Soulful Sundays: Slavery

“It is hard to have a Southern overseer; it is worse to have a Northern one; but worst of all when you are the slave-driver of yourself.” — Henry David Thoreau

Moby-Dick, one of the most iconic novels of American literature, follows the maniacal Captain Ahab in his single-minded quest to kill the great white whale. Ahab is driven by his lust for vengeance and is, in the end, consumed by it. For Ahab, the whale is the visible mask of invisible evil—the embodiment of every force that torments the human soul—and by striking it, he is attempting to “strike through the mask.” But in doing so, he loses all respect for the mystery higher than himself. He becomes a slave to his own thirst for power.

Thirty-seven years later, Friedrich Nietzsche contemplated that same thirst. “What is happiness?” he wrote. “The feeling that power increases—that a resistance is overcome.” He saw the will to power as the quintessential drive of life. Without it, humans were slaves and lived according to “slave morality,” instead of living virtuously according to “master morality.” But it is not so easy to tell the two apart.

Master morality is the highest form of human striving—noble, strong, and creative. This ethos seeks power for the sake of affirming life. It encompasses all of the classical and biblical virtue ethics—courage, wisdom, humility, and compassion—but does so from a core of love. Slave morality includes those same virtues but comes from a place of resentment and fear. Both desire power, but slaves want it only for themselves.

Ahab was a slave. But, as Ishmael proclaims, “We are all slaves in one way or another.” We must ask ourselves: is any one of us truly free, or are we just the wardens of our own prisons? Nietzsche thought about freedom differently. He believed humanity’s imperative was to untether itself from the idols—religious and otherwise—it had made to enforce its slave moralities. The highest goal was not to replace God, but to create values without pretending that they came from heaven—to live expansively with love and not shrink with resentment, to sit with the uncomfortable mystery that is existence.

A piece of Ahab lives inside us all. He is the shadow of all that is true, beautiful, and good. Instead of using his power for the benefit of others, he chose to fulfill his own caprice. He made the whale into Satan and himself into God. He was so obsessed with being right that he lost sight of doing right.

We live in the middle of a paradox: threading the needle between increasing power without letting it control us, shedding the shackles of our limitations without pretending to be limitless ourselves, becoming masters of the self without enslaving it.