who is beneath them. The working class builds their housing and transportation, and gathers and brings them their food.

The lower working class are paid less, and are often shunned by the middle class. But they do everything for them.

The spirit of slavery is still alive and well.

[Sassybluesy]

There were people who treated their slaves humanely, and there were people who treated their slaves cruely.


I think those who whipped, tortured, and maimed their slaves were the same kind of people who kick dogs, kill cats, picked wings off of bugs, and other cruel, for the sake of cruel things.

[silibran]

Originally Posted by YuMart

So then why has it always been very common place and viewed as acceptable by the majority everywhere from the dawn of man till the last 100-200 years?

I am no historian. But I think it is because of warfare throughout our history, and because labor to produce even simple things was so hard. With the rise of an agricultural society, came wealth to a few. Larger households needed to produce more, and servants and slaves were needed. Since the world was frequently at war, captured people could be enslaved, transported and sold. Slaves produced and did jobs "respectable" people did not want to do, and required only a small portions of food and a place to sleep.

Even when there were no slaves, there seemed to be an underclass of indentured people. These people are tied to land, or relegated to severe discrimination and privation. Think villeins in Europe or the untouchables in India.

Wealth and societal stratification, and warfare seem to me to be the drivers of enslavement.

Interestingly, white Englishmen indentured themselves for seven years to work for established American Colonists in return for their passage to the Colonies. This is a form of enslavement.

[EcuaDave]

While I think it is unfair to judge the behavior of individuals in the past by the standards of today, we can certainly critique the morality of the past based on present understanding.

If someone is taught that beating people is OK, it will be difficult for that person to to step outside of his programming.

And yet...some people do. They usually don't need an enormous ethical breakthrough, just the recognition that moral standards apply more broadly than they had thought.

Apply the Golden Rule (1000's of years old) to your slave? Voila! You just wouldn't want someone owning you and beating you, it's over. It's just a question of applying it.

But people, psychologically, are often victims of their conditioning. They become blind to the logical implications of rules they preach and, to some extent, live by. Yes, this is psychological damage, the programming of the mind to accept sickening contradictions.

Some people in our society are still victims and perpetrators of this same horror.

[CrazyDonkey]

Originally Posted by YuMart

So then why has it always been very common place and viewed as acceptable by the majority everywhere from the dawn of man till the last 100-200 years?

Lack of labor-saving devices: vacuum cleaners, washers/dryers, etc. Agricultural machines: mowers, threshers, harvesters, balers, etc.

Industrialization actually required a mobile supply of labor that could flow to shifting (rising and falling) demands, with unions replacing guilds.

Today, in globalization we have mobile demand that flows to relatively fixed suppliers of cheap labor - post-modern plantations and neo-slavery. Empires, to the degree that they disrupt and imbalance natural trading/distribution systems (all roads lead to Rome), produce their own invaders, be they Goths, Huns, Mongols, Turks, and other "illegal migrants".

[CrazyDonkey]

Krupp, etc., in WWII literally starved their slave labor because the SS/Himmler could supply replacements at pennies a head, which Germany's industrial leaders had very few, if any, qualms in exploiting to the hilt.

If slaves are expensive and difficult to obtain, however, they are more likely to be more humanely treated (not starved), because they represent an asset, not a liability, on the books.

[Basiliximab]

Originally Posted by YuMart

I know it is always said we shouldn't compare people from the past to the same views/morals we have today, but if that is true, then could it not be said that what we typically view as bad today not as bad then? I get that the likes of slavery for example, has been around for millennia, but why is it that only (relatively speaking) did people as a whole start to even start to feel bad about it and think of it as wrong? Surely human emotions haven't changed since mankind began, so it seems crazy it took so long for people as whole to feel bad about brutally subjugating and torturing people in the first place.

That perspective grew out of a change to a modern, convenient (first-world) society. In third-world places, when most of the people are struggling for their own survival, they're not going to have the capacity to be concerned so much for the plights of other people because they're going through their own plight. Once our country started becoming industrialized and there arose a significant percentage of people who weren't slaving away themselves in their fields struggling to have enough food for the winter, we could sit back and say, "wait a minute, why are there people who are obviously people although we want to say they're not being treated so inhumanely?"

So it comes with the progression of a society that there is an overwhelming concern not just at the local level, but at a broad national level, for the well-being of all it's citizens.

Originally Posted by YuMart

Do you think those people would have had to been mentally damaged to do such in the first place regardless of the times, or do you think they could have well been what we view as sane, good people but given the times they were just victims of the time period and shouldn't be looked down for such things as we do today?

I think these people were mentally damaged and if they lived today and could get away with it, they'd do the same thing (some people do--torture their children, that kind of stuff). So, no, they weren't just victims of the period. They were enabled to act out their mental derangement because of the acceptability at that time period of slavery.

[goodheathen]

It was not okay to abuse slaves without reason. Severe abuse was punishable by law.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delphi...e_mansion_fire
It's fair to assume that employees who mistreated slaves by the standards of owners were at risk of termination if found out.

I don't know if there has ever been a time in human history where destructive sadism has been viewed as acceptable behavior by the masses. As now, people who did such things either lacked conscience or were deranged.

Unless there are enough surviving diaries and memoirs by slave owners, we will never know how bad they felt when administering socially condoned punishments to slaves. Also, without records, we probably won't know how often whippings (seemingly the worst physical punishment commonly prescribed) and other harsh measures were used by the typical owner. It's possible that much of the harsh treatment was used by a small, mean percentage of owners. Apparently sometimes whipping was outsourced, in part because some slave owners felt qualms about doing it themselves.

Meanwhile, besides cruelty not being as condoned then as is widely believed today, at least in the USA, prison labor is widespread today and is only a half-step above slavery.

[Nov3]

Romans tortured. China tortured. Can't think of a country regime that didn't.
Golly,Roman enjoyed crucifying. Egyptians considered certain 'breeds' objects . American slavery was no different. The enslaved were tools,that often 'needed' trimmed of any dignity. The show roots expanded on this antic of that era. To think it was not common is denial. Branding the workers, leaving them to wither, and broken in spirit.

[OzzyRules]

The USA has overcome slavery. Otherwise we would be doing horrible things like making all of our products in overseas child-slavery factories or something like that. No, we have overcome it and things are so much better and different today.