Lots of questions raised in my mind by this one:
Six months after Muhammed Yusuf had been sold, tortured and forced to watch as a friend died, he found himself back at the parched, dusty bus station where his ordeal began, facing the man who had made him a slave.
Unembarrassed and unrepentant, the smuggler was still touting for business among the crowds flooding into Agadez, an oasis town on the fringe of the Sahara desert in central Niger that has for centuries been a trading centre and gateway to shifting paths across the desert.
“I told him ‘my friend died in Libya because of you’,” Yusuf said a few days after the meeting. Then, desperately hungry, he asked him for some food…
Yusuf, a 24-year-old Nigerian, was one of thousands of people who had travelled to Libya looking for work, or hoping to sail to Europe, who were instead sucked into a grim and violent world of slave markets, private prisons, and brutal forced brothels.
Notice, he essentially says, “You killed my best friend, made me into a slave, and ruined my life!… Hey, do you have something to give me to eat?” That is an r-strategist. His friend was killed right in front of him. He was totally screwed by someone with no morals. And just like a dead rabbit next to another rabbit’s dead body, he doesn’t care. All he can think about is grazing. To a K-strategist, that is the makings of a blood oath of vengeance. But not to a rabbit.
Which makes me wonder, is enslaving r-strategist migrants bad? They are kind of psychologically designed for it. They are programmed to either be the slave traders, or to be the slaves. Give them power, and they will ruthlessly tell everyone what to do and what to think. Take their power, and they will buckle under and do anything to save themselves, while appeasing their tormentors gratuitously.
If the choice is to make an r-strategist a slave trader, or a slave, I don’t think there is anything morally wrong with seeing them enslaved.
Tell others about r/K Theory, because r-strategists are not human
[…] Migrants Are r-strategists – Is Enslaving Them Wrong? […]
>is enslaving r-strategist migrants bad?
If your goal as a K-strategist is to remove r-strategists from the gene pool, slavery is the opposite of what you want to do.
Historicallly, slave masters have bred their slaves anytime the price of a new one exceeded the price of raising one. Enslave r-strategists, and you’ll one day have an army of helots to revolt against you.
r-strategists don’t compete because they can’t. Let them fall, as they naturally do, to the bottom of society. The K-strategist women wont want them. And the r-strategist women, with their low rearing urge+birth control, won’t many kids.
Each generation, the K-strategist population will grow 5%, and the r-strategist population will shrink 30%. And a continual stream of immigrants will keep the resources short. Problem solved.
This is why slavery is so common in certain societies. If the West were to collapse, there would be a sudden massive increase in slavery in Africa and the Middle East, ie. they would return to their normal state. Many of their new slaves would be peoples from the former countries of the West, although many of these would likely make bad slaves and probably being K-ified would revolt or escape. In time Africans and Muslims would revert to enslaving themselves in numbers more massive than anything seen in America, Rome or ancient Greece. The future would look more like the past.
Reminds me of the debate about the death penalty, where similarly sometimes the only choice is between killing a killer who will kill again if ever freed, and eventually setting them free to do so.
Perhaps it wouldn’t do them any harm, but one of the many awful things about slavery is what it does to the slaveholder. However debased and deserving the slave is, slaveholding is not something you want to do to yourself. And who would want such people around either themselves or their loved ones? I would not feel safe with a rabbit in my household, knowing they would betray me at the first opportunity.
I think a majority of people would be better off as slaves under firm but benevolent masters. Right now we in the productive classes are slaves to a cruel and greedy master: the US government.
There is a good reason why kidnapping people for slavery is punished with death in scripture. So no. Why should we enable those r-strategists to breed or incentivize breeding them by enslaving them?
Since I paid more than 20K in taxes this time around, and those taxes went largely toward the care and feeding of those whose profession it is to consume my tax dollars, it occurred to me that I am providing for “employees”, yet receiving no gainful labor in return for my largesse. Since I have laid out X dollars for food, housing, and medical care for total strangers, is it too much to ask to have one or two of those strangers be assigned as my employee(s)?
I look forward to Esmeralda, my new cook, and Juan, my new gardener/handyman. In return, I will keep paying taxes.