I’d rather be the slave than the master

From the lecture and discussions about Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit that has been discussed for this week, what interest me the most is the discussion of the slave and the master and the need for a fight as a means of determining who is going to survive or who will not throughout the course of history.
The interesting part on this is the fact that it can be perfectly applied in our modern context here in the Philippines. But before going to the application, let’s review the differences between the slave and the master.
The master is the more powerful of the two, who in most cases fights and most of the time wins the fight, and seeks recognition only to a person of equal stature to him. The master also is greater than the slave, and he is the one who gets all of the recognition in the significant events throughout history.
The slave, on the other hand, is the person who works and bows down to his master, who recognizes the master for everything, and seeks recognition elsewhere. Also the slave is never recognized by the master and is not given due credit throughout the significant events in history.
History, as Hegel explained, is of pure energy, which is always in a n perpetual motion, and most of the time, is rough. Because of the nature of history in Hegelian thought, man goes through three premises: the first is through speech and desire, where he attempts to speak his desires as a means of his satisfaction and survival. Then he goes through the process of negating his actions, wherein his moment of thinking and acting are performed at the same time, resulting to the alienation of his being, thus negating his actions and therefore concentrating on what he thinks instead of concentrating of his actions. Combining the two will then eventually make the human lead into fighting against one another, wherein the fight is no ordinary fight, but is a fight to the death.
But why fight to the death anyway? Why not just a competition of who is the better of the two?
I think the Hegelian way of thinking can be related to Charles Darwin’s theory of Natural selection, wherein beings have to evolve in order to survive. In this case, the slave and the master have to live up to their desires in order to determine who would win in the fight. But sad to say, the competition between the slave and the master is an unfair means of competition, analogous to the outcome of the third Punic war, where the Romans annihilated the powerless Carthaginians, killing even the women and children, and burning the whole Carthage down into ashes.
The battle between the slave and the master is unfair for two important reasons. First, although the slave is responsible for the creation of the world, and hence the creation of history, it always ends up to the master claiming such historical feat. A perfect example of this principle is the creation of the numerous pyramids in Egypt during the ancient Egyptian era. Although Egyptian slaves are fully responsible for the creation of these breath-taking structures of the ancient era, it always end up in history that the pharaohs, Djoser and Khufu to name a few, are the one responsible for the creation of these structures instead of the hundred million Egyptian slaves who worked with blood, sweat, and tears, and some of them dying of fatigue, hunger, and unexpected circumstances just to create such a historical feat. These slaves never got the opportunity to be honored of this endeavor. The second reason for the unfair fight is the extremely uneven powers of the slave and the master. Comparatively speaking, the master is ultimately powerful, evident to his commanding, managing, and strategizing abilities, while the slave has no such power expect the power to conform to the desires of the master. Because of this, the phenomenon of the slave and the master ends up with the slave creating his work, being satisfied with his creation, then the master partakes and consume of the slave’s work, the master desiring more than what the slave has created, then the cycle goes on.
In the debate on whether it is better to be the slave or the master, I would answer that I would prefer to be the slave than the master. This may be an unexpected answer from a human being perspective, given that being the master has more benefits than being the slave, since I believe that being a slave, you know deep in your mind and soul that you work hard for your creation, that you have poured down your efforts just to make that feat, unlike the master, who doesn’t really work as hard as the slave. Also, the advantage of being the slave rather than the master is the fact that the slave can get satisfied with his work, unlike the master who has the tendency to desire for more, despite of the desire reaching to a status wherein it is very impossible to accomplish. Overall, I believe that the slave should be the one who would win the fight against the master. The problem is that the slave is too scared to fight against the master. Just like Philippine politics, in the competition between the masa and the government.