I once heard a man say slavery corrupts the slaver as much as the enslaved, and I have not yet recovered from hearing those words.
Let’s peel back the layers and understand the text.
We do not need much convincing to understand that slavery is evil. It is an injustice against humanity—one of the clearest we’ve known. It denies dignity, strips identity, and scars the soul. It denies the humanity, value, and inherent worth of another person. It deems one less than and subject to another thing/ person.
We can only endure so much malevolence on our own before we are corrupted by it. Then, all the things imposed on you, your imposed worth, become your perceived reality. This is grief.
W.E.B. Du Bois called this perception "double consciousness": the painful duality of seeing oneself through one’s own eyes, and simultaneously through the contemptuous gaze of the oppressor. Carl Jung would describe the enslaved as society’s projection of the "Shadow": the part the slaver denies in himself and casts outward to degrade and fear. These frameworks help us understand not only the brutality inflicted—but the psychic manipulation behind it.
Generally, a normal decent person, religious or not, can come to this conclusion - slavery is bad.
If you know someone who disagrees, recommend them to a therapist
The latter half of the statement isn’t the mind-boggling part - it is the first half. The slaver is corrupted by slavery. An institution he affirms and holds true. A law he practices. We call him the devil, evil manifested in flesh, and many things. But for a moment, I beg we stop the condemnation and moral superiority complex to beg the question of how a man gets to such a point where owning a man and treating him like cattle was justifiable and normal, maybe to some, even noble. What happened in his mind that he could not see man as man?
When we are the judge - the juror, with condemnation on our tongue - it is easy. We need only speak a word and we are heard and cheered. But when we are the ones on the chair waiting for our verdict, we learn perspective.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
- This isn’t the main matter of discussion but I need to mention it - the earlier statements and the ones to follow are not to disregard the law and justice but to shed light on what I feel is sometimes overlooked in our zeal for morality. We are all certain we are not demons and devils and we are in some form good or to say the least better than the next person - and I understand, but the truth is we are not. Justice and the law are not moral superiority tools to exert over another, they are emblems of stability. Justice must come with the heart of love. We must approach it with the mind and heart of earnestly trying to make the world a better place and if possible aid the man in the chair to better fit into society again. Understanding another human being (their sin, struggles, crime etc) is not affirming or justifying it. When we relegate obscene behaviors to the metaphysical ie Hitler did that because he was of the devil. If we do not understand how someone became a slaver, we risk raising more in our midst. This is not a call to abandon justice. Law must exist. Accountability is necessary. But justice is not a tool for moral superiority. It must be wielded with humility. As Desmond Tutu said, "Justice must be restorative, not only punitive." Dr. King reminded us, "Justice is love correcting that which revolts against love." And Nietzsche warned that sometimes condemnation masks a hunger for power -
____________________________________________________________________________________________________
In lust, I fear we repeat the same corruption, albeit in miniature. I fear we become the slaver and the person of interest/ desire is the enslaved.
The person we desire becomes an object—something to consume, not behold. And consciously or unconsciously we begin to accept our own objectification in return. In lust, the soul forgets its worth - and that is a scary place to be. There is no regain of power in the hook-up culture, only a loss of identity and value. And this culture incites boys to believe that they are now men of society and girls that they are women. While in fact we are stuck in our adolescence - the girl remains the damsel despite the turning of the hands on the grandfather - and the boy trips, shoved to anger and malevolence as he fails to walk in the shoes of the man - a mantle he picked up too soon.
The progenitor of lust is our senses, touch, sight, voice etc. The common guilty party is sight - our eyes. I previously called lust the prime imitator of love - so for that reason sight is important to lust. I explore this theme in a book I am working on - To see her rightly (don’t hold me to it, but it should be completed at the end of summer) -
Seeing is not what love is but where it begins.
It might make no sense but bear with me. The two great tests for humanity’s genders are concerned with sight - The first, everyone wants to be seen, some not always, others not by many and to different degrees but we want to be seen. And the second is what we see. Some will argue women are more inclined to want to be seen than men - attention - and men are more tempted to see/ look.
Somewhere between being seen and seeing someone - love exists and it is mostly in the small bubble that is not physical. A friend of mine, like an older sister once taught at a bible study that the first time God was named in the bible - he was called the God that Sees Me (El Roi) - by Hagar… I find it beautiful because - GOD IS LOVE -
But lust, the prodigal - doesn’t grasp this, it grazes it a little bit reducing it to physical desire. It uses the eyes—what we see—to convince us of depth that isn't there.
If you are in a relationship, romantic, friendship or whatever, I want you to ponder on how you view your partner. And take it a step further and compliment them - but not on any physical trait, not their hair or smile, not their height or weight - do not comment on anything that can be seen or touched, compliment only what can be felt with them and around them - so get creative!
Franz von Stuck – The Sin (1893)
