I don't think it's always possible or warranted.

Fear is paralyzing when it takes over. Any self-directed action is a sign that fear is diminished. And then action leads to further diminishment. Gandhi spun fibers to relieve fear of going without clothes. The Samurai studied Zen so they could fight with no fear of death. If you go into healthcare someone will share ways to overcome fear when someone is dying in front of you and it's your job to do something about it.

Or you could do it like MLK... have faith in people.

I'm not familiar with Foucault. Does he talk about self-oppression? — Mongrel

It's a while since I've read him, since I'm in an analytic phase..Foucault would begin with power, as a relation (indeed it's interesting that your op leaps from mutuality to slavery without saying 'power' or 'status'). Then power is (historically situated and ) distributed through social relations, not just through institutions but in the smallest and most intimate areas of our.lives . We exert or accede to power in many small ways which are part of the structure of discipline, including ways in which we discipline ourselves, feel guilt and contrition. It's extremely hard at any historical moment to 'step outside' such disciplinary structures for we are embodied within them. The 'self' is a performing thing that is subject to discipline great and small but also tries to create their own life, aesthetically. Hope that makes sense and doesn't offend any Foucault fans!

You say it's difficult to step outside power structures "for we are embodied within them." The master and slave both have to die to be born anew as equals. There's an American movie called Gone With the Wind that depicts the ending of a whole world due to war and the abolishment of slavery.

What I note is that it never really seems to end. People rise up, things change for bit, and then slavery appears again in some other form. Is that because it's part of our basic nature? Do we have to die and be replaced by something else for slavery to finally end?

We're socializing creatures. We're better when we come together to feed, clothe, shelter, and defend one another. When does this dependence become slavery? — Mongrel

Slavery is in the first place a word we use to name a special social status, for instance as defined by law. By United States law, by Roman law, by Sharia law, and so on, from one time and community to another.

Do we have a single concept of slavery as a special social status across all such legal definitions and across all communities in which there is no legal system in place or no laws that pertain to slavery? It may be difficult to articulate such a concept precisely in a way that's suitable for all cultural contexts. This difficulty expands into a broader one, concerning the use of the concept of slavery as a metaphor for various socioeconomic conditions in which the freedom of individuals is arguably restricted unjustly.

One way to bring out the difficulty: Someone might want to argue that one or another group in the U.S. or in similar Western nation-states are currently "enslaved": farm animals, pets, children, the elderly, incarcerated felons, the institutionalized insane, the disenfranchised, the proletariat, the 99%.... It's far from clear how to adjudicate disputes about whether the relevant conceptions of "slavery" are appropriate or inappropriate conceptions. Accordingly, one might prefer to avoid use of the term in such contexts, to wave off disputes about such use of the term as insignificant, and to focus conversation on facts about the relevant groups, facts about the relevant abridgements of rights or liberty, and arguments about the justice or injustice of the relevant facts.

When what you are doing is not by choice and you begin to build up resentment, against those whom are making you do it, including but not limited to yourself. — "ArguingWAristotleTiff

By this standard, all or nearly all communities would be communities that have "slaves"; and whether or not a member of the community counts as a slave would vary from one moment to the next along with his social contexts, choices, and emotions.

If my friends pressure me to dance when I don't feel like it, and I do it and then resent them and myself for it, am I a "slave"? What if I refuse to dance, but resent them and myself anyway?

Taken one way, this seems a frivolous definition that should offend anyone with an historically informed sense of what literal slavery has and still does entail for literally enslaved human beings.

On the other hand, we do speak metaphorically about being a "slave to your own impulses", a slave to ambition, a slave to gluttony, a slave to the esteem of others....

Accordingly, it should be specified what sense of "slavery" is at issue in the present conversation. Slavery as a formal social status, slavery as a metaphor for oppression, slavery as a metaphor for akrasia, or what?

I was thinking about the human body: how liver cells spend their whole lives being the liver, skin cells are skin, heart cells beat from birth to death. None of them are acting by choice are they? Even if the heart is struggling because it belongs to someone who became very overweight... it never gives up. It never goes out on strike to get better conditions. It just goes until it can't go anymore and at the very end it will go into overdrive trying to compensate for its own failure. — Mongrel

My heart is my heart, it's not my slave. There's no reason to think of the parts of an organism as "slaves" of the organism. In general there's no reason to think of parts of a whole as "slaves" of the whole.

I am not a slave to myself, but I have my own limits. Some of these limits are limits of action imposed by my body in each environment. Under normal conditions, I can't fly, I can't run beyond a certain speed, I can't lift more than a certain weight. I can train up my speed and strength only at a certain rate, with certain effort, and with certain limits to my progress. I must take in air, and water, and food if I'm to flourish or survive....

There's no reason to say I am a "slave" to these limits of mine. They are conditions of my existence and conditions of my freedom. I would not be myself without them, and I would not be anything without some such limits. To exist is to have limits. Having limits does not entail being a slave.

I'm not sure it makes any sense to speak literally of slavery except where sentient agents are enslaved by other sentient agents. This is only a necessary, not a sufficient, criterion for a clear conception of slavery.

One way to flesh out that conception might emphasize the concept of property: A slave is the property of a slave-owner. Another way might emphasize the subordination of will: According to relevant social norms, the will of the slave is in principle subordinate to the will of the slave-owner, which can mean, among other things, that the owner is held responsible for the actions of the slave. Details of property rights and responsibility pertaining to slaves have varied across cultural contexts in which slavery has been treated as legitimate; that's one reason it's difficult to produce a generic conception of slavery that suits all cultural contexts.

A human society is different from that. The idea of slavery causes revolts and revolutions. I'm trying to find the beginning of that. Is it something that's done to us? Or is it something we're all collectively creating? — Mongrel

I have the impression that literal slavery begins after human communities develop resources sufficient to hold captives -- typically including members of alien communities captured during raids or combat -- while giving those captives enough freedom of movement to perform tasks assigned to them by their captors. I hope it's obvious how and why this might cause revolts of the enslaved and their sympathizers.

Isn't there a middle ground between a clear conception of literal slavery, on the one the hand, and any old metaphorical use of the term? Can we agree that "oppression" and "coercion" are terms that figure prominently in this middle ground?