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| Name: | Fangs of Mara |
| Nicknames: | New Masters |
| Path: | Mastigos |
| Order: | any |
| Arcana: | Mind |
The Liberatores are a Legacy that deals with freeing humanity from its forced conditions. Their primary efforts are directed against the black market trade in human beings, but this Legacy also actively sabotages any activity that smacks of economic oppression or social control through mental and emotional abuse or deprivation.
Mindset
Humankind exists in a state of slavery. Children are reared for blind obedience to their superiors, whether adults, authority figures or even bigger children. Education consists only fractionally of actual instruction - and then only in the procedural details of menial tasks - and mostly of conditioning towards the unquestioning acceptance of monotony, regimentation, and redundancy. Negative reinforcement - pain and deprivation - requiring constant maintenance for diminishing returns, is extensively employed, while positive reinforcement - pleasure and reward - which maintains itself and encourages progress, is seldom used, if not rejected outright. Dissent and alternative views are discouraged with such severity that the mere thought of them is stifled even before the thinker can utter them aloud. The modern adult emerges as a mass-produced domesticated robot, interchangeable with any other, his own slave driver and self-censor. The society formed by such people thus becomes an entity unto itself, bearing no responsibility to its disposable individual members, its insular communities enclosed and contained, its communication monitored and information flow regulated by living automata. Even the society's ruling class is bound to a system beyond its control, bred and groomed for power by the same process of threats and punishment, its soul trapped within massive walls of denial erected against the degradation and debasement it inflicts upon its race. The rest of the world understands that the obedient slave who has never tasted the lash can easily convince himself that he is free, his servitude offered voluntarily to well-meaning masters.
The Liberatores realize that this is only the tip of a most chilling iceberg. For the truth about the human condition, they point to the ghetto and shantytown, to dungeons and basements and shipping containers, to containment camps and torture chambers and rape rooms, to the barbed wire fence between desert and fertile field, to the windowless monolithic building, to the sweatshops of Saipan and the tourist brothels of Dubai, to the eyes of the kiddie-porn "star" and the screams of the toddler strapped to the racing-camel's saddle. One of the reasons that slavery-like conditions persist even after the social systems fostering them have been dismantled is that psychological patterns of dominance and submission become so thoroughly imprinted in the personalities of both master and slave. These patterns survive in the grand scale of socio-economic inequities and in the more intimate scale of family relationships. The Liberators have sworn themselves to fight against these mindsets in order to achieve true freedom for those who have been abused.