7 ms·

What a strange piece. Putting the reader in the master's perspective certainly is a choice. It fails to investigate that almost anyone in its ostensible audie

by britch 5y ago

What a strange piece. Putting the reader in the master's perspective certainly is a choice. It fails to investigate that almost anyone in its ostensible audience of corporate managers is both a "master" and "slave" (mangers have managers). An incredibly grim takeaway as well. It acknowledges the exploitation in both systems, but doesn't ask you to do anything about it or interrogate it deeper. There's no way that you're being exploited, just the poor saps that work for you. It's not wrong to exploit, just honest.

quocanh 5y ago
You definitely have to be opened minded in order to read this. I can see how this could be offensive or distasteful but from a purely academic point of view it's interesting to see that a master-slave relationship was more than a contractual relationship. Leadership was just as important in that relationship as it is in a manager-employee relationship. And although we have since abolished slavery, we will always need leadership skills. If your mind is open and is able to understand nuance (able to keep similar concepts separate amid complexity) then you can learn from history and take lessons from the masters (bad joke).
- toiletfuneral 5y ago
- jacquesm 5y ago
  Think about the risks! Anything your slave does that damages other people's properties or causes them to lose life or limb is your responsibility. Those poor masters. Seriously, anything that attempts to be 'open minded' about slavery starts off on the wrong premise: that there are useful lessons to be learned there about human interaction. It's a well that is so thoroughly poisoned that it is probably better to stay away from it lest you be infected.
  - quocanh 5y ago
    You're twisting my words. No one is arguing "for" slavery here.
  - A4ET8a8uTh0 5y ago
    There is merely a step away from arguing for 'wrongthink' as a policy. Ideas should be examined, thoroughly and openly. Staying away does the opposite to the goal you may want to achieve. Suggesting that ideas can corrupt is especially troubling on HN, which is supposed to be more focused on rational/logical discourse.
    - jacquesm 5y ago
      > Suggesting that ideas can corrupt is especially troubling on HN, which is supposed to be more focused on rational/logical discourse. But they can. Religion, racism, terrorism, fascism: they are all ideas that can corrupt, and some people are more susceptible to this than others. If you find that you are at the end of your wits and unable to find one more source for management advice to the point that you have to turn to the masters of slaves of a few thousand years ago I think you should simply stop looking because nothing good can come of that. Ideas do not exist in a vacuum, they exist in a timeframe as well as what was considered locally acceptable and those conditions all but ensure that anything that you think you might learn is going to be very hard to apply. We study history to avoid repetitions, not to see what particular item certain despicable people from the past had to say. For an encore: Sex tips by rapists, explosive manufacture by suicide bombers, vegetarian cooking by A. Hitler, marketing tips from J. Goebbels and how to run a start-up by Elizabeth Holmes. Those are books I can do without.
      - A4ET8a8uTh0 5y ago
        "For an encore: Sex tips by rapists, explosive manufacture by suicide bombers, vegetarian cooking by A. Hitler, marketing tips from J. Goebbels and how to run a start-up by Elizabeth Holmes." I understand that you wrote it in jest, but isn't Goebbels studied precisely due to the nature of marketing ( propaganda ) he employed? I personally find it interesting. Why does association work so well? Why does it automatically follow that if Hitler wrote an absolutely spectacular vegan recipe that basically cures cancer, it is automatically off limits to everyone? Before you answer, note that Americans brought some actual Nazi scientists after WW2(operation paperclip). Should US have done without?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- evan_ 5y ago
  you actually have to be close-minded to read this favorably, an open-minded reading would be to consider the "slaves" as people whose rights are being violated
  - quocanh 5y ago
    Close/open-mindedness isn't about being morally wrong/right. It's about holding a vile idea in your head long enough to see its various facets. To study it and understand it. Openmindedness here means being able to understand that slavery is wrong at the same time you study what it reveals about the human condition. To be clear, no one in this thread has argued that slavery was good. If you think that, then maybe it's a sign that you're not separating subtle ideas well enough.
    - evan_ 5y ago
      If you "[hold] a vile idea in your head" but only look at the aspects of the vile idea that would benefit you then you've chosen to ignore a pretty huge facet of the idea.
      - quocanh 5y ago
        Yep. You got it. And I would go further - not just ignore but reject. That’s what is meant by separating ideas. You find what is orthogonal and keep what is useful.
  - fallingknife 5y ago
    All cultures have differing views on rights. So any culture will have elements that I see people whose rights are being violated. I guess I will have to avoid reading anything about them, unless the author takes an appropriately moralistic and judgmental tone, of course. I have to assume that I am right and everybody else is wrong. It's the only way to be open minded.
