"Men are naturally equal, and none ever rose above the rest but by Force of Consent:"
-John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon
At first when I first wrote this quote down, I thought it was quite clever. Then when I put it on here to write about it, I hit a wall. I wasn't sure what to write about, it didn't seem as profound until I thought about it harder and deeper. Obviously this quote heavily relates to slavery. This is clearly the case with the slave owners. The reason some were 'above' their slaves because they 'bought' them. That is a 'force of consent.' The longer I think about 'force of consent,' and the situations that it applies to, the more I think it is usually an intangible thing and how much it relates to the person 'below.' I also think it applies a lot to how we place ourselves in relation to others.
Sometimes, when we feel inferior to other people, it usually means they are a bully. Because we feel inferior to them, that makes them 'above' us. And although they didn't buy us or torture us the fact is that we gave them that consent. Now I'm not saying that the bully isn't wrong, I'm saying that we have the power to make them 'above' us; but we also have the power to make us equal to them again.
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