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.
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.
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.
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?
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:
“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
So even if Tom Lehrer took some artistic license I think he's on the money.
Dunno whether to buy that, but at least doesn't feel totally implausible.
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.
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?