    - evan_ 5y ago
      Wow, when you pretend I said something completely different than what I actually said, it sounds really bad
- stereolambda 5y ago
  Well, there was nothing contractual about this relationship: you have no contract with your property. A related rant. Being a wage worker is historically strictly better than being a peasant, as you can go wherever and leave your employer whenever you want; being a peasant was also strictly better than being a slave, since you're not property, are tied to a place (and cannot be just moved wherever), have legal personhood and duties limited by public law. That people like to conflate all this muddles actual historical progress and also prevents people from real analysis and improvement of their situation. I don't think that the current situation of wage workers will be something accepted by people long term, assuming civilization progresses. But to deconstruct the bad parts of social machinery they need to understand it beyond slogans, otherwise they can be made content with different slogans. /rant In a sense, the free person's (and therefore, often a master's) perspective is the only one relevant to the present inhabitants of First/Second World countries. You are emphatically not a slave, can have no remotely close experience and can only cultivate memories for ethical reasons. That being said, I don't think there is anything to "learn" from ancient managers of slaves either, because hopefully you can never be in that sort of situation. Romanticizing of slave and peasant relationships also exists, and is obviously BS, although not something that people are tending to push openly with the current swing of cultural pendulum.
  - bckr 5y ago
    > Being a wage worker is historically strictly better than being a peasant... being a peasant was also strictly better than being a slave What's next? Shall we unite the concept of citizenship and the concept of economic freedom? Perhaps with something like a citizen's dividend? A freedom dividend you might say?
beerandt 5y ago
Slaves were often given the job of overseeing other slaves. There are some interesting incentives and punitive practices that come into play, but I don't think they're applicable to the comparison being made.
balutdev 5y ago
edit:
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
nescioquid 5y ago
I think your take on the article is interesting to me because it shows how timely your apperceptions are. I take for granted that everyone has encountered the riposte that the Bible nowhere gainsays the institution of slavery, and that slavery in the U.S. was legitimized, in part, on repulsive pseudo-Darwinian grounds and further misses the way in which the article is blandly suggesting that the institution of slavery (extant at some time in every culture) has merely become sublimated in our own. Two things are of interest to me about the institution of slavery in republican (or later) Rome: chiefly the lack of racial rationalization for the institution, and that the institution itself probably retarded the industrial and scientific revolutions[1]. In Rome, the most prized slaves were Greeks, for whom the Romans had both admiration and a cultural inferiority complex. As Horace wrote: > Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit et artes intulit agresti Latio. (Captured Greece captured her wild capturers and brought the arts to those agrarians Latins[1a].) I mention this because I think it shows the opposite of U.S. rationalizations for slavery. Further, domestic slaves were called famulus -a; probably something on the order of "the lesser family" (more expendable were those working the fields or -- gods forefend -- the mines). Greeks enslaved Greeks, Latins enslaved Latins, Sumerians enslaved the nearby mountain-dwellers. As a species, we lack talons or fangs. Ours survival strategy depends upon cooperation. Cooperation can be willing, bargained, or forced. I join company with the parent insofar as the choice of frame for this article is too untimely: perhaps better would have been Solzhenitsyn's chapter "The Trusty" from "The Gulag Archipelago". It provides a sort of fourth movement to a symphony of betrayal of serf to serf, peasant to peasant, Kulak to Kulak. Here, the damned betray the damned. But we must be upbeat! Life is getting better![2] Hence "la serva perdrona"! --------------------------------------------------- [1] Hint: a Roman factory was merely a building filled with slaves "manufacturing" (making by hand) some good. See also the works of Vitruvius who describes (among other things) how an odometer should be made to accurately place mile-markers. They had the ingenuity and engineering capability, but not the economic incentives to birth both revolutions. The Romans were (like us) trapped in a local maximum. [1a] a turn of phrase most worthy of his cultural ideal; not unlike (and also wildly dissimilar to) the way in which the only original American culture (pardon to those in the southern continent) is Black. One can't help but find patterns and anti-patterns. [2] also sprach Stalin
- 5y ago
Banana699 5y ago
Why didn't you read it as implicitly critical of modern managment? since slavery is almost universally agreed-upon to be wrong, any comparison of an institution to it is more likely to be a scathing criticism against the institution than a praise for slavery or any of its practitioners. Edit : Considering that the author has written a book called "How To Manage Your Slaves" about Roman slave managment satirically in the style of modern self-help books, it's almost certain my interpretation above is a more correct lens to view his comparisons.

