Dependence

1

The master foresees, says Aristotle; the slave works accordingly. Thus there is a common interest uniting master and slave. Slavery is natural; slavery is normal. After all, it is out of the association formed by men with those two, women and slaves, that the first household was formed. (By the way, nature has distinguished between female and slave; they have different functions). In either event, men are naturally fitted to rule them both. Should affection exist among the various parties, that may be advantageous, but slaves (and women, I infer) exist to be used; affection therefore equates to guarding the tool against rust.
But what I see as the exploitative instillation of dependence, Aristotle presents as interdependence. The slave belongs to the master, he says, just as the foot belongs to the body.
If what I originally interpreted as the exploitative instillation of false consciousness in Sunee's situation might actually be adaptive or even humane, how can I be sure that slavery in Aristotle's epoch was wrong? I turn this question over on my tongue, and decide that I do not care to taste it.

2

All the same, I will not come out against patriarchal Middle Eastern families. Therefore, what right do I have to reject the proposition that authority might theoretically be absolute, personalized and benevolent? Certainly an evil institution can be mitigated or even rendered benign by a sufficiently virtuous master. The Roman father had the right of life and death over his children. We do not thereby deduce that all Roman fathers were evil, or even that the Roman system was necessarily evil.

3

On the other hand, we ourselves, spoiled, emancipated children, might not wish to be children in ancient Rome.

4

How can poverty not entail dependence? Self-reliance is a luxury of the rich. (Thoreau, you'll recall, defined himself as rich.) A poor person is someone who cannot be sure of gaining or holding the resources to meet his necessities. Therefore, he is unfree, in peril of humiliation and servitude, and certainly dependent on circumstance if not necessarily on any fellow human being.
Montaigne refers to the common run of men today, stupid, base, servile, unstable and continually tossed about by the tempest of the diverse passions that drive them to and fro; depending entirely on others. Doesn't this include most of us? It certainly includes the poor.
In Columbia a street vendor told me: Police took my merchandise, although they gave me a receipt for it. I have to sleep in the street. There's no place for me to stay.
Can the guerrillas help you?
Nobody helps nobody today. The guerrillas took everything from my family.
In one sense this man was less dependent than I. He existed without a home and now lacked even his former modest capital -- yet he declined to die! Wasn't that a triumph of self-reliance? I for my part have my house; but, as Thoreau remarked, my house also has me. Sometimes I wonder how to pay next month's mortgage.
This being duly noted, the fact remains that this Colombian was a tightrope-walker and I a comfortable spectator. He had put on a good show by not falling yet. What would happen when he got tired? His self-reliance temporarily sustained him on the rope. In and of itself, it showed him no way to dance to safety.

Poor People by William T. Vollman

Resurgam

While arranging my hair, I looked at my face in the glass, and felt it was no longer plain: there was hope in its aspect, and life in its colour; and my eyes seemed as if they had beheld the fount of fruition, and borrowed my beams from the lustrous ripple. I had often been unwilling to look at my master, because I feared he could not be pleased at my look; but I was sure I might lift my face to his now, and not cool his affection by its expression. I took a plain but clean and light summer dress from my drawer and put it on: it seemed no attire had ever so well become me; because none had I ever worn in so blissful a mood.

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

cheers, darlin

nothing unusual nothing strange / close to nothing at all / the same old scenario the same old rain / and there's no explosions here / then something unusual something strange / comes from nothing at all / i saw a spaceship fly by your window / did you see it disappear? / amie come sit on my wall & read me the story of 'O' / tell it like you still believe that the end of the century / brings a change for you and me / nothing unusual nothing's changed / just a little older that's all / you know when you've found it there's something i've learned / 'cause you feel it when they take it away hey hey / then something unusual something strange / comes from nothing at all / but i'm not a miracle and you're not a saint / just another soldier on a road to nowhere / amie come sit on my wall & read me a story of old / tell it like you still believe that the end of the century / brings a change for you and me / amie come sit on my wall & read me the story of o / tell it like you still believe that the end of the century / brings a change for you and me

Amie , Damien Rice

Chicago

The room was suddenly blanketed in darkness, and the girls fell quiet. Then the lights rose, a dim blue now, and seven black women appeared on the stage dressed in flowing skirts and scarves, their bodies frozen in awkward contortions. One of them, a big woman dressed in brown, began to cry out:

...half-notes scattered
without rhythm / no tune
distraught laughter fallin'
over a black girl's shoulder
it's funny / it's hysterical
the melody-less-ness of her dance
don't tell a soul
she's dancing on beer cans and shingles ...

As she spoke, the other women slowly came to life, a chorus of many shades and shapes, mahogany and cream, round and slender, young and not so young, stretching their limbs across the stage.

somebody / anybody
sing a black girl's song
bring her out
to know herself
to know you
but sing her rhythms
carin' / struggle / hard times
sing her song of life ...

For the next hour, the women took turns telling their stories, singing their songs. They sang about lost time and discarded fantasies and what might have been. They sang of the men who loved them, betrayed them, raped them, embraced them; they sang of the hurt inside these men, hurt that was understood and sometimes forgiven. They showed each other their stretch marks and the calluses on their feet; they revealed their beauty in the lilt of their voice, the flutter of a hand, beauty waning, ascendant, elusive. They wept over the aborted children, the murdered children, the children they once were. And through all of their songs, violent, angry, sweet, unflinching, the women danced, each of them, double-dutch and rhumba and bump and solitary waltz; sweat-breaking, heart-breaking dances. They danced until they all seemed one spirit. At the end of the play, that spirit began to sing a single, simple verse:

I found god in myself
and I loved her / I loved her fiercely

Dreams from my Father by Barack Obama

A Banquet of Consequences

Within only a few years, OPEC countries will have control over virtually all of the exportable surplus oil in the world (with the exception of Russia's petroleum, the production of which may reach a second peak in 2010, following an initial peak that precipitated the collapse of the USSR). The US -- whose global hegemony has seemed so complete for the past decade -- will suffer an increasing decline in global influence, which no amount of saber rattling or bombing of "terrorist" countries will be able to reverse. Awash in debt, dependent on imports, mired in corruption, its military increasingly overextended, the US is well into its imperial twilight years.

The Party's Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies by Richard Heinberg

Thy will be done

How do humanists feel about Jesus? I say of Jesus, as all humanists do, "If what he said is so good, and so much of it is absolutely beautiful, what does it matter if he was God or not?"

But if Christ hadn't delivered the Sermon on the Mount, with its message of mercy and pity, I wouldn't want to be a human being.

I'd just as soon be a rattlesnake.

A Man Without a Country by Kurt Vonnegut

"The function of the artist," the Navajo answered, "is to provide what life does not."

Amanda became pregnant during a fierce thunderstorm. "Was it the lightning or the lover?" she was sometimes heard to muse.

When her son was born with electrical eyes, people no longer thought her foolish.

Another Roadside Attraction by Tom Robbins