Non-fiction, and Shaw on natural slavery

Non-fiction is factual writing: everything outside novels, stories, plays and poems. It includes essays, reports, speeches, biographies and more. Its job is to explain, analyse and clarify.

The first essay, 'Freedom', is by George Bernard Shaw, the Irish dramatist and critic, famous for fearless criticism hidden under a light, joking surface.

Shaw begins with a simple idea. A perfectly free person could do anything they liked, at any time. But no such person exists. We must all sleep, wash, eat, dress and travel, and these natural tasks take about half of every day. In that sense we are all Nature's slaves.

These natural jobs create other jobs: someone must produce the food, build the houses and make the clothes. And the products of that work can be taken from the people who make them.

Whoever gets the upper hand, by force, by fraud, or by teaching people to accept it, can shift his own share of Nature's burden on to you. Then you must work far longer than you need, to keep him as well as yourself. That, says Shaw, is slavery: not to Nature, but to other people.