The Eternal Dance - Freedom, Slavery and Free Will

Who is the master, and who is the slave?

The hunter-gatherer was bound to nature and tribe but perhaps free of oppressive hierarchy.

The ancient slave could find inner freedom through wisdom, while the master could be a slave to his own power.

Plato taught that without enlightenment we are all prisoners, whereas Dante insisted that with God’s grace we all possess freedom – and we damn ourselves by surrendering it.

Hegel revealed the master’s dependence on the slave’s recognition, and Nietzsche unmasked the slave’s covert moral victory over the master.

In modern life, we pride ourselves on liberty yet find new fetters in technology, consumerism, and loneliness.

As the Stoic philosopher Epictetus, himself once a slave, famously said:

“No man is free who is not master of himself.” In other words, true freedom requires self-mastery, an inner command of one’s own impulses and fears

Introduction

Freedom and slavery are often seen as direct opposites – one implies the absence of the other. Yet throughout history and philosophy, they have been intertwined in surprising ways. The infamous slogan from Orwell’s 1984, “Freedom is Slavery,” resonates as more than dystopian irony; it hints at a profound paradox[1]. What if pursuing absolute freedom can lead one into a new kind of slavery? And conversely, might forms of servitude conceal an unexpected freedom? These questions have occupied thinkers from ancient times to modern days, revealing that the line between freeman and slave, master and servant, is often blurred.

To explore “who is truly free” and “who is a slave,” we must look beyond legal definitions. History provides examples of people physically enslaved yet spiritually or intellectually free, and of individuals enjoying political liberty yet bound by invisible chains of ignorance or desire. Freedom, in the deepest sense, is not merely a social status but a state of mind and soul. Likewise, slavery can exist in subtle forms – one can be enslaved by illusions, passions, or dependency even without physical shackles. As the Stoic philosopher Epictetus, himself once a slave, famously said: “No man is free who is not master of himself.” In other words, true freedom requires self-mastery, an inner command of one’s own impulses and fears[2]. A person could be outwardly free but internally a slave to vices, or outwardly constrained but internally sovereign.

This paradoxical connection between freedom and slavery invites us on a journey across time. We will traverse scenarios from prehistoric hunter-gatherer bands to our hyper-connected modern world, examining how conceptions of freedom evolved alongside forms of domination. We will delve into the philosophical visions of Plato and Dante Alighieri – who present starkly contrasting views of free will – and consider perspectives from religious doctrine to political ideology. Throughout, we’ll challenge assumptions: Are humans “prisoners” of circumstance as Plato suggested, or endowed with an inalienable free will as Dante believed? Does individualism liberate us or isolate us into new servitude? By unearthing these questions and the “hidden truths” behind them, we seek insight into that ultimate riddle: who is the master, and who is the slave?

Early Human Societies: Freedom Before Masters?

To understand freedom and slavery, it’s worth beginning at the very start of human society. In small hunter-gatherer communities, formal slavery as we know it was likely absent. Our distant ancestors roamed in bands where strict social hierarchies were limited by the demands of survival. There were no kings and no chattel slaves; by modern standards, one might imagine these nomadic peoples enjoyed a kind of primitive freedom. Indeed, the romantic notion of the “noble savage” – a term later popularized to suggest indigenous people living freely in nature – paints early humans as unfettered by the chains of civilization. Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the 18th century speculated that in a state of nature, humans were solitary and free, only later choosing to form societies at the cost of some liberty (the idea of a “social contract”)[3][4]. In Rousseau’s view, “a man can be free, that he can be a man, [only] outside of society,” because living together inevitably meant constraints on individual will[5][6]. This is a trade-off: by joining a community for mutual benefit, humans surrendered the complete freedom of isolation.

However, the reality of early human life complicates this idealized picture. Survival in the wild imposed its own harsh constraints – nature itself can be a master. A hunter-gatherer was “free” in the sense of not being owned by another human, yet was bound by hunger, weather, and the needs of the tribe. Moreover, anthropologists note that for all their egalitarian tendencies, small tribes often had strong social norms and leadership in the form of elders or skilled hunters. One could argue these norms were a kind of soft bondage: to belong to the tribe (and thus increase one’s chances of survival) meant submitting to communal rules and traditions. In other words, even in the “freedom” of pre-state societies, the individual bowed to the community.

In modern debates, some radical thinkers (like anarcho-primitivists) have viewed the rise of agriculture and civilization as a fall from freedom – introducing private property, social classes, and formal slavery. Others counter that true human freedom only flourishes within society, through cooperation and shared culture, not in isolation. The 19th-century anarchist Mikhail Bakunin forcefully rejected the Rousseau-esque idea that one can be free in absolute isolation. “No individual can be free outside of human society or without its cooperation... To be free in absolute isolation is an absurdity invented by theologians and metaphysicians,” Bakunin wrote[7]. He argued that the very notion of a person being perfectly free alone (as if communing only with God) was empty – “Freedom in isolation, then, is the freedom of nothingness... indeed the nothingness of freedom: slavery.”[8]. In Bakunin’s analysis, true freedom is a collective achievement: “The freedom of individuals is by no means an individual matter... It is a collective matter, a collective product”[9]. We only become fully human – with language, thought, and self-awareness – through others’ influence[10][11]. A lone person in the wilderness, as Bakunin imagines, would hardly be free in any meaningful sense; without society they would be more animal than human, constrained by ignorance and incapacity[12][13]. Thus, from the very start, we see a tension: freedom vs. belonging. Humans gain capabilities and selfhood from the community, but must also conform to communal demands.

