Pylimitics

Today is Juneteenth. Not everybody knows that the official title is Juneteenth National Independence Day. It’s the holiday that commemorates the end of slavery in the US.

Slavery was declared over by Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, but it took another two and a half years for the traitorous slavers to be defeated. That enabled General Granger of the US Army to issue General Order #3 in Galveston, Texas, declaring the enforcement of the Proclamation. People in Texas already knew about the Proclamation, but the slavers ignored it because there was nobody to enforce it. And the enslaved, of course, were held powerless to do anything about it.

I find it difficult to really grasp that enslaving people was important enough to the traitorous slavers that they sent conscripts to fight to the death for it. The slavers themselves didn’t so much fight, of course. Not the rich ones reaping the lion’s share of the benefits of owning humans. They sent other people to become cannon fodder. People who weren’t slaves, but also weren’t considered the equals of the wealthy slavers.

It says right in the founding document of the United States that “all men are created equal.” That’s always been easier to say than act on. Humans have a hard tiime with equality. Many of us have been so thoroughly indoctrinated to think in hierarchical structures that we default to assuming that no matter what we’re observing or pondering, there are some items “higher” and others “lower.” It can be quite difficult to escape this mental habit. When the things we’re considering are other people, there might be some sort of mammalian behavior thing going on too. There are some species of mammals that form social networks that include — or appear to us to include — a hierarchical aspect. That’s a shallow, poorly reasoned interpretation, but it’s common. It’s in the way we observe and think more than in the reality of those networks.

Envisioning a network of social relationships as a hierarchy can become a mental disability that leads to countless ills. Some of the problems are deficienies in thought. Some are reified in behavior — with the US Civil War being a particularly bloody example. But such examples are easy to find, from the civil rights activists of the 1960s who were beaten and murdered by the decendants of the traitorous slavers to the descendants of the enslaved people who were subjected to the same treatment by the same bunch.

You could argue that we’ve progressed, at least a little, in those areas. Nowadays there are at least a few laws and at least a few social norms and attitudes that address inequality. That at least try to harken back to what that founding document declared. But inequality in human behavior and thinking comes in many forms. There isn’t very much outright slavery in the US in 2026, although there is more than you might think. We have a bigger problem now with economic and social inequality. It’s arguably less extreme than outright slavery, but it’s related.

When the billionaires consider the rest of us (if they even do), many of them seem to agree with the trillionaire, who has called us “NPCs.” That stands for “non-player characters” in a video game. Parts of the software that are there for background, to enhance the player’s experience. The “players,” of course, being the billionaires. Like the traitorous slavers of an earlier age, they are unable to think outside of simple hierarchies. Everything has to be somewhere in a vertical structure; either higher or lower than everything else. They are higher; everyone else is lower.

Today is Juneteenth. It’s not just about slavery. And just like the case on June 19, 1865 in Galveston, when General Order #3 was issued, there’s still a long way to go.