> [!Quote] > [[Friedrich Nietzsche]] > "Today as always, men fall into two groups: slaves and free men. Whoever does not have two-thirds of his day for himself, is a slave, whatever he may be: a statesman, a businessman, an official, or a scholar." # Slavery [[Osho]] on slavery as the underlying structure of all societies — not only the historical institution but the conditioning that makes any human being a slave to identity, relationship, or obsession. ## No Free Society Brutality, violence, insensitivity are taught so that millions of people can be turned into slaves. You think you are free people? Slavery has only become more sophisticated, that's all. Slavery still exists. No society up to now has ever been a free society. All societies have been slave societies. Yes, one thing is certain: slavery changes its forms. First it was very gross, now it is very subtle. And remember, subtle slavery is far more dangerous than gross slavery because you can rebel against gross slavery, it is so apparent, so obvious. But when the slavery is very subtle then you are not even aware of it. If you are a Mohammedan, if you are a Hindu, if you are a Christian, if you are a Jaina, you are a slave. Your mind has been conditioned to be a Hindu, to be a Mohammedan, to be a Christian, and you have become that. You have never questioned it. Why should you be a Christian? Why should you be a Mohammedan? You were not born as a Christian, as a Mohammedan, you were born as pure consciousness. Why these limitations? Who has forced these limitations on you? You were born as a pure human being. Who has made you an Indian and who has made you Chinese? You are slaves. If you are Chinese or Indian or English, you are a slave. Slavery is very subtle. If you are doing things which others want you to do, and you never do the thing that you always wanted to do, you are a slave. You go on loving a person you don't love; you go on sleeping with a person you don't love; you go on living in a relationship which is simply destructive, horrible, a hell, but you go on. You are a slave; you are not a free man. A free man is one who takes back his intelligence, who takes back his sensitivity. To me, that is what sannyas is: to take back your intelligence, to take back your sensitivity – to become again sensuous, alive, to become again intelligent, to become again a child. ## Conditioning as Slavery Intelligence itself as a site of enslavement. Every society chooses what counts as clever — mathematics, eloquence, silence, dance — and the choice is arbitrary. A child who can't do sums looks stupid in one culture and invisible in another. What society rewards is not a natural hierarchy of minds but a selected metric, and the selection serves whoever controls it. This connects directly to the slavery argument above: subtle slavery works through valuation. You don't need chains when you can define what a human being is *for*. The exam, the career ladder, the productivity scorecard — these are the modern equivalents of the master deciding which slaves get fed. They work precisely because they're experienced as self-improvement rather than subordination. The observation underneath all of this is uncomfortable: children arrive with full attentional capacity and undivided awareness, and the socialising process systematically narrows it. Not because the narrowing is necessary for survival (hunter-gatherers managed fine without formal education for tens of thousands of years) but because a population that thinks freely is expensive to govern. Obsessions — money, status, approval — function as internalised shackles. Nobody locks you in; you lock yourself in and thank the locksmith. Freedom, on this view, isn't acquiring more capability. It's recognising which of your current capabilities were installed rather than discovered, and choosing which to keep.