Escaping Natural Necessity through Enslaving Others

The previous post was about Cain/Abel, Prometheus/Epimetheus, and the Romulus/Remus characters in mythology. I think the most complete mythology on the topics covered by those characters is in the Prometheus/Epimetheus stories. The Cain/Abel and Romulus/Remus stories are more mangled and omit many key elements found in the Pro/Epimetheus stories.

The stories are about human use of technology and artifice to try to escape natural necessity. In each case, the attempt ends in mixed results or outright failure. For example, Prometheus is punished for giving fire to man, and Cain toils and obtains nothing from his labor. If you ever build anything, even some simple thing like a fence or a woodshed, you will get a taste of the same type of punishment. Your infrastructure eventually falls apart, maybe at an inopportune time, and requires constant repair and vigilance for critical things.

Technology initially looks like a means of escape from the toil and difficulty of life in the natural world, but it isn't.

Inevitably, some men attempted to repair this defect of technology and artifice by enslaving others to do the toil. The masters then imagined they were able to live the life of their "god" characters in myths, while those enslaved were reduced to life beneath that of animals. Of course that's not really what happened at all.

The "masters" are those enslaved to the system of slavery, whatever kind of slavery, be it physical oppression and control of human bodies, or scamming people into working for fake money. Today, the executives and managers of corporations are the people who make the paper corporate egregore function. They serve the corporation and the system itself.