Overpopulation slavery must end.

First, overpopulation slavery must be understood.

This King of Dahomey panel seeks to correct an important oversight. For many reasons, human awareness in recent centuries has focused on the experience of slavery rather than upon original causes of slavery. Until we develop an understanding of circumstances that repeatedly set the stage for slavery’s rebirth, past accomplishments of abolitionists will never be safe.

Harvard’s Orlando Patterson’s landmark Slavery and Social Death book documented the reappearance of slavery again and again on most continents through out history. Patterson’s 2018 Preface to Slavery and Social Death notes, “Indeed, one of the most remarkable features of Western civilization is the critical role of slavery at almost all the high points of its development, from ancient Greece to the rise of industrial capitalism.” (Patterson, Orlando. Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study, With a New Preface (p. 7). Harvard University Press. Kindle Edition.)

Many North Americans view slavery as a “solved-by-emancipation problem” unique to the Southern United States. But 10.7 million African people were sold into slavery between 1525 and 1866. 1.8 million deaths had reduced survivors from the estimated 12.5 million people sent through African gates of no return. “How many of the 10.7 million Africans were shipped directly to North America? Only about 388,000.” PBS data.

“Slavery has existed all over the world,” Patterson documents. Experienced slavery, African and otherwise, has often challenged humanity.

So what circumstances nudge, trigger, and move societies from a few initial imprisonments into full-blown institutionalization of slavery? The question is beyond academic. Until such processes come under human control the accomplishments of abolitionists of the past will never be safe.

Unfortunately, our order for taking up such thoughts here will seem backwards. Those who fought slavery–often at immense costs to themselves and loved ones–focused necessarily on brutal experiences of slavery in their struggle for emancipation. Their focus, sometimes to the point of martyrdom, continues to dominate our thinking to the present.

Alas, we are born into a world that has shaped our animal natures for millions of years. Five-centuries’ richness of so-called “new world” resources helped some push back against horrid concepts of horrid institutions. But experiences of slavery do not explain the origins of slavery.

If slavery’s ability to rise repeatedly from human unsustainability is to be managed, we must no longer shrink back from understanding the fierce logic of overpopulation slavery.

Overpopulation poverty’s path to overpopulation slavery.

Harvard’s Henry Louis Gates Jr. is footnoted in the image-plate above. In Gates’ powerful Youtube video linked below, Gates understandably found his visit with the modern King of Dahomey “unsettling.” After all, predecessors of that emperor had sold Dr. Gates’ ancestral family into overpopulation slavery several generations and centuries before. Judge for yourself.

By the time Gates visited King Agoli-Agbo’s Court surrounded by the Kings’ servants, petitioners, supporters and others, the British Slavery Abolition Act 1833 had long since become law. Still, Dr. Gates’ video-taped personal reactions help us imagine earlier times when the likes of King Ghezo and slave-seller Francisco Felix de Souza dealt with a very pressing question.

What should be done with so many prisoners of war?

What universal characteristic of human nature explains why slavery appears again and again throughout history?

Darwin clearly recognized struggles that ultimately accompany overpopulation among animals. Darwin recognized, too, that we humans are animals. Occasionally demographic transitions and/or deliberate intentional decisions should be able build us better qualities of life. In general though, all momentarily successful life tends to overpopulate available life support. So when humans outnumber available life support some experience overpopulation poverty. Some compete for what’s left.

Overpopulation poverty becomes obvious as  babies are born faster than jobs. Where overpopulation poverty yields desperate searches for jobs, food, and shelter, people are driven from their lands of birth.  A result is overpopulation emigration.

Ben Franklin wrote in the 1750’s that human numbers out-racing opportunities collapse wages. Fortunately for his own country in those early times, the reverse was also true. Even the poetry of Lady Liberty, that beautiful Statue of Liberty that stands at the entrance of New York Harbor, bemoans return of overpopulation poverty.

How does overpopulation poverty set the stage for reappearance of slavery in any of slavery’s many forms? How has overpopulation poverty shaped human nature such that any of many circumstances repeatedly ignite human desires to enslave our own kind?

Sparks that ignite overpopulation poverty into overpopulation slavery.

As Patterson details with such consummate skill, “social death” identifies slavery. “Social death” captures the absolute repudiation, dishonor, and stripping of status from true slaves. Where is social death found in modern civilizations?

Prisoners of war (POWs) are an obvious example. Captors fear mortal enemies. Captives caught as prisoners of war are stopped while brutally working to destroy everything captors value. POWs threatened captors’ lives, loved ones, gods, cultures, gods! Despite anti-slavery writings from Geneva Conventions, captors suffering wars for survival tend to see POW enemies as deserving of absolute dishonor. Dishoner such as wars’ capital punishment for mortal enemies. To captors, captives are subject to execution, entirely without value, and socially dead.

When numbers outrun life support, overpopulation poverty grows. Human “us” versus “them” passions trigger. Politics becomes increasingly zero-sum, polarized, harsh, and violent.

History yields countless examples. Let’s start with hungers that overturned Rome’s constitutional democracy. Right, that’s the constitutional democracy that would one day became U.S. Founding Fathers’ greatest goal!

