A culture of slaves?

Posted on 8/22/06 in Europe - West,News,Plato
Reference Address: http://www.ellopos.com/blog/?p=15

Europeans want limitless working hours, as statistics reveal : let’s make as much money as we can, is the motive that prevails in Europe, and especially in the biggest economies. Socrates was approving an old saying that a pleasure with pain as its previous condition, is a pleasure for slaves (Plato, Phaedrus 258e).

Contrary to that, Europe confirms the spirit of Charlemagne and the Papacy, creating serfdom as an ideal : Arbeit Macht Frei. Why not? Living without personal relationships of real value, it is necessary for the Europeans to discover more ‘meaning’ in working hours, and in wilder forms of perversion, as is known. Tolstoy was saying, that “to elevate work into something decent, is equally absurd with naming your food a virtuous benefactor.”

Cf. The European Prospect

1 Comment

James
August 23, 2006 • 1:20 pm

Does Europe actually exist any more? Or perhaps it does merely “exist” as a something that it can “trade in” from time to time. The average European man or women is now equivalent in many important ways with their same counterparts in America or China, namely with regards to this “sameness” as the absolute determining cultural fact that defines them as human beings no matter where they are upon the globe.

Modernity is no longer about cultural differences and experimentation but solely about the dialectics of economics and mass consumption, and of subsequently producing a uniform type of human being who wants nothing more then to live the ideal lifestyle of the celebrity or millionaire. Such lifestyle packages are now a standard part of the whole “culture” of the international office lexicon of television programs like Friends or Big Brother or Celebrity Love Island that are now re- produced with the same vacuous format across the entire globe. Its not surprising that such shows are also overtly hostile to the notion of the individual, a notion that was the defining ideal behind Europe’s past cultural and artistic prowess, as the individual is not as important as the “team” whose all encompassing stability must maintained by a heady mixture of banality and comformity.

It’s not surprising that the “new” Europeans from the east wish to learn English only, as they now see it as their global and inalienable passport to the good life of mass consumerism in the west (French, German or Greek are no longer useful or desirable in obtaining the good life) nor is it surprising that they wish to work more and more in order to acquire this lifestyle, as there is no longer any discernible difference between what’s public and private in the brave new world the mass man, who in reality is nothing more than the slave he dreams everyday in his work place and whom he strives to be, namely that someone who will never be himself. This someone is the ultimate fiction in the machinery of the modernist dream. In this banal mean and ultimately absurdly destructive new scheme of events George Orwell’s slogan upon the walls of the Ministry (which could easily be the walls of the Schumann building in Brussels or an IBM factory in Greece as there’s no longer any real difference anyway) in 1984 “SLAVERY IS FREEDOM” begin to make sense in an awful way.