Most Westerners are starting to realise that their positions are little better than those of chattel slaves. The average Western worker now understands that they will never own their own home, no matter how hard they work, because the house price to income ratio is too high. Awareness of this state of affairs is causing widespread misery.
If you control land, you also control the people on that land. It follows that anyone who doesn’t own land is the slave of those who do. Non-landowners, as a class, are effectively put to work by the landowner class. Proof comes from the fact that the average hours worked to pay rent alone is not much less today than the average hours worked full stop during the medieval era, despite centuries of labour-saving technological advancements.
If you don’t own land, you have to pay rent to someone who does, otherwise you die of exposure to the elements. If you try to live on land that you don’t own without paying rent, the Police will come to smash you and throw you out into the street. So in order to make money to pay rent, you have to labour for a second landowner, who takes profits out of your productivity. Then you have to pay income taxes to the Government, representing the landowner class in the abstract.
This arrangement was tolerable when the worker had enough money left over, after profits, taxes and rents, to enjoy a decent standard of living with a decent amount of leisure time. But this hasn’t been the case for decades now. Moreover, it is getting worse. The average worker now labours all week, often 50-60 hours, and is left with almost nothing after the landowners have taken their cuts.
The reason why this state of affairs is so heavily resented is because it’s reminiscent of a state of barbarism. To labour all week and be left with nothing is similar to the system that existed when we were earlier primates, where might makes right and anything you can extort out of another person is legitimately yours.
In a state of Nature, your options are: own or be owned.
Males of sexually reproducing species compete for territorial dominance, because this implies control of the resources in that territory. Whoever can establish that he is willing and able to kill the other also wins the ability to control all the resources of that other. Because females of sexually reproducing species are primarily concerned that their mates demonstrate a capacity for resource acqusition, there is a strong incentive for males to own as much as they can.
In human society, the most valuable thing you can own is other people. Ownership of women allows you to control reproduction. Ownership of men allows you to control resources. Ownership of both allows you to control society. Owning people is heavily incentivised because the more people you own, the more secure your position.
Most people in our supposedly free societies are owned, little different from livestock. This is especially true of those who labour all week but are left with nothing after profits, taxes, rents and basic living expenses are paid. This isn’t categorically different to how a unit of livestock produces e.g. a certain volume of milk but is not paid for it.
Some other people are owners. In every stable society, this ownership class raises a police force from among the owned. This police force is then paid, and paid well, to enforce the ownership claims of the ownership class. Without such a system, a society will collapse into violence over control of land. As such, a police force that smashes anyone who questions land ownership rights is essential for stability.
Wealth, throughout history, was primarily a matter of how many other people you owned. If you were the patriarch of a large family, you might control a dozen other people. A chieftain of an average village might control a dozen dozen. The lord of a fiefdom might control a dozen dozen dozen.
Today, people are owned indirectly, through owning the land underneath them. This allows for great profits without having to go through the hassle of managing people. The owners of tenement housing don’t have to worry about what their tenants do with their days, as long as they pay the rent and don’t damage the housing stock.
If life as a non-human animal is kill or be killed, life as a human is own or be owned. Class and caste systems can be seen as ways to formalise the ownership arrangement so that societies suffered less internal conflict.
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