Missing Slavery?

         You said in your heart, “I will ascend to the heavens; I will raise my throne above the stars of God; I will sit enthroned on the mount of assembly, on the utmost heights of Mount Zaphon. I will ascend above the tops of the clouds; I will make myself like the Most High.”

But you are brought down to the realm of the dead, to the depths of the pit. (Isaiah 14:13-15)

“You will not certainly die,” the serpent said to the woman. “For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”

When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it.   (Genesis 3:4-6)

This morning, a friend shared something found on Facebook “Unpopular opinion: white people love dogs so much because deep down they miss owning slaves. They love the owner and mastery dynamic, desperate for something to control.” Let me begin by pointing out that the person who originally posted it obviously has little comprehension of the relationship between most people I’ve known and their dogs. Yes, there are a few who are abusive, and a small percent more practice the mastery dynamic. Most of us are, instead, slaves to our dogs. I mean, is it really mastery and dominance on my part that Grace ends up with parmesan cheese sprinkled on her kibble?

There are logical problems. How can a person miss doing something they never did? How can they miss what they never had? But she’s not as wrong as our quick snorts of derision would like us to believe. The first passage above is often depicted as having at least two levels of accusation. On the one hand, it is rebuking the king of Babylon. But it’s also said to describe Lucifer’s fall. The second passage is the account of Satan’s temptation of Adam and Eve, and that temptation is the same – to be like the Most High.

Because mankind fell (and has continued to fall ever since), our relationships are flawed. At our best, love controls the desire to dominate and enslave. At our worst, there is no love, just the desire to dominate and enslave. Most of us are somewhere between those two extremes. It has ever been thus. We view ourselves as oppressed because we are not granted the power to be like God when the reality is that we can no more be God than COVID-19 can replicate itself outside of a host or build a nuclear bomb all by itself, but in our flawed thinking if we were only given the chance… we could overthrow God and we could take his place. Marx was absolutely correct about that part. We could…we could… but we never have, so we can’t really miss it. That’s the first thing that the woman with the unpopular opinion got wrong. It’s not about missing something that has been taking away. No, the desire to dominate and enslave isn’t with an eye to a glorious past and a sense of nostalgia. It is with an eye to the future, to making the world over in our own image. In short, it is a progressive approach.

Saul Alinsky, who seems to be widely admitted by Left-leaning politicians and activists, understood this. In his book, Rules for Radicals, he described Lucifer as the first radical known to man. Lucifer’s approach, as described in the two passages above, is the progressive approach. It does not look back at what it had and lost. It looks forward to what it can take from those it deems unfit. In the same way, those who wish to dominate and enslave others aren’t missing the dominance and control they had. They are seeking to wrest dominance and control from another and grant it to themselves and assuming that they will do a better job.