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Do I think times are bad? Get real.
It is all too easy these days to read the newspaper or watch the evening news and become overwhelmed by feelings of anxiety and fear of continuing economic collapse. Governments throughout the world have elevated the economic recession to a state of emergency. But even when we hit double digit unemployment rates and lose sleep over a 401k that’s been cut in half, let’s get real: we still have it incredibly good. After all, we are not among the estimated 27 million people on earth who live as slaves.
Slavery still occurs in every country. Yes, slaves exist right now in households and factories even in Los Angeles, New York, London, Berlin, Paris, Tokyo, and Sydney. Modern slavery differs from traditional slavery, its 19th century (and prior) predecessor, in important ways. Slavery is now illegal in every country on the planet. In traditional slavery, legal ownership rights were actually asserted over slaves. Due to increasing population and the economics of modern globalization throughout the 20th century, the cost of modern slaves has plummeted and the return on slavery has skyrocketed compared to the economics of traditional slaving. Modern slavers in India can generate a 50% annual return on investment per slave compared to a 5% return on investment for a slave-owner in the American South of the 1860s. Right now, a powerless ten-year old girl can be “purchased for $150 and can be sold for sex up to ten times a night and bring in $10,000 per month,” writes Kevin Bales in Disposable People. Human trafficking and modern slavery is a multi-billion dollar business in its own right, and at its heart modern slavery is a vicious form of enrichment.
As Bales notes, because people are now so drastically cheap they are also therefore disposable. In traditional slavery slaves were viewed as an investment, an asset to purchase and maintain. In modern slavery slaves have become merely a cheap expense, completely disposable after maximizing their usage, recyclable like our razors. What in traditional slavery was a high-priced asset with restricted supply based on long-term and legal ownership rights has become in its modern form a supply glut with low “throwaway” costs, short-term relationships and extremely high profits. Both forms are reprehensible, but the latter somehow manages to be worse.
Fighting the modern slavery movement is something we just have to do. To put the number in perspective, 27 million people represents twice the estimated global Jewish population. National governments see a 5% retraction of GDP as a global emergency, how about if we enslaved wholesale a few ethnic populations?
The slavery problem is complex, arising from a seemingly intractable knot of labor economics, corruption, lax law enforcement, and lack of leadership by global powers (that’s us, folks). (Not to mention lagging moral-line development for a significant portion of the world population.) But awareness is starting to emerge and that is why Integral Life is working on several fronts to contribute to this effort.
Next month we will release full details of the new Integral Life Spiritual Center, which includes as its founding members twenty-five esteemed spiritual teachers in the United States and where activism on human trafficking and modern slavery is part of its mission. On another front, David Martin, Executive Chairman at M-CAM and a partner with us at State of the World Forum, helped produce with musical artists Akon and Peter Buffett the wonderful music video below that commemorates the United Nations “International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade,” which occurs tomorrow.
Click here if video does not play.
We also count as friends the non-profit organizations High Road for Human Rights, run by former Salt Lake City mayor Rocky Anderson, and Free the Slaves, run by Kevin Bales. I encourage anyone who wants to learn more about this issue to visit them on the web. Learn more, spread the word, donate if you can.
Living integrally is, if anything, about cultivating perspective. Our economic problems are real and the anxiety that accompanies them is valid; our economic malaise is a real and important perspective that needs to be honored and addressed. But let us keep our problems in proper perspective. The moral demands of a planet-centric integral view paradoxically allow us to move quickly past our own despair and compel us to deeper gratitude, greater fullness and more committed activism, and I am humbled by the efforts of so many in the integral community to do just that in their fight against modern slavery.