by britch 5y ago

quocanh 5y ago

You definitely have to be opened minded in order to read this. I can see how this could be offensive or distasteful but from a purely academic point of view it's interesting to see that a master-slave relationship was more than a contractual relationship. Leadership was just as important in that relationship as it is in a manager-employee relationship. And although we have since abolished slavery, we will always need leadership skills. If your mind is open and is able to understand nuance (able to keep similar concepts separate amid complexity) then you can learn from history and take lessons from the masters (bad joke).

toiletfuneral 5y ago
jacquesm 5y ago
Think about the risks! Anything your slave does that damages other people's properties or causes them to lose life or limb is your responsibility. Those poor masters. Seriously, anything that attempts to be 'open minded' about slavery starts off on the wrong premise: that there are useful lessons to be learned there about human interaction. It's a well that is so thoroughly poisoned that it is probably better to stay away from it lest you be infected.
- quocanh 5y ago
  You're twisting my words. No one is arguing "for" slavery here.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 5y ago
  There is merely a step away from arguing for 'wrongthink' as a policy. Ideas should be examined, thoroughly and openly. Staying away does the opposite to the goal you may want to achieve. Suggesting that ideas can corrupt is especially troubling on HN, which is supposed to be more focused on rational/logical discourse.
  - jacquesm 5y ago
    > Suggesting that ideas can corrupt is especially troubling on HN, which is supposed to be more focused on rational/logical discourse. But they can. Religion, racism, terrorism, fascism: they are all ideas that can corrupt, and some people are more susceptible to this than others. If you find that you are at the end of your wits and unable to find one more source for management advice to the point that you have to turn to the masters of slaves of a few thousand years ago I think you should simply stop looking because nothing good can come of that. Ideas do not exist in a vacuum, they exist in a timeframe as well as what was considered locally acceptable and those conditions all but ensure that anything that you think you might learn is going to be very hard to apply. We study history to avoid repetitions, not to see what particular item certain despicable people from the past had to say. For an encore: Sex tips by rapists, explosive manufacture by suicide bombers, vegetarian cooking by A. Hitler, marketing tips from J. Goebbels and how to run a start-up by Elizabeth Holmes. Those are books I can do without.
    - A4ET8a8uTh0 5y ago
      "For an encore: Sex tips by rapists, explosive manufacture by suicide bombers, vegetarian cooking by A. Hitler, marketing tips from J. Goebbels and how to run a start-up by Elizabeth Holmes." I understand that you wrote it in jest, but isn't Goebbels studied precisely due to the nature of marketing ( propaganda ) he employed? I personally find it interesting. Why does association work so well? Why does it automatically follow that if Hitler wrote an absolutely spectacular vegan recipe that basically cures cancer, it is automatically off limits to everyone? Before you answer, note that Americans brought some actual Nazi scientists after WW2(operation paperclip). Should US have done without?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
evan_ 5y ago
you actually have to be close-minded to read this favorably, an open-minded reading would be to consider the "slaves" as people whose rights are being violated
- quocanh 5y ago
  Close/open-mindedness isn't about being morally wrong/right. It's about holding a vile idea in your head long enough to see its various facets. To study it and understand it. Openmindedness here means being able to understand that slavery is wrong at the same time you study what it reveals about the human condition. To be clear, no one in this thread has argued that slavery was good. If you think that, then maybe it's a sign that you're not separating subtle ideas well enough.
  - evan_ 5y ago
    If you "[hold] a vile idea in your head" but only look at the aspects of the vile idea that would benefit you then you've chosen to ignore a pretty huge facet of the idea.
    - quocanh 5y ago
      Yep. You got it. And I would go further - not just ignore but reject. That’s what is meant by separating ideas. You find what is orthogonal and keep what is useful.
- fallingknife 5y ago
  All cultures have differing views on rights. So any culture will have elements that I see people whose rights are being violated. I guess I will have to avoid reading anything about them, unless the author takes an appropriately moralistic and judgmental tone, of course. I have to assume that I am right and everybody else is wrong. It's the only way to be open minded.
  - evan_ 5y ago
    Wow, when you pretend I said something completely different than what I actually said, it sounds really bad
stereolambda 5y ago
Well, there was nothing contractual about this relationship: you have no contract with your property. A related rant. Being a wage worker is historically strictly better than being a peasant, as you can go wherever and leave your employer whenever you want; being a peasant was also strictly better than being a slave, since you're not property, are tied to a place (and cannot be just moved wherever), have legal personhood and duties limited by public law. That people like to conflate all this muddles actual historical progress and also prevents people from real analysis and improvement of their situation. I don't think that the current situation of wage workers will be something accepted by people long term, assuming civilization progresses. But to deconstruct the bad parts of social machinery they need to understand it beyond slogans, otherwise they can be made content with different slogans. /rant In a sense, the free person's (and therefore, often a master's) perspective is the only one relevant to the present inhabitants of First/Second World countries. You are emphatically not a slave, can have no remotely close experience and can only cultivate memories for ethical reasons. That being said, I don't think there is anything to "learn" from ancient managers of slaves either, because hopefully you can never be in that sort of situation. Romanticizing of slave and peasant relationships also exists, and is obviously BS, although not something that people are tending to push openly with the current swing of cultural pendulum.
- bckr 5y ago
  > Being a wage worker is historically strictly better than being a peasant... being a peasant was also strictly better than being a slave What's next? Shall we unite the concept of citizenship and the concept of economic freedom? Perhaps with something like a citizen's dividend? A freedom dividend you might say?

