Informant38

ΩComments on Master and Servant � A Certain Relationship
Servants serve. The waitress serves. The soldier serves his country. Lives are owned for hours, days, weeks, or entire.
We sell our lives in pieces for the same reason anyone sells anything, to get money.
I give up 9 hours out of my day, receive payment for 7 and a half of them.
There is a responsibility the employer has, the customer has, the served have to the server, but living shows us soon enough not all responsibilities are fulfilled.
The roots of these formal relationships are twined around the buried cause in its primal state, the inequities of biology. I have food, you don't, but perhaps you have something I do want.
It isn't slavery, exactly. How can it be when the inferior, in the case of the servant or the waitress, is free to go? What happens after that leavetaking may be as immutable as iron - unemployability, disgrace, poverty and its degradations, but that initial freedom is real.
The domestication of human beings is a taboo subject, most of us are uncomfortable even wondering about it. But isn't that what takes place?
The first horses were kidnapped, captured, forced to stay. Eventually the wildest rebels were bred out. The same with cattle and sheep.
Sooner or later it's an equation of risk against safety, food and chains against hunger and freedom.
Cats inhabit the margin of that, neither domesticated nor wild. Watch how upset people become when a dog reverts, assumes an attitude incompatible with its 'position'.
Servants can serve or not, but the larger context, the society in which they move, will treat them accordingly.
No one forces anyone in the US or the EU to work in a fast-food restaurant, people choose to do that because the alternatives seem worse. And we are highly adaptable creatures, making peace with the unavoidable.
That said, there's an old fairy tale of a prince who, to rescue a fair damsel, must complete a great quest. As he goes along his journey he gathers around him individuals of freakish talent: one that can see for miles, one that can uproot trees, one that with a single step can travel 7 leagues, etc. Together they rescue the princess.
Co-operation can result in relationships that are outwardly indistinguishable from the master/servant, that may even be that in a formal sense.
Our hearts make the difference, the past and its darknesses also contribute. We work with what we have.
There's a pandemic derision of the early European explorers these days, some of that derision coming from people whose histories are as blood-drenched as Spain's or England's.
It's a kind of waking up to these unpleasant truths, but only a partial one. We need to wake up all the way.
Stopping time at a single frame and making judgements on what's there is not enlightened progress but convenient, cheap catharsis.

yr humble Servant...

Ω{Flotsam 10.20.03, edited}