"I don't get all choked up about yellow ribbons and American flags. I see them as symbols, and I leave them to the symbol-minded." -George CarlinModern Slavery Stats:
1. Asia and the Pacific: ~29.3 million (6.8 per 1000 ppl)
2. Africa: ~7.0 million (5.2 per 1000)
3. Europe and Central Asia: ~6.4 million (6.9 per 1000)
4. Americas: ~5.1 million (5 per 1000)
5. Arab States: ~1.7 (10.1 per 1000 [highest] )
It also discounts the value of groups, absent concerns about competition. No man is an island, and the society you grow up in, the people you grow up with, greatly affect who you become and what your life is like. To say it doesn't matter who you live around discards all that, or reveals the profound mistake (or lie) of thinking who makes up a society doesn't affect what the society is like.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_slave
This is arguably the reason why the Overton window has shifted towards the rejection of human slavery over the last century or so, with the growth of fossil fuel use.
Human slavery will thus likely swing back into fashion again in the future as oil, coal and natural gas run out.
There must be some other solution, surely! If only we could somehow find some other source of energy...