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Comment by quocanh | Hacker News Reader

You definitely have to be opened minded in order to read this.

I can see how this could be offensive or distasteful but from a purely academic point of view it's interesting to see that a master-slave relationship was more than a contractual relationship. Leadership was just as important in that relationship as it is in a manager-employee relationship. And although we have since abolished slavery, we will always need leadership skills.

If your mind is open and is able to understand nuance (able to keep similar concepts separate amid complexity) then you can learn from history and take lessons from the masters (bad joke).

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Well, there was nothing contractual about this relationship: you have no contract with your property.

A related rant. Being a wage worker is historically strictly better than being a peasant, as you can go wherever and leave your employer whenever you want; being a peasant was also strictly better than being a slave, since you're not property, are tied to a place (and cannot be just moved wherever), have legal personhood and duties limited by public law. That people like to conflate all this muddles actual historical progress and also prevents people from real analysis and improvement of their situation. I don't think that the current situation of wage workers will be something accepted by people long term, assuming civilization progresses. But to deconstruct the bad parts of social machinery they need to understand it beyond slogans, otherwise they can be made content with different slogans. /rant

In a sense, the free person's (and therefore, often a master's) perspective is the only one relevant to the present inhabitants of First/Second World countries. You are emphatically not a slave, can have no remotely close experience and can only cultivate memories for ethical reasons. That being said, I don't think there is anything to "learn" from ancient managers of slaves either, because hopefully you can never be in that sort of situation. Romanticizing of slave and peasant relationships also exists, and is obviously BS, although not something that people are tending to push openly with the current swing of cultural pendulum.

> Being a wage worker is historically strictly better than being a peasant... being a peasant was also strictly better than being a slave

What's next? Shall we unite the concept of citizenship and the concept of economic freedom? Perhaps with something like a citizen's dividend? A freedom dividend you might say?

you actually have to be close-minded to read this favorably, an open-minded reading would be to consider the "slaves" as people whose rights are being violated

Close/open-mindedness isn't about being morally wrong/right. It's about holding a vile idea in your head long enough to see its various facets. To study it and understand it.

Openmindedness here means being able to understand that slavery is wrong at the same time you study what it reveals about the human condition. To be clear, no one in this thread has argued that slavery was good. If you think that, then maybe it's a sign that you're not separating subtle ideas well enough.

If you "[hold] a vile idea in your head" but only look at the aspects of the vile idea that would benefit you then you've chosen to ignore a pretty huge facet of the idea.

Yep. You got it. And I would go further - not just ignore but reject. That’s what is meant by separating ideas. You find what is orthogonal and keep what is useful.

All cultures have differing views on rights. So any culture will have elements that I see people whose rights are being violated. I guess I will have to avoid reading anything about them, unless the author takes an appropriately moralistic and judgmental tone, of course. I have to assume that I am right and everybody else is wrong. It's the only way to be open minded.

Wow, when you pretend I said something completely different than what I actually said, it sounds really bad

> you actually have to be close-minded to read this favorably, an open-minded reading would be to consider the "slaves" as people whose rights are being violated

People who agree with you are open-minded. People who don't agree with you are close-minded.

Think about the risks! Anything your slave does that damages other people's properties or causes them to lose life or limb is your responsibility.

Those poor masters.

Seriously, anything that attempts to be 'open minded' about slavery starts off on the wrong premise: that there are useful lessons to be learned there about human interaction. It's a well that is so thoroughly poisoned that it is probably better to stay away from it lest you be infected.

You're twisting my words. No one is arguing "for" slavery here.

There is merely a step away from arguing for 'wrongthink' as a policy. Ideas should be examined, thoroughly and openly. Staying away does the opposite to the goal you may want to achieve.

Suggesting that ideas can corrupt is especially troubling on HN, which is supposed to be more focused on rational/logical discourse.

> Suggesting that ideas can corrupt is especially troubling on HN, which is supposed to be more focused on rational/logical discourse.

But they can.

