House Elves

[Bart Lidofsky]

No: HPFGUIDX 147537

justcarol67 wrote:
> As for Harry's willingness to have a house-elf as his slave, mentioned
> earlier in this thread, I suppose he's so used to Dobby's servile
> obedience and doting adoration that he doesn't give a second thought
> to ordering a fellow being to do his will, especially one as dangerous
> and devious as Kreacher, who is still capable of doing great harm to a
> hated master. And neither Harry nor Ron (nor I) ever had much use for
> SPEW.

Bart:
	Once again, I think we need to go to Dumbledore for inspiration. Note 
that Dumbledore had no problem employing house elves as slaves, nor does 
he have any problem recognizing Dobby's freedom. Hermoine is prejudiced 
from a human perspective; normally, when enslaved humans claim to love 
their slavery, it is due to, at best, ignorance; they know no other 
life, and are afraid of what it might bring, and, at worst, for fear of 
reprisal. The psychology of house elves seems to be different. Even 
Dobby, who is proud of his freedom, finds it hard to break away from his 
slave mentality, while Winky, who, if she wanted, could just pretend she 
wasn't free, finds the concept of freedom to be so onerous that she is 
driven to taking mind-numbing substances.

	It is pretty clear that the minds of house elves are simply wired 
differently than the minds of humans. Even Kreacher finds it preferable 
to serve someone he despises than to be free.

	In the American Southwest, as an experiment, mongooses (I checked the 
plural in the dictionary) were imported from India to deal with 
rattlesnakes. It turned out that their ability to kill snakes had to do 
specifically with hardwired reactions to the behavior of cobras; against 
rattlesnakes, they proved to be disastrously ineffective.

	One of the reasons why Hagrid gets along so well with magical creatures 
is because he understands them (his major weakness is not realizing that 
such understanding doesn't come instinctively to other humans; that's 
one reason he has trouble explaining to others how he does it). Hermoine 
needs to understand that just because creatures can talk and look human 
doesn't mean that they think like humans.

	Bart