@philip_cardella @Npars01 @Catvalente it all makes so much sense when you look at the history and frame it in terms of a society that's fed itself by maintaining one of the most brutal and massive slave-holding institutions the world had ever seen, and has had its laws and culture and understanding of right and wrong shaped by being in that position for multiple centuries, suddenly losing the *de jure* element of that structure and spending the next 150+ years scrambling with everything they've got, by any deception or stochastic violence or blasphemous heresy necessary, to put the *substance* of everything back into the only social, economic and moral order that they can conceive of for organizing a society