Let go on to African slave coasts where powerful empires competed with neighbors to support their own growing numbers. Prisoners of war were taken. Captors typically executed prisoners of war not sold to avoid strengthening their enemies. Slave-ships offering cannons, muskets, weaponry, and money for POWs, criminals, and bankrupts built global markets. A plate showing Atlantic Slave Trades shows here.

Captor-leaders even found wayt to claim a moral high ground!  Instead of killing prisoners “we let them live.” We send dangerous enemies where they’ll be forced to do useful work. They won’t rejoin our enemies. We got better weapons for defending our peoples and our lands and resources.  And for taking more land and resources we need from hated enemies. Our enemies only threaten us because they cannot learn to live within their means.

The Brazilian Don Francisco de Sousa yields an example. After supporting Dahomey King Ghezo’s successful coup against his brother, Don Francisco was rewarded as the King’s Chacha, Viceroy of Ouidah, monopolist of the region’s massive slave trade to outgoing vessels. Henry Louis Gates’ interview of the senior member of Don Francisco’s extended family exposed such a claim of moral high ground.

King Ghezo denied British abolition in the 1840’s with these words. “The slave trade is the ruling principle of my people. It is the source and the glory of their wealth…the mother lulls the child to sleep with notes of triumph over an enemy reduced to slavery…“

Why? At Ghezo’s succession he knew Dahomey was being ruined by tribute payments forced by his Oyo neighbors. Ghezo’s military organization of surplus people stopped the tribute and generated POWs for sale.

Emperor wannabees ask, “What can we do with all our hungry surplus people?” Organize militarily to defend our life supports against hungry neighbors? Organize aggressively to plunder resources from “alien foreigners?”

Overpopulation poverty terrorizes political leaders. Louis XVI proved that losing control over starving subjects can make heads roll.  As overpopulation poverty increases, “we the people”  increasingly stress those at the top. Controlling instruments of social violence makes outright coercion more predictable, to those at the top.

One German explained the aggression that started WWII with these words. “85 million Germans possess as their living space scarcely 232,000 square miles and 46 million Britishers possess 16 million square miles.”  1940 Dec 10 speech to workers of Berlin  Aly’s book Hitler’s Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State documents feeding German working classes from plunder and racial war against “others,” against targetable “outsiders” whose lives and life-support resources were stolen and redirected. Jews, foreign countries, political enemies, and murdered others contributed involuntarily.

Death penalty crimes are committed against rules protecting captors’ communities. Especially as slavery institutionalizes, communities and captors tend to see such prisoners as devoid of value, deserving of dishonor, executable. Felons subject to capital punishment get sold as slaves. Debtors get sold as slaves.

Transitions from Edenic affluence to overpopulation poverty to overpopulation slavery have been occuring since the beginning of human history on planet earth. Think babies born faster than jobs in Egypt.

Can overpopulation slavery happen elsewhere?

Has any nation of human animals ever achieved that sustainability necessary to support all of us comfortably forever? Have formerly wealthy nations like Egypt, Rome, and others lost their ability to maintain their people?

Could Uncle Sam do better than admire China’s “later-longer-fewer” population policies? Might the U.S. make Lady Liberty happy by encouraging numbers sustainable for all time?

Why is overpopulation slavery so hard to see?

Overpopulation slavery is invisible for many reasons.

Overpopulation shaped and continues to shape our passions, our wants, hungers, and desires. When “we” fear “them” it is because we know that we and our children will need what “others” also hunger for. See Chapter 2 of Clever but Clueless that Overpopulation drives Slavery, Genocide, and War. Like instincts of other animals and innate tendencies of plants, overpopulation emotional-instincts are part of human nature that blinds us to our to our own rising numbers that trouble us.

Consider influencers. Do some military authorities see ever-larger numbers of hungry people as ever-larger supplies of fresh soldiers? Do some CEOs prefer overpopulation for ever-bigger markets and ever-cheaper wages? Musk weighs in.

Do some union leaders prefer foreign-shore immigration as dues-paying union memberships decline? As capital was increasingly off-shored in pursuit of cheaper overpopulation-lowered wages, that problem was bound to happen.

Do many religions and religion-businesses grow by teaching even disadvantaged families that birth self-restraints are no-nos? See Chapter 6 of Clever but Clueless that Overpopulation drives Slavery, Genocide, and War. As to religious pressures, Eric Kaufman’s Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth? Subtitled, “Demography and Politics in the TwentyFirst Century”  deserves expansion.

We humans should theoretically have had intelligence enough to manage our animal drives sustainably. Time will tell.

Overpopulation slavery must be made unnecessary, or…

Most North Americans hopefully believe that slavery has been ended for all time. The Emancipation Proclamation shouted loudly the admirable goal of a young affluent democracy to end domination over one man by another. Abraham Lincoln, we thank you among so many beloved people who gave so much for a chance to make freedoms sustainable.

But laws written in the wake of that great Proclamation can last only as long as underpopulation affluence can be sustained.

Historic and current violence reminds that we humans don’t respond well to continuous depravation.

Of course we have great new technologies! But our technologies now include nuclear, chemical, and suicidally-intelligent weapons…

Buzzie, our buzzard friend might add, “The longer Humies fear other Humies the better for us buzzards!”

Buzzie feels good ’cause buzzard futures look good!