Kyle Harper

That's the most important element.

Yeah.

It's –

It's sort of like disturbing in a way, isn't it?

That humans have the ability to convince themselves that it's okay to own other human beings as property through a variety of different kinds of ideological justifications.

And you see even in the ancient world, there's different models

that people use to say that slavery is okay.

I mean, Aristotle develops a theory of natural slavery that actually some people deserve to be slaves by their very nature and that it's actually good for them to be in bondage.

What's really interesting though is that that doesn't actually ever seem to be like the dominant ideology.

The Roman ideology of slavery

is not racialized.

It's not like the Romans think that the Greeks or the Germans are like, you know, some fundamentally separate kind of human that justifies their exploitation.

The Roman ideology of slavery is really rooted in the law of property and status.

So they think that slaves are people who've been conquered and rather than

killed, they've been spared, and they've been sold into the condition of being somebody else's property.

And this seems to mentally explain to them where their slave system comes from and why it's justifiable.

And so you have different kinds of criticism of the slave system from within.

But remember, most of what we have written is from the slave ownership class.

It's not like – I don't think the slaves were themselves –

you know, believing this ideology.