Religion, racism, terrorism, fascism: they are all ideas that can corrupt, and some people are more susceptible to this than others. If you find that you are at the end of your wits and unable to find one more source for management advice to the point that you have to turn to the masters of slaves of a few thousand years ago I think you should simply stop looking because nothing good can come of that.

Ideas do not exist in a vacuum, they exist in a timeframe as well as what was considered locally acceptable and those conditions all but ensure that anything that you think you might learn is going to be very hard to apply.

We study history to avoid repetitions, not to see what particular item certain despicable people from the past had to say.

For an encore: Sex tips by rapists, explosive manufacture by suicide bombers, vegetarian cooking by A. Hitler, marketing tips from J. Goebbels and how to run a start-up by Elizabeth Holmes.

Those are books I can do without.

"For an encore: Sex tips by rapists, explosive manufacture by suicide bombers, vegetarian cooking by A. Hitler, marketing tips from J. Goebbels and how to run a start-up by Elizabeth Holmes."

I understand that you wrote it in jest, but isn't Goebbels studied precisely due to the nature of marketing ( propaganda ) he employed? I personally find it interesting. Why does association work so well? Why does it automatically follow that if Hitler wrote an absolutely spectacular vegan recipe that basically cures cancer, it is automatically off limits to everyone?

Before you answer, note that Americans brought some actual Nazi scientists after WW2(operation paperclip). Should US have done without?

The US (and Russian, by the way) appropriation of German scientists and Nazi party members post WWII is certainly controversial and there are plenty of people who strongly believe that they should have stood trial in Nuremberg instead of being given a new job with plenty of perks.

As Tom Lehrer wrote:

"Don't say that he's hypocritical, Say rather that he's apolitical. "Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That's not my department, " says Wernher von Braun."

The sarcasm dripping of those words is hard to replicate without hearing it sung, I recommend the original:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEJ9HrZq7Ro

But, in your opinion, was it the right thing for US to do? Say you are Truman. You are responsible for US and how it fares on the world stage. What would be the right thing to do? Show trials in Nuremberg will satisfy the public. Useful heads and knowledge at the very least would be prevented from going to Russia, where who knows what they would work on. If Braun was truly apolitical, history timeline could have easily changed.

Utilitarian arguments and ethics rarely go together well, hence 'realpolitik'.

What my opinion is on the matter is irrelevant, history has run its course and here we are.

We're well into 'old man lost his horse' territory now, of course you never know what the utility of a particular event is in the longer term. The doctor that saves the baby's life may well have caused a mass murderer to live a long and productive life.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_old_man_lost_his_horse

I agree.

We are just two random people on the internet discussing things passed.

One never really knows what the action is going to ultimately accomplish, but if the opinion on that particular matter is irrelevant, why is the following opinion relevant:

"Those are books I can do without."?

If the history has ran its course, does it matter?

In contrast to the satirical lyric by Tom Lehrer, here's an actual quote attributed to von Braun:

“The rocket worked perfectly, except for landing on the wrong planet.“ — Wernher von Braun remark to a colleague after the first V-2 rocket hit London (September 1944), as quoted in Apollo in Perspective: Spaceflight Then and Now (1999) by Jonathan Allday, p. 85

I think it is safe to assume that Von Braun was never under any illusions as to on what planet his rockets were going to come down and what was going to be the result of that.

So even if Tom Lehrer took some artistic license I think he's on the money.

The most generous reading would probably be something like he wished he were shooting for other planets, in stead of cities with people in.

Dunno whether to buy that, but at least doesn't feel totally implausible.

> If you find that you are at the end of your wits and unable to find one more source for management advice to the point that you have to turn to the masters of slaves of a few thousand years ago

I think you've interpreted the article as some kind of prescriptive document modeled on slavery.

This isn't Business Insider. It's Aeon.

If anything the article comes across as critical of modern management by way of being too similar to Roman slave management.

But it's more interesting than that. It's a look at how Roman slavery was a very complex system, much different from the way we popularly imagine "Slavery" (with a capital "S")--AKA American chattel slavery.

I think that your revulsion is coming from a very beautiful place, and that you're a bit out of step here. We can rightly revile chattel slavery, and despise the thought of ancient slavery, and also be curious about it.

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