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Jumping from ads to enslavement is one of the biggest stretches I've seen on HN...

• olalonde 6y ago
  It might seem like a stretch to us, but it was actually used to justify slavery in the past. As early as Aristotle who thought that slaves didn't have the ability to think properly and therefore needed masters to tell them what to do.
  • Der_Einzige 6y ago
    Hell, I'd go right before Aristotle. The whole allegory of the cave from Plato/Socrates is most likely the first non-religious justification in western philosophy (which was promulgated) which explains this "the people on the bottom deserve it and are correctly segmented" idea. Idiot farmers, who are not educated and don't see reality for how it is (only shadows on the wall), cannot be trusted to run your state. Only those who see reality for how it is (those who are dialectically educated in a school) should be anywhere near power. I think that even today, this notion of "you are low/stupid therefor we should not listen to you" is almost everywhere in the west.