Even today, Africans are frequently kidnapped, sold as slaves, and worked mercilessly to death in the Middle East. No one, except the slaves, complains. Children are routinely sold into slavery in Thailand. After having been horribly abused by those who insist they are not perverted, they are discarded. Chinese and North Korean prison camps force unpaid millions into factories, farms, and mines. No sense of outrage greets these egregious attacks on human dignity.
The Christian and formerly Christian countries do have slavery, but it’s part time. About half of our wages and salaries are confiscated by various government entities. So, we labor in what is slavery for about half of each year. Should we have the gall to complain, we are thought to be “selfish” by those who want to take more from us.
There seems to be no end of souls so lacking in love that they don’t mind enslaving their neighbors “because we just need a little bit more”. Each tax increase is to provide that “little bit more”. Like termites nibbling at a beam, their nibbling will eventually cause the collapse of freedom as being anything more than an illusion.
As freedom collapses, more direct forms of slavery are imposed. Those who prey upon their neighbors will continue, for all of their lives, to believe they “need a little bit more”.
And, they’ll get it. But, as Dante describes, they get far, far more after their souls leave their bodies.
