I recently read "Sufferings in Africa" by the American ship captain named James Riley who happened to shipwreck on the coast of Sahara in 1815, around the time Napoleonic wars were raging in Europe. It's a fascinating story to read from multiple points of view, one of them being the "shock" of discovering an America before the superpower status of today. Even today if an American citizen gets stranded in a hostile place, it's only a Hollywood myth that they mostly get out alive and well out of it, let alone during those times. The other fascinating story it's about slavery and how it works. Also about who employed it "first" and "last" and it ain't JUST the white people. The whites have a long (hundreds of years of) history of being enslaved by the blacks (or browns, depending on where they lived and they developed some immune mechanisms to that, which in the context of the merciless coronavirus, maybe it's good to recap. There are three levels of how defences work: 1) The armed forces. Police / army / navy in real life, the immune system in biology. 2) When that gets breached, you got ransoms. When rapacious slave owners or viruses get you, most will work you to death. A small fraction may be spared if they're able to convince their captors they'll get a better reward by releasing them than by working them to death (as long a life that they have). #3) The epiphany. Read in the "Sufferings in Africa" book by the American captain James Riley. If you're in the deepest hole in the hands of rapacious viruses, and you still want to escape, least thing you wanna do is to prove useful or let them know you are highly useful at something, especially sought-for skills: you're a good doctor, a skilled blacksmith or carpenter or what else. You'll raise above the level of destitute worked to death slave and live a good and plenteous life. But you won't be free and if you had that, you'll never get it back. My problem as a #3 is that I'm surrounded by guys who've relinquished their freedom to the good and plenteous. They'll die eventually though, perhaps later that I will, but they won't live past me or past us. And that's why we struggle.