Dear oh dear some of the people on this live journal caper are really wacky you know, so much abuse and cheek have I copped from some of these people that I dont know if I should keep on or not
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I think it ridiculous almost to the point of being insulting to the intellect to think that a person should or could EVER be expected to have a work ethic when it is clear that they will never gain anything from having a work ethic. As far as I'm concerned, any discussion of "work ethic" among slaves starts and ends there - any "work ethic" that they do or do not exhibit as a result of treatment isn't work ethic at all, because the ethics of the situation are so far skewed. All it is is a response to stimuli, a simple cause and effect relationship.
Work ethic can only be applied when the ethics of the person doing the work are the MOTIVE for the work being done. But the basic fact of being a slave is that you have NOTHING that is personal - everything you do is for someone else, and so you are just acting as an extension of their motives. Your own motives are moot.
So whether good conditions got more or less actual work out of slaves, "work ethic" has NOTHING to do with it. It's just how people chose to control others, how they were manipulated to produce things for other people. They were stripped of their own ethics and barred from having them, so as I said, it is borderline sickening to look back with a revisionist eye and now assert that perhaps if these people had not had whatever small comforts their masters provided them, they would have been more committed to their work. There was NOTHING that would have committed them to that work, because it was not their work, and they SHOULDN'T have been committed to that work, unless it was something that they chose of their own free will.
Work ethic can only be applied when the ethics of the person doing the work are the MOTIVE for the work being done. But the basic fact of being a slave is that you have NOTHING that is personal - everything you do is for someone else, and so you are just acting as an extension of their motives. Your own motives are moot.
So whether good conditions got more or less actual work out of slaves, "work ethic" has NOTHING to do with it. It's just how people chose to control others, how they were manipulated to produce things for other people. They were stripped of their own ethics and barred from having them, so as I said, it is borderline sickening to look back with a revisionist eye and now assert that perhaps if these people had not had whatever small comforts their masters provided them, they would have been more committed to their work. There was NOTHING that would have committed them to that work, because it was not their work, and they SHOULDN'T have been committed to that work, unless it was something that they chose of their own free will.
ris
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ris
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