Freedom in Community vs. Domination in Early Civilizations

As soon as humans formed larger settled communities – the first villages and city-states – the dynamic evolved. The agricultural revolution created surpluses that led to hierarchy: some accumulated wealth and power, while others fell into dependence or debt. The unfortunate invention of slavery as an institution can be traced back to antiquity (and perhaps late prehistory). By the time of the first kingdoms in Mesopotamia and Egypt, there were clearly delineated masters and slaves in society. One human could literally own another as property. The freedom of some was built on the bondage of others.

Yet even in these stark conditions, history provides rich paradoxes. Ancient slaves, though brutally deprived of liberty, were not necessarily devoid of agency or spiritual freedom. Meanwhile, the masters – emperors, pharaohs, nobles – though enjoying absolute power over others, were often themselves constrained by the systems they ruled. For example, a king might appear to have total freedom of action, but he is “enslaved” by responsibilities to the state, by the fear of losing power (living in paranoia of palace coups), or by ritual obligations (many ancient rulers were bound by religious laws or omens). There is a poignant dialectic here: the master needs the slave as much as the slave needs the master, perhaps more so. Philosophers in the 19th century, most notably Georg Hegel, explored this master-slave dialectic. Hegel describes a scenario of two self-conscious beings encountering each other, each desiring dominance. One becomes master, the other slave, through a struggle. But once this hierarchy forms, the master finds himself strangely dependent: “The victor keeps the loser alive so that he can have someone by whom he can be recognized – the master is dependent on the slave.” In Hegel’s analysis, this insight “turns the usual thoughts regarding this relationship upside down – the master is the one who needs the slave, but the slave does not need the master.”[14] The slave labors and in doing so develops strength and self-awareness, while the master, doing nothing for himself, remains spiritually stagnant[15]. Over time, the slave may become internally free – gaining skill, knowledge, even moral maturity – whereas the master, parasitically reliant on the slave’s work and recognition, is imprisoned by his own need for control[16]. This profound reversal suggests that power can be its own kind of bondage. The one who seems to command all may in reality be chained by dependency on those under him.

The ancient world’s own thinkers had inklings of these truths. In classical Greece, where slavery was commonplace, philosophers debated who was “free by nature” and who was “slave by nature.” Aristotle infamously argued that some people are slaves by nature – lacking the rational capacity for self-governance – and thus it is just for them to be ruled by masters who possess reason. This served as a convenient rationale for slavery in Greek society, but even Aristotle acknowledged that many actual slaves became so by law or war, not due to innate inferiority. Interestingly, the Stoics – a later school of Hellenistic philosophy, which included former slaves like Epictetus – radically disagreed with Aristotle’s premise. They taught that all humans have the divine spark of reason and thus in essence are free and equal. Epictetus, who was born a slave, preached that true freedom comes from within: “No man is free who is not master of himself. Freedom...occurs not under the shackles of another... but from us – should we decide to take on our own mastery.”[2] In Stoic view, every person could cultivate inner freedom by mastering their own desires and fears, thereby becoming emotionally invulnerable even if physically in chains. The Stoic sage might be a slave externally, but internally he obeys only reason and virtue – thereby attaining moral freedom. Meanwhile, a tyrant on a throne, if governed by lust, greed, or anger, is internally a slave to those passions. As Epictetus quipped, “Is he free who is in the power of appetite, money or fame?… No more than a man is free who is in the power of drunkenness.”

The Christian worldview that emerged in late antiquity added another twist. Christianity preached the spiritual equality of souls (“there is neither slave nor free... for you are all one in Christ Jesus,” says the Bible, Galatians 3:28) and emphasized that sin is a form of slavery. In Christian theology, even people of high status were “slaves to sin” until freed by Christ’s grace, and conversely, even a literal slave could be spiritually free if he served righteousness. This was encapsulated in paradoxical teachings like: “Whoever commits sin is a slave of sin... if the Truth shall make you free, you shall be free indeed” (John 8:34, 8:32). Some early Christian thinkers even called themselves “slaves of God,” implying that serving God (the ultimate good) was perfect freedom, whereas serving one’s own base impulses was enslavement. This idea – servitium Dei summa libertas (service of God is supreme freedom) – later influenced Dante and others (we will return to Dante’s view of God and free will shortly).

However, despite these noble ideals, the social reality in medieval times remained hierarchical and coercive. Serfdom replaced slavery in many places, but serfs were unfree to leave their lord’s land – essentially bonded to service. The master-slave dynamic lived on under other names. Yet, within these rigid structures, people continued to seek freedom in the only ways available: through faith, through knowledge, or through community bonds. For instance, joining a religious order (like a monastery) meant giving up worldly freedom but supposedly gaining spiritual liberation. In a sense, medieval man might say: I am a servant of my lord and of God, but in knowing my place and living virtuously, I am free from the greatest slavery – the slavery of sin and chaos. It’s a mindset quite foreign to modern individualism, but it underscores how freedom was often conceived as an internal condition – freedom for something (virtue or salvation) rather than freedom from all constraint.

