Slave Mentality: Where Choice is Key, but Choices can Shackle

-- By TomaLivshiz - 03 May 2012

Thin Market For Freedom

Last year, I spent Passover visiting a friend in Israel who lived in an urban commune. Most of the Jewish world spends Passover reciting the narrative of the exodus of what would one day be the Jewish people from bondage in Egypt, but the group with whom I was celebrating took a different angle. At their seder, this commune read a portion of a famous Midrash (a rabbinic commentary on the text of the Torah) which focused on the untold story of Passover: the story of how most of the Hebrew slaves—eighty percent—decided to stay in Egypt as slaves. The seder organizers wanted us to consider what seems like a confounding question: why would so many people choose to stay in slavery?

At first, the idea seems preposterous—is there anything worse than slavery? But I found at least one explanation to be distressingly familiar. From the perspectives of the Hebrew slaves, stability and predictability in their lives in bondage was better than the risks and unforeseeable challenges of total freedom. One defining characteristic of slavery is the lack of autonomy. It is axiomatic, then, that people who have been in bondage their whole lives might be terrified at the prospect of boundless choice. People might prefer to be unhappy, to suffer, to allow themselves to be denigrated to the other option of carving a new path, through incremental steps and deliberate decision-making. Trailblazing may not seem like a choice at all. What if the new path leads somewhere worse than Egypt? What if the new path leads you closer to the thang?

If You Were Shown the Path out of Slavery, Would You Take it?

Over the last twelve months, the original question—why do people choose to stay in slavery—has fermented in my mind and, in relation to the trajectory we began in August, has become truly pungent. I do not mean to say that I, or we, are slaves to the school, the system, or the firms, though those metaphors might be successfully drawn by someone else. What I mean to say is that I too am paralyzed by the thought that “I have no real choice” when in reality, my subconscious may be more concerned with the inundation of choice. My guess is that many of us feel bound to the well-worn path of the canning factory—that leaping out of the assembly line might leave us worse off than we will be on the inside of a can.

Speaking for myself, I am overwhelmed by the prospect of stepping off the pre-drawn path. Instead of making the singular resolution to stay on the conveyor belt, I would have to make many decisions, and worse still, many mistakes. Thoughts of being an entrepreneur, finding other ways of covering my nut, finding clients, are inspiring in the classroom, but quickly seem audacious and quixotic once I step out. And while a fate like that of the narrator in Bartleby, splitting our souls until we descend into insanity does not sound appealing, like the narrator we may grasp for a semblance of safety rather than crafting our own routes out of debt and into the future.

Being Your Own Deliverer

This year, I spent Passover with my family – all people who had emigrated from the former Soviet Union. For many, Passover is a ritual commemorating an ancient story, but for many Russian Jews, it is more personal tale of liberation. It eventually became clear that the story we read from the Haggadah had a familiar cast: my parents’ generation saw Russia as Egypt, the Communists as Pharaoh, America as Freedom, and themselves as Moses—as deliverers. The journey to America was not forty years long, but it was difficult and only somewhat chartered. Between Russia and America, my family spent a month in Austria and several more in Italy, where my father, a mathematician by trade, peddled goods on the streets of Rome in order to ensure our manna. With this legacy, it seems counterintuitive that I, raised with several orders of magnitude more privilege than my parents, could be so risk-averse, so unwilling to take advantage my many options.

But what this class has forced me to admit to myself, is that going to work for a big law firm is a choice too, just like my parents could have stayed in Russia, and Israelites chose to remain in Egypt. If that is the path that I will take, the defense of inevitability is a hollow one. Even if I am being ushered towards bonds, mortgages, securities and mergers, I could choose to lose my place in line and go do something else.

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