One might wonder why the world is always unequal, or why it so often resembles an unbalanced scale. Or one might wonder why poverty has not been eradicated when the world has more than enough capacity and abundance to meet the basic needs of all its guests.
And the answer may lie in servitude. For someone to serve you, or to want to serve you, they must be relatively poorer than you: they must desire something that you possess and that they lack. This relationship does not have to be exclusively economic, although in many cases it is.
Poverty, then, can become something desirable to those who stand at the opposite end of the relationship, since it is a way for the world to bend to them and to their personal interests or desires. It is a way for the world to become their servant.
It is therefore not merely a question of capacity, nor something that reason and common sense alone can resolve. It is also a question of will.
Slavery remains very much present today, although it has changed its form over time, becoming more refined and concealed until it can appear broadly acceptable. Because that is precisely the point: for it to be acceptable to the majority.
Today, anyone who wants to be “free” desperately seeks financial freedom because, given the way the world is organized, it represents a way of moving from the side of servitude to the side of those who can benefit from it. The privileged side, in turn, has greater power to dictate the rules, manipulate them, or bend them in favor of its own interests. In this way, a system can end up preserving the very inequality on which it depends.
Servitude, as such, means doing something against your will in order to survive or obtain something you lack. Someone who is able to act in accordance with their own will, following those interests that create no inner friction, is not truly a servant, because they are doing what they genuinely desire.
Anyone seeking real freedom should ask themselves in which areas of their life they are enslaving others, since this is one way of becoming aware of what slavery truly means. And having recognized it within themselves, and rejected it within themselves, they may then be in a position not to accept it from others.
In the end, we must always return to the question of what we desire and why, because behind every desire we may find either our sickness or our freedom.