The latest NFL hubbub in a long series of hubbubs is over Troy Vincent’s eye-opening remark comparing the league’s draft combine to slavery.  Vincent is Executive Vice President of Football Operations for the NFL, but he obviously doesn’t know much about slavery.

The well-deserved blowback against Vincent’s comment was fast and furious.  Obviously, men who make millions of dollars a year and are free to participate or not participate in an event like the draft combine cannot be considered slaves.  “Wealthy elites” would be a more appropriate description of their societal status.

Vincent’s dumb comment is yet another embarrassment for the NFL, a league that has extolled the virtues of BLM, Colin Kaepernick, and a slew of other race-hustling con artists and organizations since it made the decision to give the middle finger to its fans.

Real slavery is when someone is considered to be the legal property of another person and is not given a choice of whether or not to remain in that person’s servitude.  In the NFL, even though a player is contractually obligated to his team, he can leave that team anytime he chooses without asking permission.  Last I heard, slaves don’t have that option.

Sadly, slavery does still exist in many countries throughout the world.  There are estimates that as many as 40 million people are in bondage today, with India, Pakistan, China, and North Korea leading the way.  Even in the United States, slavery still exists, primarily in the form of sex trafficking.

The opposite of slavery is freedom, which includes freedom of movement, freedom of association, freedom of religion, freedom to express oneself (including the freedom to criticize the government), and so on.  A purist would argue that true freedom is absolute, i.e., that a person should not be constrained in any way.  But even though total freedom is the theoretical ideal, most civilized people agree that some laws are needed to prevent people from committing aggression against others.  In other words, your freedom does not include the right to override someone else’s freedom.

John Stuart Mill emphasized the importance of defining the “nature and limits of the power which can be legitimately exercised by society over the individual,” believing that there is an inherent and continuous antagonism between liberty and authority.  Mill believed that the prevailing question is “how to make the fitting adjustment between individual independence and social control.”  It’s an important question, because it can mean the difference between freedom and slavery.

Thus, even in Western countries, the idea of total freedom is a myth.  It’s not just that your freedom does not give you the right to violate the rights of others.  There are also many other things government forces you to do against your will, as well as things it does not allow you to do.  So much so that government today is unquestionably the biggest threat to individual freedom.

What the Uniparty really wants is summed up in one of Aldous Huxley’s most famous quotes from Brave New World:  “A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.”

When this was written in 1931, no doubt most people thought it was nothing more than fiction, but that was almost 100 years ago.  We’ve come a long way down the road to tyranny since then, and today there are millions of people who apparently love their servitude, as evidenced by the way they vote.

The preferred method for getting people to love their servitude is to hoodwink them into believing government is their friend and savior, which is best accomplished through a combination of fabricated crises and gradualism.  Create the “existential” crisis of your choice — global warming, pandemic, corporate price gouging, inflation, et al — then milk it nonstop until gradualism takes hold and convinces the walking dead that the only solution to the crisis is for government to step in and pass more laws to save them from a terrible fate.

Today, millions of low-information people are trapped in their normalcy biases and cannot envision such a scenario, and we all know what happens to those who ignore the lessons of history.  The battle lines have been clearly drawn between those who favor the security of slavery and those who are determined to fight for their freedom, and which side prevails is likely to determine the fate of the 246-year-old American experiment.

Perhaps there’s merit to the argument that when all is said and done, slavery really is a choice.