Slaves to businessmen.

Slaves, serfs, workers, employees, Human resources, and “independent” businessmen.

Most of you, if you are like me, learned early history from the Bible and later some more from archeology. There is hardly a way that we can learn the truth from those sources without a time machine that we don’t have. Later, writing became more available to humans, and history was developed, but very inaccurate. History must be written, can be altered or destroyed, and often we see conflicting history stories that we must choose if to believe or not. We can’t even agree on what is happening in front of our eyes here and now, never mind a thousand years ago.  

You hear Premier Kenney talking about Alberta oil as the most ethical oil in the world. Ezra Levant, who lobbies for petroleum, coined the phrase Ethical Oil, without knowing that a barrel of our liquefied tar is producing around three times the pollution compared to Nordic oil, and it got popular in the media. Strangely, there are no waiting lines to purchase our product and not many investors to help build a pipeline to transport it. What will history say? Ethical or immoral?

We still debate the oldest historical argument I am aware of to this day. The Bible talks about kings who built cities, pyramids, and other grand capital projects. It doesn’t mention the thousands, perhaps millions of people who worked and died to complete the ventures.

In the story of the Hebrew slaves in Egypt, the Hebrew scribes recorded the events mostly to show the power of God, not of the people. People enslaved were only the pawns in the game of history. Joseph, a Hebrew slave, rose to prominence and brought his family, Hebrew migrants, to Egypt, to save their lives. Over generations, they became a nation of slaves and the mighty hand of God saved them. Kings and armies fought and land titles changed hands.

In the biblical stories, people became slaves most often when their country or city was conquered by a bigger army. Otherwise, your own countrymen could be sold as slaves if you couldn’t pay a debt. Slaves had no rights but had value. A king who wanted to build a city had to have many slaves to do the work. If he wanted a large army, he would gain an advantage by owning a lot of women of childbearing age.

Christianity became popular and enslaving our own kind of people lost its luster, so a social change happened. Humans of other races were enslaved, while those more like the masters became serfs. The serf was a property that came with the land, but the master wasn’t obligated to keep them alive. The unwashed masses couldn’t negotiate anything to improve their living conditions. Their sons were drafted into armies and what they produced was taken away. Hunger was a way of life and if they broke the law to steal food, the penalties were harsh and deadly.

In comes the industrial revolution. Farming improved, there was no need for as many peasants, and people were pushed into factory jobs in cities. Men, women, and children worked their lives away. The pay was mostly only enough to survive. Workers created wealth, nobility controlled the army, and the army protected the industrialists and nobility who benefitted from the work.

There have been slave revolts, like with the Hebrew slaves in Egypt, but never on a large scale. In the last couple of hundred years, we witnessed an additional dimension. The unwashed masses realized that united, they have power. They could withdraw their labor and sink the ship. When they did it the Communist way, it didn’t work well, was too expensive to maintain by using force, or they could form union federations and demand some human rights. In Northern Europe, a shortage of labor hindered economic development. Although labor withdrew from Church Christianity, a new idea took hold. All is one. The people can work together to improve everyone’s lives. In Christian terms, the people are the body of Christ. They all need bread.

A country could do well if the government, employers, and workers worked together. An economy could also benefit from being open to competition avoiding monopolies. The northern Europeans proved the concept by experimenting on themselves. They developed the concept that a government is obliged to serve the people instead of the other way around. Understanding that the economy needs to sustain those who work in it, not just constantly growing, was another major step. Some people worked harder than others and are rewarded accordingly, but the first goal is to have enough to provide people with basic needs to avoid trouble.

Strikes, revolutions, wars, and poverty are all very expensive. Dealing with ecological disasters is devastating. Fighting against economical forced migration is almost impossible. Humans are not a resource, they are our equals in our image.

We shouldn’t work towards joining business and government to enslave people and wring the last drop of sweat and blood from them. Now the newest scheme is to call the workers independent businessmen, like the Uber drivers.

The wealthy may win in a short term, but all will be destroyed, eventually. The archeologists of whoever took our place on earth will try to form a picture of what we were like from our dry bones. It may be thousands of years in the future or a million years from now. The earth will still turn around, encircling the sun, but no one will be counting.

“You do not know the hour or the day,” the bible said, so you should always be ready. To be ready, we must make some changes to our behavior.

The earth gives us all we need. It’s a gift from the Lord. It’s a gift to all of us, not governments, employers, or workers alone. It must be shared. There is just no other way.