Plato’s Cave: Ignorance as Imprisonment

Few metaphors illustrate the connection between freedom and slavery as powerfully as Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. In Plato’s Republic (Book VII), the philosopher asks us to imagine prisoners who have been chained in a cave since childhood, chained by their legs and necks so that they cannot move or see anything except the wall in front of them[17]. Behind them burns a fire, and between the fire and the prisoners runs a walkway where other people carry objects. The prisoners see only the shadows of these carried objects cast on the wall. Having never known any different, they take these shadowy shapes for reality. In this allegory, the prisoners symbolize ordinary people in our world, and the cave’s shadows symbolize the perceptions and beliefs we uncritically accept. Plato suggests that most human beings live in a state of intellectual imprisonment, chained by ignorance and illusion. They are slaves, not in a physical sense, but in the sense of being bound to false images of reality.

If one prisoner is somehow freed and climbs out of the cave into the sunlight, he undergoes a painful but transformative liberation. At first the light of the sun (symbolizing truth and knowledge) hurts his eyes – reality is blinding after a lifetime of comfortable shadows[18][19]. But gradually he sees the true forms of things and realizes how false his former “reality” was. This enlightened individual attains intellectual freedom – the freedom that comes from grasping truth. However, Plato’s tale has a tragic twist: if the freed one returns to the cave to tell the others, they ridicule him and may even kill him if he tries to unchain them. The prisoners, in their ignorance, defend their own captivity. In Plato’s eyes, ignorance is a kind of prison for the mind, and many people are so accustomed to their chains that they fear true freedom (since it requires painful growth). Thus, the cave allegory dramatically portrays un-enlightened existence as a form of slavery – a “prison we cannot escape” unless we undergo rigorous education of the soul. It is a pessimistic view of the human condition: left to our own devices, we are enslaved by illusion and require the guidance of philosophers (those who have seen the sun) to become free.

Plato’s conception of free will is not explicit in this allegory – it’s more about knowledge versus ignorance – but implicitly, the prisoners lack meaningful free will because they do not even know the true options available to them. They mistake shadows for real choices. In a sense, Plato’s philosophy suggests that freedom is the fruit of knowledge and rational understanding. One must ascend beyond the cave of material appearances and opinions into the light of the Good (which Plato equates with the ultimate truth, even God) to be truly free. Before that ascent, our “choices” are so conditioned by falsehood that they hardly deserve to be called free choices at all. We are puppets dancing to the flickering shadows cast by unseen puppet-masters (in Plato’s day, perhaps the sophists and poets who manipulate public opinion; in our day, one might think of mass media or social media algorithms creating shadow realities).

Notably, Plato was not democratic in spirit – he believed the masses would not easily handle truth or freedom, and thus should be guided by enlightened guardians. In this, some see an elitism: freedom (in the sense of wisdom) is only for the few who can break their chains. The rest might need their comforting illusions to live by. This notion—that people can be enslaved by ignorance yet paradoxically content—is eerie when we consider our own times. How often do we cling to convenient falsehoods rather than face uncomfortable truths? The allegory of the cave remains a sharp reminder that one can live in bondage without realizing it, and that genuine freedom may require a difficult, even painful, confrontation with reality.

Plato’s stark view might be summed up: we are all born prisoners; only through a philosophical awakening can we become free. It casts freedom not as a birthright but as an earned state achieved by a few. This stands in interesting contrast to another great medieval thinker we will examine – Dante Alighieri – who, writing nearly 17 centuries later, held a very different view of human freedom.

Illustration of Plato’s Cave: Prisoners live chained in a cave, mistaking shadows on the wall for reality. Only by breaking their bonds and journeying into the light of the sun (truth) can they achieve real freedom. Plato’s allegory highlights how ignorance is a form of enslavement, and enlightenment is a difficult liberation[17][18].

Dante’s Vision: Free Will and Divine Order

Where Plato saw humans as trapped in a cave of ignorance, Dante Alighieri saw them as pilgrims endowed with God-given freedom, charting their course toward salvation or damnation. Dante, the 14th-century poet of the Divine Comedy, lived in a Christian universe where free will is sacrosanct. In fact, Dante asserts through his character Beatrice that free will is the greatest gift God bestowed upon humanity, “the gift most attuned to His goodness”[20][21]. This bold theological claim appears in Paradiso Canto 5, where Beatrice explains that when God created rational beings (humans and angels), He gave them free will as a reflection of His own divine freedom. According to Dante, nothing is more precious than this liberty of the will, and even God will not violate it – not because He cannot, but because doing so would negate the very purpose of creation. In Dante’s Christian understanding, love necessitates freedom: God wants humans to choose the good freely, rather than be mindless automata.

This principle has dramatic consequences in Dante’s cosmology. Notably, it provides a theodicy – an explanation for the existence of evil and suffering. Dante (in line with much of Christian theology) would argue that evil exists because of misuse of free will by angels (Lucifer’s rebellion) and humans (original sin and every sin thereafter). God could have created a world without the possibility of sin, but that would require not granting genuine free will – effectively making creatures slaves to divine preordination. Instead, God honored human freedom so profoundly that He permits humans to even reject goodness, with all the horrific results that follow (moral evil, suffering, etc.). Dante’s Inferno is populated by souls who freely chose paths of wickedness; their damnation is self-chosen slavery to sin. Each damned soul in Inferno has, in a sense, “enslaved” itself by misusing free will. For example, lustful sinners are blown about by relentless winds, symbolizing how in life they let themselves be blown by the winds of passion. The gluttonous lie in mud under incessant cold rain, symbolizing how they wallowed in base appetites – all these punishments are freely earned. In Dante’s moral universe, no one in Hell can say they didn’t choose to be there; as one damned soul admits in Inferno: “I engaged in my own deception. Nothing compelled me: I willed it, I want it; that’s why I act as I do.” The ultimate slavery is to be fixed in sin – and Dante’s depiction of Satan himself, trapped at the pit of Hell in a lake of ice, incapable of change or repentance, represents the utter loss of freedom that comes from final and absolute sin. Satan is the emperor of Hell but also its prisoner, his wings furiously beating but only freezing him more firmly in place – a powerful image of a master who is totally enslaved by his own evil.

