The ancient societies of Egypt, Greece, and Rome all had economies that depended upon slave labor. Even as recently as 150 years ago, the economy of the Unites States of America depended upon slave labor. This level of enslavement was physical, restricting undesired behavior with whips, chains, cages, and other physical constraints. There are still places in the world today where such physical enslavement still occurs. For the rest of the world those physical constraints are no longer necessary.

In most current societies, an individual’s access to the necessities of life is governed by their access to money. The only way to acquire money for most of us is to work for someone else. The access to resources directly is most often considered theft and results in physical punishment. Thus the physical constraints of slavery are removed from the direct application to the slave, only becoming a threat if the slave breaks the social rules. I use the word slave for those who got to a job in order to acquire money for their own needs because the consequences of not doing that are so undesirable. The apparent freedom of the individual is cloaked in myth and fiction until this slavery becomes difficult to recognize.

In “Western” societies the myth is that the individual can choose their employment, enticing their prospective employer to higher pay with skills the employer needs. The actual fact of the matter is that there are plenty of other individuals willing to do the job for less that the prospective employer is willing to pay, so competition will alway beat you out if you seek more from an employer than they are offering. It seems apparent that poverty is necessary to any economic system acting as another indirect control over individual behavior. Those stuck in poverty will do almost anything to improve their position, while the rest will do almost anything to avoid that poverty they see in others.

While the constraints are subtle and indirect all societies utilize incarceration as the ultimate control over those who refuse to abide by those more subtle constraints. We all agree that theft is wrong, even when that theft is to feed an individual or their family, we fail to fault the society they live in, but instead place the wrongfulness of the act back on the individual rather than the group. This lack of individual power enslaves us all.

Yes, the rich have an apparently sweeter life than the rest of us, but they are no more in control of the system they operate within than the rest of us. The idea that there are a few very rich and very powerful individuals who control the fate of all the rest of us, and use their power to subjugate the rest of the world is just another myth promoted by the group to make the rest of us believe that with a bit of effort and some luck we could be in that group of people making those controlling decisions. Yes, being the “overlord” in a slave system is better than being a slave, but it is still just another part of the slavery system. The slave owner in current societies is the society itself. We have all, as individuals, become enslaved to the demands of the group. The irony of individuals interacting as a group, is that the resulting entity has no concerns for the fate of the individuals composing that group.

Societies act like a Skinner Box providing the Operant Conditioning to mold individuals into model citizens. This conditioning can be subtle. Consider the greeting between individuals in Western cultures. The “call” is something like: “Hello, how are you today?” with the “response” being: “I’m fine. How are you?”. While in Muslim cultures the greeting call is “As-salamu alaykum wa rahmatullahi wa barakaatuhu” (Meaning: May Allah’s peace , mercy and blessing be upon you). This greeting is usually shortened to “As-salam alykum”, with the response being: “Wa-Alaikum-Salaam,” meaning “And unto you peace”.

These are both interpreted as “hello” in each culture. However, with some subtlety, they speak to very different topics. The western version is a request for the condition of the other individual, while the Muslim version is a statement of the greeters relation to Allah. Thus Muslim societies are much more closely tied to their religious beliefs than Western/Christian societies. This may explain why Christian sects no longer kill each other over religious doctrine, while Muslims are still killing each other over points of dogma.