Tamay Besiroglu

I'm not sure if I would say that slavery collapsed.

I mean, I think this depends on what you mean by slavery.

I mean, you know, a lot of ways people in feudal Europe were like... But his point is that actually serfdom was not the descendant institution for Roman slavery.

It was not descendant.

But like the...

in fact this is sort of the point I'm trying to make is that values that exist at a given time like what the values of we will have in 300 years or like from the perspective of someone a thousand years ago what values people are going to have in a thousand years those questions are much more determined by the like

by the technological and economic and social environment that's going to be there in 1,000 years, which values are going to be functional, which values end up being more competitive and being more influential so that other people add up their values.

And it depends much less on the individual actions taken by people 1,000 years ago.

So I would say that...

The abolitionist thing, it's not the cause of why slavery came to an end.

And slavery comes to an end also because people's own – like people just have natural preferences that I think are suppressed in various ways during the agricultural era where –

Like it's more efficient to have settled societies in like cities which are like fairly authoritarian and don't allow for that much freedom.

And you're in this Malthusian world where people have very low wages perhaps compared to what they enjoyed in the hunter-gatherer era.

So it's just a different economic period.

And I think people were not – they didn't evolve much.

to have the values that would be functional in that era.

So what happened is that there had to be a lot of cultural assimilation, where people had to adopt different values.

And in the Industrial Revolution, people become also very wealthy compared to what they used to be.

And that, I think, leads to different aspects of people values being expressed.

Like people just put a huge amount of value on equality.