Jones Plantation – First Questions

In case you didn’t extrapolate from this video an extended perspective of some implications relevant to our lives and our situation, I’ll try to guide you there.

How different are the lives of the freed slaves from the lives of the same people when they were slaves? I see four differences. One difference is nothing more than ideological: that the people identify themselves as free rather than slaves. The second difference is also purely ideological: that the meetings have an appearance of audience participation. The third difference is a small burden of responsibility of free people: that the people handle currency and manage accounting in addition to the same work they had done previously. The fourth difference is attitudinal: that the people are incentivized to work harder to improve their lifestyle and penalized for poor performance and incentivized to compete with their neighbors in a divisive way.

Other than those four differences, is there anything different in lives of the freed slaves from the lives of the same people when they were slaves?

Are the “free” people allowed to think freely? Is dissent tolerated? Is the talk from the manager, which appears to be kind and generous, anything more than pure rhetoric designed to manipulate the thoughts of the “free” people? If the objective of the slave owner before emancipation was to get compliance from the slaves, has compliance been achieved? How? How did most slaves view a slave who complained about the master? How do most “freed” people view a dissenter? To what extent is this view influenced by the words of the manager? Would it be fair to call this tyranny? Is there a more suitable word than tyranny to describe the situation?

There is a project proposed to use the short cartoon version of Jones Plantation as the basis to produce a full-feature (two hours, I think) film with good actors. If you wish to support this project, you can visit https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/jones-plantation-feature-film#/