Contrast this with Dante’s vision of Heaven (Paradiso), where the souls are perfectly free precisely because they have aligned their wills with God’s will. Far from seeing this as subjugation, Dante presents it as the fulfillment of freedom. In Paradiso, the blessed souls all sing in harmony, “In la sua volontade è nostra pace” – “In His (God’s) will is our peace.” The souls in heaven have freely chosen to conform to divine goodness, and as a result, they experience no conflict, no bondage to sin or desire – they are utterly free in love. It’s a seeming paradox: by willingly serving the highest good (God), they attain perfect freedom. This echoes St. Augustine’s idea that true freedom is not the freedom to do evil, but the freedom to do good unimpeded. In heaven, Dante’s souls could do otherwise (for their will remains free), but they have no desire to do otherwise than the good – their freedom and God’s will are one. They have become, in effect, “slaves of God” but thereby “free indeed.”

Dante’s emphasis on free will also leads him to wrestle with questions of coercion and responsibility. In Paradiso canto 4 and 5, he raises a delicate issue: what about those who appear to have their free will overridden by external force? (He gives the example of a nun, Piccarda, who was forced by her brother to leave her convent and marry, breaking her holy vow.) Dante’s resolution, voiced by Beatrice, is that no matter the external force, the will retains a degree of freedom. If Piccarda truly kept the will to maintain her vow, then morally she did not sin by outward compliance – the will’s internal consent is decisive. This underscores Dante’s belief in the indomitable core of free will: even a tyrant can’t make you will evil; at most he can compel your body. Thus in Dante’s view, a martyr who is tortured to renounce faith but internally refuses is still free and faithful. Free will may be “bound” by fear or violence, but it is never entirely erased – one is still responsible for one’s yielding or resistance. This is a more optimistic stance on human freedom than Plato’s portrayal of ignorant masses who cannot help but be deceived. Dante would likely say that even those in metaphorical caves have, by God’s grace, the internal capacity (if aided by truth and love) to turn toward the light.

One of the most eloquent affirmations of free will in The Divine Comedy comes in Purgatorio, Canto 16. Here, a soul (Marco Lombardo) lectures Dante on the source of human wickedness. Some blame the stars (fate) for everything, he notes, but if that were true, “then your free will would be destroyed, and there would be no justice in joy for doing good or grief for evil.”[22] In other words, if we were not free, reward and punishment would be meaningless – a point very similar to what later philosophers like Kant would make. Marco continues to insist that humans cause their own evils by misusing free will, not by destiny’s decree[23][24]. He says the soul is created simple and inclined toward love, but “you also have free will… your will grows stronger the more you use it to choose what is good. Always remember that your freedom comes from God who created you to be free.”[25][26] This is a central Dantean truth: we each possess the God-given freedom to shape our moral destiny. That freedom can be our salvation or our ruin. Dante thus places a heavy ethical burden on the individual – much heavier than Plato’s, arguably. Plato would blame ignorance or poor education for people’s faults; Dante ultimately blames the individual will (with the caveat that good leadership and laws can guide wills toward the good[27][28]).

It’s fascinating to juxtapose Dante and Plato on this point. Plato’s cave dwellers did not choose their chains – they were born into them without knowledge. Freedom for Plato comes as an unwilled grace for the lucky one who is freed and dragged upward. For Dante, every soul is presented with the fundamental choice to orient toward love (God) or toward the self (turning away from God). One could say Dante’s Paradise is full of former cave-dwellers who chose to climb out, whereas Plato’s cave suggests most will not climb without compulsion. Dante’s faith gives him a more expansive view of human freedom: even the simplest peasant has a conscience and the capacity (with divine help) to seek truth and goodness. At the same time, Dante’s Hell serves as a caution that one’s freedom, misused, can harden into self-imposed slavery far worse than physical chains. The souls in Hell demonstrate the terrifying idea that one can become a slave to one’s chosen sin forever.

Perhaps Dante’s most direct statement about the dignity of free will is put in the mouth of Beatrice in Paradiso 5: “The greatest gift that God in His bounty made in creating, the one most conformed to His goodness and that He most prizes, was the freedom of the will.”[20]. That line could almost be a rebuttal to Plato. Whereas Plato’s allegory implies that the average person’s will counts for little until enlightened (they’re effectively prisoners of determinism until rescued), Dante elevates free will as a divine endowment present in all, a reflection of God’s image in the human soul. Dante would likely agree that many live as if in chains, but he’d emphasize that those chains are ultimately of our own forging or accepting, not an inescapable fate. Even in the darkest cave, a person might pray or yearn for light – a tiny free act that could begin their deliverance.

