Free Going Postal: Rage, Murder, and Rebellion: From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond by Mark Ames Page A

corporation on the individual to be excessive, I have rarely heard this complaint from the managers themselves.”
    Numerous tales of slaves and by slaves revealed the same kind of willingness to fulfill their end of the shared-interests contract if they perceived that their master was upholding his end of the deal by appearing to respect his slave. As one former slave, Lucius H. Holsey, wrote in his 1898 Autobiography, Sermons, Addresses and Essays , his master “had great confidence in me and trusted me with money and other valuables. In all things I was honest and true to him and his interests. Though young, I felt as much interest in his well-being as I have felt since in my own… . I made a special point never to lie to him or deceive him in any way.”
     
    This tendency is not confined to slaves. The inclination to submit is built into our operating system, easily adapting itself to the current corporate culture, operating along the same functions as in slave times. A person’s ability to adapt and grovel as much as required is almost the definition of normal. It is normal to accept these conditions and try to thrive within them; it is abnormal to rise up against them. Just think about all the jobs you’ve taken, especially the ones where you succeeded most—you didn’t get promoted by being a maverick and standing up for yourself. You succeeded where you followed orders and pleased the higher-ups. In our own way, we moderns are just as slavish and painfully docile as African slaves. We simply lack the distance to acknowledge it or a proper excuse to explain it.
     

4
A Normal and Inevitable Aspect of Their Affairs
     
    So the reason there were so few slave rebellions in the United States wasn’t because African slaves were actually content, as racist whites contended, or even because of brutal repression. It had to do with human nature and effective management technique.
     
    Another reason why there were so few slave rebellions was that until the 1800s, there wasn’t even a context to frame a slave uprising. Until then, a slave insurrection was seen as an act of random evil or sheer insanity by the ruling class.
    So if the insurrection failed, it would have no resonance, politically, culturally, or otherwise. Slave uprisings weren’t framed by the ruling whites as an inevitable consequence of slavery, but rather as random acts of violence by sick, ungrateful Africans. Until the 1800s, it was difficult, if not impossible, for Americans to even imagine why a slave would rebel. As historian Louis Filler wrote in The Crusade Against Slavery , “Throughout the colonial period and after the American Revolution, slavery was accepted by most Americans as a normal and inevitable aspect of their affairs.”
    They knew and feared that slaves might rebel, but they couldn’t understand why, except that there was something inherently barbarous (and ungrateful) in the Africans’ nature—there were a few bad apples out there. The effective propaganda of the time said that the white man was doing a great humanitarian deed for his African slaves: civilizing them, giving them clothes and comforts that they would be denied in Africa, and teaching them the Word of Christ, thereby saving their souls and giving them a chance to win a spot in Heaven. Whites gave blacks a better life in the here and in the hereafter. What crazy fool could argue with that logic? What kind of madman would take up arms against this?
    Christianity played a powerful role both in reinforcing the whites’ sense of moral righteousness in enslaving the Africans, and in convincing blacks to accept their slave status as part of Jesus’ plan. Church leaders went to great lengths to convince the slaveowning class to allow them to preach to their slaves, including the explicit promise to make the slaves more docile. It wasn’t easy. Church leaders literally had to make a pact with the Devil in order to persuade slaveholders that Christianity was exactly