‘If we are allowed to live, solely through the effort of others, do we not owe them some form of servitude, at least for a period of time, in exchange for our lives?’
what you have described here is most emphatically not subservience, enforced by physical or mental threats...yes, we owe those who have mentored and guided us our allegiance and loyalties...
Total shift of topic! I'm talking about the woman who gestated you for 9 months and gave birth to you at great risk to her life and health (except for the last ... what? 100 years of human existence). I'm talking about feeding you when you could do nothing but twitch and gasp. Changing diapers, working to provide you with food, shelter, clothing, medical care, education.
A case could be made, based strictly in human reason, that you owe those people servitude, not just "allegiance and loyalties." A case can be made that they had the right - perhaps even the obligation - to abandon you to die or to actively take your life if you proved unsatisfactory at any point. They could have in classical Greece or Rome.
In summary, I do not believe there is much support for your contention that humans are "freeborn."
And with that, I hope you have a nice evening. I have to take a son to a school meeting.
This makes me think that we've been arguing about different things without making the necessary distinctions.
I have been regarding "subservience" and "humility" in this discussion, anyhow, in a filial sense. Which is to say, a way that is conformed to reality. "Humility" in this context is practically a synonym for "realism." We did not make ourselves, we are contingent beings and therefore indebted beings, we live "referred lives", which is to say, lives that refer, inescapably, to others; and we are born into a society and a world we did not make.
We are not born "free". We are born into a predicament.
Your kids will say, as you yourself said, or at least thought, as a kid: "Why do I have to live in this world I did not make?" "What do you expect *me* to do?" That's the predicament.