In summary, Plato and Dante offer opposing frameworks: Plato’s cave is a prison of ignorance we cannot escape without philosophical enlightenment (freedom is rare and intellectual); Dante’s universe is a moral landscape where free will is inalienable and sacred, making each person accountable for using it rightly (freedom is universal and ethical, tied to God). Yet there is a complementary thread: both agree that Truth (for Plato, the forms and the Good; for Dante, God and divine law) is what ultimately frees us. Plato’s sun outside the cave and Dante’s God in Paradise play similar roles as the ultimate reality that liberates the seeker. “The truth shall set you free,” says Scripture, and Dante and Plato would nod, even if they conceive truth differently.

Masters and Slaves: Who Rules Whom?

Throughout history, societies have drawn clear lines between masters and slaves – rulers and ruled, owners and owned. But as we have seen, these roles are not as straightforward as they appear. There is a recurring motif in philosophical thought and historical experience: the master-slave reversal – the idea that who is truly master and who is truly slave can invert, depending on perspective. Let’s explore a few scenarios that highlight this counterintuitive dynamic:

• The Benevolent Master and the Dependent Slave: In many slave-holding societies (from ancient Rome to the American South), slave owners would justify their rule by claiming slaves needed their guidance, that slaves were like children incapable of independence. Yet often the reality was the reverse: it was the masters who became deeply dependent on their slaves – for labor, for personal care, even for status (a rich man wasn’t truly rich unless he had many servants). The master’s daily life, economy, and identity revolved around those he enslaved. In a literal sense, the master could not survive in the lifestyle he was accustomed to without the slave’s continual service. Meanwhile, the slave at least possessed the hard skills and resilience born of necessity – things the pampered master often lacked. The American enslaved woman who cooked every meal, raised the master’s children, tended the fields – she had a command of practical reality that her master (who perhaps lounged on a veranda) did not. It’s telling that when slaves were emancipated, many former masters floundered, unable to perform basic tasks or run their plantations efficiently without coerced labor. The “masters” were revealed to be crippled by their reliance on slaves. As one analysis of Hegel puts it: “the master is dependent on the slave's labor for the satisfaction of his needs and desires, while the slave, through labor, becomes aware of his own independent self-worth”[14]. The Civil War abolitionists often argued that slavery equally degraded the master’s character – making him lazy, cruel, and ignorant – effectively enslaving him to vice. Thus who was the real slave in a moral sense: the one in chains or the one chained to arrogance and indolence?
• The Rebel Slave and the Fearful Master: History provides dramatic moments where the power dynamic flips – slave revolts such as Spartacus’s uprising in Ancient Rome or the Haitian Revolution (1791-1804) where enslaved people overthrew their French colonial masters. In these cases, the supposed “powerless” demonstrated that the power ultimately resided in the many, not the few. Masters lived in terror of such uprisings – in a psychological sense, even at the apex of power they were slaves to fear. The Haitian Revolution is especially instructive: for generations, white plantation masters in Haiti lived in opulence, literally whipping African slaves to produce sugar. But the slaves greatly outnumbered them. When the enslaved population galvanized under leaders like Toussaint L’Ouverture, they successfully destroyed the system of their bondage. The masters who weren’t killed fled for their lives. This real-world case showed how the master’s freedom was illusory and precarious, resting on the forced acquiescence of the enslaved. The moment that illusion broke, the master’s “rule” evaporated. In a sense, the masters had been masters only by the consent of the enslaved, albeit a consent extorted by violence. And once the slaves collectively withdrew that consent by daring to resist despite risk of death, the master was powerless. Such events underscore a hidden truth: any power structure relies on the complicity (willing or unwilling) of the subordinates. Masters are “masters” only so long as those below allow themselves to be mastered. Thus, even societal masters are enslaved by the need to maintain control. How free is a dictator who must constantly censor, police, and propagandize to prevent rebellion? He may hold the keys to every jail, but he sleeps in fear of his own people.
• Mastery of Others vs Mastery of Self: Another perspective on masterhood is provided by sages throughout time – from Laozi and Buddha in the East to Socrates and the Stoics in the West – who have taught that the greatest mastery is self-mastery. The Chinese philosopher Laozi (Lao Tzu) wrote: “He who conquers others is strong; he who conquers himself is mighty.” Consider a conquering emperor, hailed as “master of the world.” If he cannot control his own anger or greed, he is, in this philosophical lens, more a slave than the monk who, possessing nothing, has conquered his own desires. Jesus of Nazareth expressed a similar inversion: “Whoever would be first among you must be the servant of all” (Mark 10:44). The implication is that true mastery comes through service and humility, not domination. Those who seek to rule themselves – their passions, their ignorance – achieve a form of freedom and power far greater than ruling over other people. History’s wise kings and leaders often realized this. Marcus Aurelius, a Roman Emperor and a Stoic philosopher, reminded himself in his Meditations that absolute power over millions meant nothing if he lost power over his own character. From this standpoint, every individual is a master or slave to the extent that they govern or are governed by their own inner life. We each contain a little kingdom of the self. Are you the master of your thoughts, or do compulsions and external influences master you? By this metric, a beggar content in his simplicity might be freer than a king tormented by anxieties.

The master-slave dialectic also operates in more abstract realms: ideas can master us, technologies can enslave us, habits can rule us. In the modern era, we increasingly ask: who is the master – the human or the machine? A person glued to their smartphone, algorithmically nudged in behavior, may feel free as they scroll through endless content, but are they not perhaps a slave to a device and the companies that manipulate their attention? This leads us to the current day, where new forms of slavery and freedom vie in subtler ways.

