Discussion Group Report

Summary of Jerry Spence's From Freedom to Slavery.

Spence says: "As for solutions, there are only two kinds--those from outside of the self and those from within. The first suggests that we destroy our enemies, that we manipulate or neutralize them, that we discover detours around them, that we suffer their impositions against us, or, at last, that we even love them. In any event, the solution acknowledges the existence of outside forces that deter our progress and impede our happiness. On the other hand, there persists the idea--one with which I am in agreement--that solutions are mainly matters of the self, that power vested in others is often irrelevant to our freedom, that the only change essential for the human condition is to change within, that we are the fountainhead of power, and that, therefore, we need not free the world--we need only free ourselves...

"The danger, of course, is that we have become only the purchasers of the fable of freedom. When we vigorously argue to our neighbors that Americans are free, our neighbors will likely assert that they "buy" that. Having thought the fable, it belongs to us, and we fight to keep it like howling apes protecting their trinkets and their tinfoil...

"Today there are, as indeed, there have always been, insidious, enslaving forces at work in America. Today's tyranny emanates from a New King, from a nonliving power center composed at its core of monolithic corporate entities encased and protected by endless layers of governmental bureaucracies. The primary strategy of the New King is to convert all rights, all human energy, all goals, and at last, all humans into fungible commodities, for the New King exists solely for commerce and its life's blood, its green blood, its money-and its singular mission is profit. The new King's principal means of control is the media that sells us the myths of freedom, that, when we doubt, reassures us we are free, and that programs us and our children to accept the notion that all human function, all human desires, indeed even immortality itself can, at last, be satisfied at the marketplace...

"If the churches have anything to do with it, those who offer solutions outside the scriptures will be condemned to eternal hell. If government has anything to do with them, any sound idea will be condemned in the bureaucracy, and if the idea should somehow escape the grinding teeth of its machinery, the author will be labeled an enemy of the state and disemboweled in one fashion or another. If corporate America has anything to do with it, any ideas that threaten its power will be branded as leftist, or commie, or un-American, and the author of such reform banished as a heretic against the most sacred of all religions in America, Free Enterprise...

"I would rather visit with the corpse than exist with the breathing dead, with those who have never considered a new idea, who worship the same God and vote the same party of their fathers, whose friends believe the same, look the same, and say the same things that they say. I would find a conversation with a corpse more engaging than one with the breathing dead, whose next words are as predictable as the liturgy of the priest and who, on pain of death, cannot recall the last book they read. All creativity is dead. Feeling is dead. Yet, as we observe, they breathe...

"Every large corporation should be required to seat on its board an equal number of ordinary people, people who have no pecuniary interest in the corporation's activities, who will act as the corporation's conscience and who are selected at random from the tax rolls of the community in which the corporation carries on its principal business. These 'conscience members' of the corporate board will see that the rights of the corporation's employees are preserved, that their pension funds are not raided, that the workers receive fair wages, that their benefits are equitable, and that the corporation acts in accordance with every standard of good citizenship."