beerandt 5y ago

Slaves were often given the job of overseeing other slaves. There are some interesting incentives and punitive practices that come into play, but I don't think they're applicable to the comparison being made.

balutdev 5y ago

edit:

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

nescioquid 5y ago

I think your take on the article is interesting to me because it shows how timely your apperceptions are. I take for granted that everyone has encountered the riposte that the Bible nowhere gainsays the institution of slavery, and that slavery in the U.S. was legitimized, in part, on repulsive pseudo-Darwinian grounds and further misses the way in which the article is blandly suggesting that the institution of slavery (extant at some time in every culture) has merely become sublimated in our own. Two things are of interest to me about the institution of slavery in republican (or later) Rome: chiefly the lack of racial rationalization for the institution, and that the institution itself probably retarded the industrial and scientific revolutions[1]. In Rome, the most prized slaves were Greeks, for whom the Romans had both admiration and a cultural inferiority complex. As Horace wrote: > Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit et artes intulit agresti Latio. (Captured Greece captured her wild capturers and brought the arts to those agrarians Latins[1a].) I mention this because I think it shows the opposite of U.S. rationalizations for slavery. Further, domestic slaves were called famulus -a; probably something on the order of "the lesser family" (more expendable were those working the fields or -- gods forefend -- the mines). Greeks enslaved Greeks, Latins enslaved Latins, Sumerians enslaved the nearby mountain-dwellers. As a species, we lack talons or fangs. Ours survival strategy depends upon cooperation. Cooperation can be willing, bargained, or forced. I join company with the parent insofar as the choice of frame for this article is too untimely: perhaps better would have been Solzhenitsyn's chapter "The Trusty" from "The Gulag Archipelago". It provides a sort of fourth movement to a symphony of betrayal of serf to serf, peasant to peasant, Kulak to Kulak. Here, the damned betray the damned. But we must be upbeat! Life is getting better![2] Hence "la serva perdrona"! --------------------------------------------------- [1] Hint: a Roman factory was merely a building filled with slaves "manufacturing" (making by hand) some good. See also the works of Vitruvius who describes (among other things) how an odometer should be made to accurately place mile-markers. They had the ingenuity and engineering capability, but not the economic incentives to birth both revolutions. The Romans were (like us) trapped in a local maximum. [1a] a turn of phrase most worthy of his cultural ideal; not unlike (and also wildly dissimilar to) the way in which the only original American culture (pardon to those in the southern continent) is Black. One can't help but find patterns and anti-patterns. [2] also sprach Stalin

5y ago

Banana699 5y ago

Why didn't you read it as implicitly critical of modern managment? since slavery is almost universally agreed-upon to be wrong, any comparison of an institution to it is more likely to be a scathing criticism against the institution than a praise for slavery or any of its practitioners. Edit : Considering that the author has written a book called "How To Manage Your Slaves" about Roman slave managment satirically in the style of modern self-help books, it's almost certain my interpretation above is a more correct lens to view his comparisons.