The Illusions of Freedom in the Modern Age

In the contemporary world, outright slavery is almost universally condemned and (formally) abolished. Most of us in democratic societies consider ourselves free. We have personal liberties, freedom of choice in careers, where to live, whom to marry; we can vote, speak, and consume what we like. By historical standards, these are remarkable freedoms. And yet, a nagging question remains: has modernity truly emancipated us, or merely traded old visible chains for new invisible ones? Many thinkers argue that modern people are enslaved in ways our ancestors were not – enslaved by consumerism, by corporate exploitation, by digital technology, or by their own egos and anxieties.

One striking phenomenon of recent decades is the “democratization of the cult of the self,” aided by social media and smartphones. Where once only elites might indulge in self-absorbed quests (as the lecture excerpt in our context noted, referencing Freud and modernist art), now everyone is encouraged to curate their individual brand, chase personal success, and gaze into the virtual mirror of endless feeds. Superficially, this celebrates individual freedom – the freedom to express yourself, to broadcast your life, to choose from infinite options online. But studies are finding that this hyper-individualistic, screen-saturated lifestyle correlates with epidemic levels of anxiety and depression[29][1]. Around 2015, when in the U.S. about 92% of teens owned a smartphone, rates of teenage depression and self-harm surged dramatically – one report notes a 33% increase in depressive symptoms, coinciding with the spread of social media use[30]. It appears that the “freedom” afforded by constant connectivity comes with a cost: people, especially youth, feel more isolated, inadequate, and helpless than before. They may be free to share their voice, but end up enslaved by the need for validation. The dopamine hits of notifications and “likes” create dependence like any drug. The algorithms manipulate attention and emotions, effectively mastering the user. One is reminded of the saying: “The chains of habit are too weak to be felt until they are too strong to be broken.” Millions now habitually reach for their phones each morning and scroll late into night – a routine as binding as any chain, yet self-chosen and normalized.

Modern consumer culture likewise pitches itself as liberation. We have freedom of choice among products and lifestyles unimaginable to our ancestors. But this plethora of choice can entangle us in a new servitude: consumerist slavery, where one’s value and identity become chained to what one buys and owns. Advertising, a sort of modern shadow-play on the walls of our cave, shapes desires in ways we often barely notice – telling us what success looks like, what we should aspire to, subtly instructing, “You must wear this, drive that, look like this to be happy or respected.” Are we really freely choosing, or are these choices engineered by a market that needs us to consume? The powers in society – large corporations, media conglomerates, political propaganda machines – may not call themselves “masters,” but they exert a mastery over public consciousness that dictators of old would envy. The context piece in our prompt alluded to how even art movements were co-opted by agencies like the CIA to promote individualism over collective ideologies[1][31]. During the Cold War, the “Free World” prided itself on liberty in contrast to the Soviet “slave state.” And indeed, the Soviet Union was repressive. But the West’s own leaders engaged in subtle social control, spreading a cult of individualistic freedom (abstract expressionist art, Freudian self-focus, etc.) partly to undermine the appeal of communitarian ideals[1][29]. The result today is a global capitalist culture where personal freedom is often equated with personal consumption. We feel free, but in some ways our very understanding of freedom has been manipulated by powerful interests. We are “free” to shop, to work (often in precarious conditions), to drown in entertainment – but questioning the deeper power structures or building genuine community? Those are freedoms we exercise less and less. As Bakunin presciently warned in the 19th century, “Having human freedom in isolation… is absurd… Only the freedom of others keeps each one of us from hardening in the absurdity of isolation… [otherwise] freedom in isolation is slavery.”[7]. Our modern cult of self can harden into an isolating loneliness, which is its own kind of prison.

Another modern master-slave inversion lies in our relationship with technology and economy. Consider the concept of the “wage slave.” Formally, a worker is free – not owned by the employer – and can quit. Yet if one’s economic survival requires selling one’s labor under exploitative terms (for lack of better options), how free is that life? The Industrial Revolution freed peasants from feudal land, only to thrust many into grim factories where they had the “freedom” to work 14-hour days or starve. Today, although conditions improved in many places, billions still effectively spend most of their waking hours in toil that they would not choose except to pay the bills. The salary buys sustenance, but at times one wonders: do we live to work or work to live? If a person is chained to debt – student loans, mortgages, credit – they may find their range of action very constrained indeed. The system calls them free, but they likely feel trapped in an endless cycle of earning and consuming. The master in this scenario could be seen as capital or money itself, with individuals as its servants.

Friedrich Nietzsche took a very different angle on masters and slaves – a psychological/moral angle. In his critique of modern morality, Nietzsche claimed that Judeo-Christian ethics were a “slave morality” that flipped the values of the strong in favor of the weak[32][33]. He saw the Christian exaltation of meekness, humility, and pity as born from the resentment (ressentiment) of slaves and underclasses who sought to undermine their masters’ values of strength, pride, and nobility[34][35]. In Nietzsche’s genealogy, the slaves (the downtrodden) achieved a kind of metaphysical revenge: they labeled their masters’ qualities “evil” and their own suffering “good,” thus making the masters spiritually guilty and elevating themselves in the moral realm. This “inversion of values” meant that, in a sense, the slaves became moral masters, dictating terms of good and evil that even the powerful had to acknowledge over time[34]. Nietzsche praised the vitality of the old master morality (which valued pride, ambition, excellence) and lambasted the prevailing Christian-derived morality as one of mediocrity and resentment. Whether one agrees or not, this analysis again blurs who dominates whom: sometimes those ostensibly in power are captive to the value-system imposed by those beneath them (for example, a noble might refrain from certain actions not because he personally feels them wrong, but because the moral law – shaped by common sentiment – condemns them).

