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Most people think of themselves as special. They think of their skills, intelligence, emotions, or looks as somehow superior to most people's. And they are in a constant competition and struggle to prove these ideas of themselves to other people. The root of this behaviour is a struggle for status within society, apparently a genetically hardcoded instinct - there is little you can do to earn someone's enmity more effectively than to doubt their skills, intelligence, or other qualities they want to be respected for.
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A slave, I believe, should not participate in the struggle for status. A slave is not part of normal society, not part of the society of free people. He is not merely lower in status than free people, but belongs to a completely different category of beings: he does not compete for status at all. He is not an individual actor within society, not a person as others are, but only the property of his owner. As an owned human, pride and respect simply don't apply to him, as little as they would to a pet.
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I think one of the most important spiritual developments of becoming a slave will be to reach this level of identification as property: to stop seeing myself as an independent person, someone to whom respect matters, but completely accept that my role in life is restricted to being property and serving my owner. As a slave, I do not want to have status � I want to be part of the belongings of my owner and be regarded as such. I think a slave who has completed this development and fully identifies as property of his owner should not feel offended or humiliated when he is laughed at by his owner, or others. He should not have personal pride, but only the pride to be the slave of the woman who owns him.
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