Robert F. Kennedy Jr., independent challenger for president and anti-vaccine activist, has a cockamamie solution for drug addicts and people who use medication for depression or ADHD: strip people of their tech gadgets and send them to government-funded "wellness farms" to grow organic food. Doesn't that sound suspiciously... like a labor camp?! Kennedy extolled this […]
They’ll threaten the people you love if you don’t comply.
Look around at other places that do this kind of thing. You don’t think they’ve thought about that already? There’s a story floating around about a dude in a similar situation who didn’t meet the quota (or something), and they cut off his little kid’s hand as punishment.
Exactly. Getting people to work when in involuntary servitude is a solved problem. You can research some of the history of what methods were used to get African slaves to work, especially in the early colonial Caribbean colonies, if you really want to lose faith in humanity.
It was actually a quite difficult problem from the slaver’s perspective. You kidnap some guy from the coast of West Africa. You take him from his family, haul him across an ocean, and force him to work against his will on a sugar plantation on a Caribbean island. You offer him no way out and instruct him he’s to work as hard as he can until he keels over and dies. He gets nothing from his work, and he has no way to earn or buy his freedom. Oh, and he doesn’t think he did anything to deserve this treatment either.
Exactly what motivation does this man have to work for you exactly? Early on, in these slave colonies, the slavers found that many abducted people would simply refuse to eat and starve themselves to death. The inescapability of their predicament meant that the slaves couldn’t even hold out hope for eventual rescue or escape. It would be like if you were abducted by aliens and hauled off to a planet in another galaxy. There’s simply no way you’re escaping and getting back home. So many slaves would simply refuse to work and just starve themselves to death.
Eventually the slavers did figure out ways to coerce slaves into working. And those methods are as bad, and probably even worse, than you can imagine.
Not to mention they literally invented a disease to explain how slaves that tried to or successfully escaped were suffering from an illness that made them not want to be enslaved.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drapetomania
I wonder if there was ever a sufficient overlap in the dubious diagnoses that someone was diagnosed simultaneously with both drapetomania and hysteria.
… Yeah this is real world and Stanford prison experiment was just role play that ended in humiliation
Yep. That experiment was cut short after only, what, a week? Turns out if you give people unchecked power over others, it might turn sour. Luckily someone had a spine and ended it.