The best slaves are convinced they're free.

The Best Kept Slaves » The Anthropik Network:

"When I try to talk to people I know about many of the issues facing the world they often use counter-examples to debunk my claim. These examples are uniformly limited to people in the middle and upper classes of Western Civilization.

When I claim that Paleolithic people had a life expectancy in the 60s and older, they reply that the life expectancy is 70 now.

When I claim that people were healthier in the Paleolithic, they reply that they can go to the hospital when they get sick.

When I claim equality, I either hear that we are equal in the United States (a reply to that will require a second article) or an evidence-deficient claim that tribes and bands were hierarchal.

When I claim lower levels of stress and a higher quality of life, the most common reply is a reassertion of Hobbes claim, without even the fallacy-driven argument that he was kind enough to supply us with.

I could, and often do, refute each point made with studies, argument, and example, but what I will instead do is point out that these counter-points are only relevant in a Western-centric view of the world. For the vast majority of modern societies these counter claims are simply not valid.

The CIA World Factbook has data on every country in the world and accumulative data on the world. But, while Western Countries have a relatively high life expectancy, when you take into account places like Swaziland, with a life expectancy of 33, the world as a whole is well below average, even by modern standards. And this data is based on estimates, and may not be wholly inclusive of all people in a country. For instance, many poorer places lack the resources, and the Western World lacks the motivation, to collect detailed data in rural areas of China, African Countries, North Korea, and the like.

Hospital care is rare in most of the world, especially the kind that one can expect in Western Countries. But disease, cancer, and parasites are far"