Freedom or Slavery, Pick One

Posted on December 28, 2022 by Robert Ringer

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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.

Robert Ringer

Robert Ringer is an American icon whose unique insights into life have helped millions of readers worldwide. He is also the author of two New York Times #1 bestselling books, both of which have been listed by The New York Times among the 15 best-selling motivational books of all time.

5 responses to “Freedom or Slavery, Pick One”

  1. larajf says:

    It's sad how people have traded in freedom for soma induced living

  2. JurassicRick says:

    It seems like people nowadays are so used to having less and less freedom that they do not know where freedom ends and slavery begins.

  3. Ghost_1776 says:

    I spent many years fighting for freedom only to realize most people don't really want it and will willingly give it away for some welfare benefits or a ladle full of government gravy. They place very little value on it. As a result I am much more focused on taking individual actions as Harry Browne taught to build freedom for me in my lifetime. I am still willing to fight, but not as a way to give myself my own freedom because I am taking individual action to do that.

  4. hharry12800 says:

    The tragic loss of freedom during the pandemic was appalling. Most agree that staying home for a week or two as we collected data was appropriate. That two weeks turned into months and years for some where normal commerce was reduced. That we put up with it is sad. We were faced with a propaganda effort from nearly all media even to the point of censorship demanded by the government forced on private companies that because agents. A certain violation of the 1st amendment. Imprisonment in our own homes, business told they couldn't operate. How can this be possible? Our peoples are weak and no longer values freedom. A product of the educational system over many years coupled with apathy coupled with a government that cares only for itself.

    What did we get for that? An awful economy, loss of childhood education and more illness. The mitigations did little to slow or stop the pandemic as data now reveal. And the vaccines haven't worked well either but have enriched makers and elements of government. Does anybody care?

  5. ringer1977 says:

    Robert never fails to speak truth. He has been for multiple decades and I am grateful that we still have a person of such profound integrity and willingness to speak. So here is my comment. We have all heard about the shadow govt. running the global scene, we have all come to realize that govt. itself is a controlled and controlling force, we all realize that the Constitution has been reduced to an insignificant relic, we all realize that presidential orders were never a part of the founding govt. and we realize that the founding fathers reminded us that if govt failed to do its job as established then the people were to dissolve it and begin anew. So we know all this. Great, so what's the plan to dissolve the current govt that isn't doing its job according to its established limitations? This govt has been in violation of its function for untold years. We don't need to know this or be told about it anymore just the actions required to remove it. Any viable ideas people???