, made in the
image of God, capable of the flights of attainment that distinguish a
Christ, a Caesar, a Plato, a Shakespeare, a Shelley, a Newton, is so
described, not alone by hopeless pessimists like Koheleth, Swift, and
Mark Twain, but by the common law, the common opinion, the common
assumptions of mankind? Because the development of slavery and
parasitism in human society, the subjection of the weak to the strong,
the dull and base to the clever and headstrong, set up a vicious
cycle: the liberation of more energy for the making of more and
more slaves and the propagation of slaves and slave qualities in a
geometrically increasing proportion.

This might be called the _Malthusian law of slavery_. For the
qualities that I have named as man's own characterization of himself
are the qualities of the slave and the slave-soul. Nietzche took great
pains to repeat ad nauseam that these qualities were the qualities of
the slave. But by burdening himself with the hypothesis, evolved from
his inner consciousness, that the slaves imposed from below a morality
of weakness upon their masters, he missed the really obvious process
by which slaves beget more slaves, slavery begets more slavery, and
the slave-soul becomes universal. That process is the simple action
of physical and spiritual reproduction of the slaves. The subnormal
begets the subnormal, the inferior begets the inferior.

Slavery appeared as an invention of the would-be-free. It was a
brilliant flash of genius of a seeker after freedom. However, it
became a boomerang. By multiplication and hereditary transmission, the
inferiority and the number of the slaves created a new overwhelming
problem for the superior few, the upper crust of the free. At last the
problem grew into the problem of problems, the problem of government,
that threatened all freedom, as an epidemic disease threatens even
the most healthy. Government, at first organized for conquest and
subjugation, had to change its character until it became more and more
to consist of experiments in a new social machinery that would free
somebody of the incubus. So through the centuries, one technique of
liberty after another was tested in the laboratory of experience.

But always the attempts are so muddled, because the problem is not
grasped. Muddledom is the essence of the slave-soul. And the
essence infiltrates and poisons the whole atmosphere in which the
would-be-free think and act. Kings' heads are chop