In our largely secular modern context, Nietzsche’s dichotomy might morph into “leader mentality” vs “herd mentality.” The masses can become a tyrannical master of their own – the tyranny of public opinion or majority rule, compelling individuals to conform. Conversely, a free spirit who resists herd mentality might be marginalized (a “slave” in social standing) yet be personally sovereign in thought. Modern democracy grapples with this: everyone is in theory equal and free, but social pressures and mass culture exercise a soft domination. Who truly governs – the individual or the collective mindset? It can be argued either way.

Ultimately, the modern age confronts us with a sobering possibility: we have met the master, and it is us. Each person can be his/her own worst tyrant. The context’s concluding insight was that the “cult of the self” – a life turned inward, concerned only with one’s own gratification and image – becomes a self-made cage[7][8]. The lecture excerpt lamented that social media spread this cult globally and led to rising depression and suicide as people became isolated in their ego-driven silos. The proposed solution was “to rediscover our humanity… to find the courage to care about others and put the interests of others before our own… we ourselves must choose to kill the cult of the self.” In other words, to free ourselves, we might need to stop obsessing over ourselves and engage in collective purpose. This echoes our earlier exploration that community can be liberating, while excessive individualism can be enslaving.

It is striking that after centuries of exalting personal freedom, some are now yearning for the freedom that comes from connection, from commitment to something larger than oneself. Thinkers like Bakunin or even psychologist Viktor Frankl (who survived literal enslavement in concentration camps) observed that a life devoted only to self leads to despair, whereas a life in service to others or to a cause leads to meaning – a kind of freedom from the prison of self-consciousness. Bakunin flatly called isolated individualism a form of slavery and preached that “I am free only when all men around me are equally free”, recognizing that our freedom mirrors one another[36]. This is reminiscent of what Martin Luther King Jr. said: “No one is free until we are all free.” The implication is that oppression of anyone is oppression of everyone, and solidarity is the path to liberation for all. Thus the master-slave dynamic is not a binary fate but a mutual one: we rise or fall together.

Conclusion: Toward Deeper Truths of Freedom and Mastery

Our journey from prehistoric tribes to the modern digital age reveals that freedom and slavery are multi-faceted conditions – physical, mental, spiritual, social – and they often invert our expectations. We have seen that the truest freedom might not lie in the absence of all bonds, but in the choice of the right bonds. The hunter-gatherer was bound to nature and tribe but perhaps free of oppressive hierarchy. The ancient slave could find inner freedom through wisdom, while the master could be a slave to his own power. Plato taught that without enlightenment we are all prisoners, whereas Dante insisted that with God’s grace we all possess freedom – and we damn ourselves by surrendering it. Hegel revealed the master’s dependence on the slave’s recognition, and Nietzsche unmasked the slave’s covert moral victory over the master. In modern life, we pride ourselves on liberty yet find new fetters in technology, consumerism, and loneliness.

So, who is truly free, who is a slave, and who is the master? The answer is both everyone and no one. If Truth and Love are our masters, perhaps we become most free. Plato’s prisoner gains freedom by serving the truth (turning toward the sun). Dante’s souls gain ultimate freedom by aligning with divine Love (God’s will). In both cases, knowledge of truth and devotion to goodness break the chains of illusion and sin. Conversely, if we make Ego, Greed, or Fear our masters, we become slaves in the core of our being, no matter how outwardly free we appear. A society can outlaw slavery, yet if its people are addicted, divided, and misled, they live under a tyranny of a different sort – “slavery with the appearance of freedom,” as some social critics warn.

Perhaps the eternal truth is that freedom is not a static state but a continual act. It is something we must practice and choose, again and again. Every time a person thinks for themselves rather than blindly following the crowd, they step out of Plato’s cave into freer air. Every time a person acts out of compassion and principle rather than selfish impulse, they break a link of the ego’s chain and affirm, with Dante, the dignity of their God-given free will. Conversely, every act of deceit, every surrender to base desire, forges new chains that bind us. Freedom, then, lives in the known unknowns and unknown unknowns we dare to explore – the willingness to question our own assumptions and challenge “the way things are.” It lives in recognizing, humbly, how easily we can deceive ourselves (for the worst slave is the one who mistakenly believes he is free while wearing invisible shackles).

If Truth is the only path for Love and Consciousness to prevail, as the user’s prompt beautifully states, then seeking truth is our highest act of freedom. It means shattering comforting illusions (those shadowy walls) and facing reality, however difficult – an act of liberation and sometimes of loneliness (for the freed prisoner, recall, was not welcomed back by those still chained). It means, too, recognizing the humanity in others, for we cannot be free alone. As Bakunin noted, “I am free only when my freedom and my ability to exercise my rights find confirmation in the freedom of all men around me”[36]. A master who denies freedom to others ultimately diminishes his own; a society that tolerates any form of slavery (literal or metaphorical) endangers the freedom of all.

