So, recently I was linked to another tedious article in the Guardian, in which someone complains about there being too much culture, too much stuff, out there. Which seems to be the perennial lament of some segments of the self-styled intelligentsia, as you may have noticed - evidently whatever marvellous things they have learned don't include self-control or the ability to prioritize.
But then I got to this frankly disgusting part:
Here's what I want: I want to be told what to read, watch and listen to. I want my hands tied. I want a cultural diet. I want a government employee to turn up on my doorstep once a month, carrying a single book for me to read. I want all my TV channels removed and replaced by a single electro-pipe delivering one programme or movie a day. If I don't watch it, it gets replaced by the following day's selection. I want all my MP3s deleted and replaced with one unskippable radio station playing one song after the other. And every time I think about complaining, I want a minotaur to punch me in the kidneys and remind me how it was before.In short: I've tried more. It's awful. I want less, and I want it now.
And I thought about this. And then I thought about all the people I know or know of who want, or claim they want, to be made to do this, and prevented from doing that, and regulated in their doing of the other, and then it hit me:
Aristotle's theory of natural slavery is seeming more and more plausible by the day.
Remember that? It goes like this, paraphrasing broadly and eliminating some of the elements clearly 'of his time': Some individuals lack an adequate deliberative faculty; i.e., there is a defect in their mentality that renders them incapable of determining, and subsequently pursuing, those ends that constitute eudaimonia. Therefore, their only way of participating in the Good Life is to be directed by another who possesses an adequate deliberative faculty.
Now, let us consider those who, as Aristotle put it, 'participates in rational principle enough to apprehend, but not to have, such a principle' and therefore is 'a slave by nature'. Alas for their plight in these modern times, since we have for good and adequate reasons abolished slavery - and yet, they still know at some subconscious level that they need to fill in for that innate lack of deliberative faculty.
I submit that the most common response in the modern era - leaving aside such minority quirks as the Gorean subculture - is to join some religion, political group, faction, or party, or other top-down belief structure which will gladly, oh so very gladly, relieve you of the need to think, choose, speak, decide or eschew for your own damn self, thus relieving the intolerable psychological pressure of needing to think while being unable or unwilling to think.
Depressing as hell, really, as theories go, but consider for a moment just how well this explains how both right-wing authoritarianism and left-wing collectivism accumulate hordes of memebot-like followers - or, for that matter, the Cult of Apple - and I bet you'll feel truthiness.
