Materiales y Recursos Didácticos para la Información en Línea

magine that you are the first man who ever tried to tame a horse. You approach a horse in the wilds with great trepidation – and great desire. You know that if you can tame this beast, you can ride it and harness it to a plough. You overcome your fear by keeping your eye on the prize.

Imagine that you do catch this horse and tame it, at least to some degree. After harnessing the power of the animal, you begin to change your farming practices – you buy more land, hire more farmhands, invest in heavier ploughs, and fall deeply into debt.

Taming the horse, in other words, causes you to make decisions that depend on the horse remaining tame.

As the months pass, however, you begin to notice that the horse does not seem to appreciate being controlled. Initially, it tries to escape, but you catch it every time and bring it back. After a while, it no longer tries to escape – except perhaps on occasion – but it continually struggles to cast off its harness, throw its riders, veer to the left or right, and sometimes refuses to eat.

Here, you become stuck in a truly impossible situation.

If you had never seen the horse – or tried to tame it – you would never have changed all of your farming habits based on your expectation of being able to harness the horse’s power.

If, even months after being “domesticated,” the horse had simply bolted off and vanished into the wilderness, you would have shrugged your shoulders, sold your excess land, fired your extra workers, and resumed your former way of farming.

However, since the horse is at times obedient, and at times recalcitrant, you become truly stuck. Since you have invested so much time, energy and resources on the assumption that the horse can be controlled, you cannot now stomach the idea of simply turning the horse loose and resuming your former life.

THE SUBTLE TYRANNY OF INCONSISTENCY

As the weeks and months pass, the horse’s inconsistent obedience continues to drain more and more of your time and resources. On any given day, you can never be quite sure that the horse is going to do what you need it to do. In the morning, the horse pulls the plough beautifully – in the afternoon, it kicks a worker and cannot be restrained.

As you sink even more time and energy into trying to control the horse, your stress and anxiety continue to escalate.

After a few months, you begin to feel truly trapped – by this time, you have invested too much to turn the horse loose, but as every day goes by, it becomes more and more wasteful and frustrating to use the horse at all. (This is also known as the “waiting for the bus” syndrome – when you have waited an hour for a bus, you are far less likely to walk. We have all been there with computers as well!)

When you initially started off, you wanted to control the horse – as time goes by, however, it becomes more and more apparent that the horse is in fact controlling you.

You initially tried to tame the horse in order to reduce your workload – however, it becomes increasingly clear that having the horse around makes your job harder and more stressful.

THE VENGEANCE OF THE SLAVE

If we recast the “horse story” above in terms of human slavery, a very similar pattern emerges.

If the slave cannot escape, and is beaten if he does not work hard, then his vengeance will always take on a more subtle form.

The slave will perform his work slightly more slowly – not enough to be punished, but enough to irritate his master.

The slave will pretend to be less intelligent than he really is, so that when he loses or breaks things, he will be more likely to escape punishment, since he is pretending in effect to be a child.

slave will always be on hand to refill his cup. If his master has a tendency towards jealousy, the slave will innocently “mention” that he saw his master’s wife chatting with another man.

If the slave is particularly cunning, he will also do everything that he can to inflate his master’s ego. He will sing his master’s praises, claim joy in “knowing his place,” thank the master for everything he does, and remain fanatically “loyal.”

This hyperinflation of the master’s ego inevitably creates pettiness, vanity, hyper-irritability, and unbearable pomposity.

In other words, the slave will always turn his master into an unhappy man – who is constantly annoyed, who cannot experience love, and who engenders no respect from those around him – particularly his children. (One of the worst aspects of being a slave-owner is that it turns you into a terrible and abusive father.)

As a result of the slave’s passive-aggressive manipulations, the master becomes prone to violence – verbal and physical – self-abusive habits, crippling self-blindness, and sinks into a bottomless pit of discontent and misery.

This is the vengeance of the slave. All slaves are Iago.

And, for the most part, all children are slaves. As you were.

THE DANGERS OF VENGEANCE

As we discussed above in the parable of the boxer, the great danger for the slave is his capacity to become addicted to the dark “satisfactions” of passive-aggressive vengeance.

By enslaving his master, the slave gains a sense of control – and also re- creates in his master his own experience of enslavement.

It is a subtle cry of hatred – and plea for empathy.

A slave can only hope for freedom by making owning slaves unbearable for his master.

Not only might the slave’s endless passive-aggressive noncompliance and provocation provoke suicide on the part of his master – but his master’s miserable existence might also serve as a warning for others who might wish to own slaves.

In other words, the horse that makes its “owner” miserable is performing an enormous service to the freedom of other horses, since anyone else who is thinking of enslaving a horse will look at the stress experienced by existing horse owners and do pretty much anything to avoid that fate – thus leaving other horses free to roam.

However, as mentioned above, the greatest danger for the slave is that he becomes addicted to the sense of control that comes from manipulating his master.

In other words, the great danger for the slave is that he becomes addicted to his slavery.

If a slave begins to believe his own master-destroying propaganda, then in the absence of masters, he will create them.