In an “eternal document” beyond time, one might conclude: the master is he who masters himself, the slave is he who abdicates his conscience, and the only rightful master over all is Truth (or call it God, the Good, Love). All lesser masters – kings, employers, algorithms, egos – must be scrutinized, kept in their place as servants rather than tyrants. We are Truth seekers by nature; when we stop seeking, we risk falling back into servitude. Thus the connection between freedom and slavery is almost dialectical: each defines the other and can transform into the other if we are not vigilant.

In practical terms, our exploration suggests a few guiding insights for a meaningful life: cherish and exercise your free will – it is a precious gift, as Dante extolled[20]. But temper that individual freedom with responsibility and compassion – freedom thrives in mutual recognition, not in selfish isolation. Recognize the subtle chains – ignorance, addiction, fear, hatred – and work to shed them, both in yourself and in society. No external liberation is complete unless the mind is free; no mind is free if it is closed to truth or hardened against love. We should seek to be masters of our desires and servants to our ideals, rather than the reverse. In doing so, we carry forward the flame of freedom that illumines the darkest caves.

Finally, we accept that some unknown unknowns remain. We do not fully know what a perfectly free human being or society looks like – perhaps it’s an asymptote we ever approach. But by constantly questioning who is master and who is slave in each context, we prevent complacency. The very act of questioning is itself an act of freedom. In that spirit, let us be “fearless and introspective,” as the prompt urged. The paradox of freedom and slavery will accompany humanity as long as we live in societies and have inner lives – which is to say, always. By understanding this paradox, we are better armed to avoid the pitfalls of both tyranny and license.

As Dante ascends to see the stars, and Plato’s prisoner gazes at the sun, we end on a hopeful note: knowledge can overcome ignorance, love can overcome domination. In the covenant Dante envisions, God’s respect for our free will is absolute – He will not eliminate suffering or evil by force, because that would negate our freedom to grow and choose. This may seem to leave us in a perilous position (indeed, free will is a double-edged sword). But it also ennobles us: we are, each of us, invited to be co-creators of our fate, not mere pawns. In that lies a kind of sublime dignity. We are “slaves” of necessity – born mortals with needs – yet within those limits we can carve spaces of authentic freedom by how we live, learn, and love.

To truly be free, then, might mean to accept no master but truth and conscience, and likewise to enslave no other, respecting that same divine spark of freedom in them. It is a high ideal, perhaps never perfectly attained, but worth striving for. In seeking it, we may stumble upon “eternal, significant truths” about ourselves. And one day, maybe, humanity can look back on its long history of masters and slaves and finally declare: we have no slaves, and no masters – only free beings united in truth.

Sources:

• Plato’s allegory of the cave, describing prisoners chained in ignorance and the journey to enlightenment[17][18].
• Bakunin on collective freedom: “To be free in absolute isolation is an absurdity... Freedom in isolation... is slavery.”[7].
• Hegel’s master-slave dialectic: the master depends on the slave and the slave gains self-consciousness through labor[14].
• Nietzsche on master vs. slave morality: slave morality inverts the values of the masters out of ressentiment[32].
• Epictetus fragment: “No man is free who is not master of himself,” highlighting inner mastery as true freedom[2].
• Dante Alighieri (via Beatrice in Paradiso 5): free will is God’s greatest gift to humanity[20], and it operates most freely when aligned with God’s will[37][38].
• JSTOR Daily on CIA and modern art: modernism promoted individualist freedom as a Cold War strategy[1].
• Data on social media and depression: 92% of teens had smartphones by 2015 as teen depressive symptoms spiked ~33%[30].
• Lecture/context excerpt on the “cult of the self” and social media leading to global depression, illustrating the spread of an isolating individualism[29][36].

[1] [29] [31] Was Modern Art Really a CIA Psy-Op? - JSTOR Daily

https://daily.jstor.org/was-modern-art-really-a-cia-psy-op/

[2] No Man is Free Who is Not Master of Himself | Neologikon

https://neologikonblog.wordpress.com/2017/03/06/no-man-is-free-who-is-not-master-of-himself/

[3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13] [36] Bakunin Versus the Primitivists | The Anarchist Library

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/brian-oliver-sheppard-bakunin-versus-the-primitivists

[14] [15] [16] Master-Slave Dialectic – Le Savoir

https://ave1125.wordpress.com/tag/master-slave-dialectic/

[17] Allegory of the cave - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_cave

[18] [19] File:An Illustration of The Allegory of the Cave, from Plato’s Republic.jpg - Wikimedia Commons

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:An_Illustration_of_The_Allegory_of_the_Cave,_from_Plato%E2%80%99s_Republic.jpg

[20] [21] Paradiso 5 – Digital Dante

https://digitaldante.columbia.edu/dante/divine-comedy/paradiso/paradiso-5/

[22] Purgatorio 16 – Digital Dante

https://digitaldante.columbia.edu/dante/divine-comedy/purgatorio/purgatorio-16/

[23] [24] [25] [26] [27] [28] [37] Dante’s Purgatorio – Canto 16 - Dante's Divine Comedy

https://dantecomedy.com/welcome/purgatorio/purgatorio-canto-16/

[30] Does Social Media Use Cause Depression | CDE

https://www.cde.state.co.us/node/77458

[32] [33] [34] [35] Master–slave morality - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master%E2%80%93slave_morality

[38] Free Will Theme in Purgatorio - LitCharts

https://www.litcharts.com/lit/purgatorio/themes/free-will

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