I highly HIGHLY recommend this book
I am listening to the audiobook for the second time in two years. You would think it would be boring. It is not boring. It’s got a cutting anthropological perspective on the nature of slavery and conquest and money that lays out China and India and the Middle East (or the Near West if you prefer) side-by-side. Showing how there actually are patterns in the way people treat each other based on the stress position that a particular type of economic system put them under. He even gets into the social origins of patriarchy.
And slavery.
For example, right now I am at the part of the book where he is unraveling Why it was that conquistadors acted so monstrously in South America, and whether it’s really just the natural state of humankind to eviscerate each other in that way. To mount up such atrocities whenever profit is possible. Or- or whether the mechanism of debt, extracted through the ruling European population, had gotten so big and so impersonal that there was no escape from it even for the conquerors, and that their shame, and their resentment, and their fear of debts consuming them, drove them to the worst depravities of the age.
Maybe our nature isn’t actually driven by greed. Maybe we’re torturing ourselves for no good reason, and if we could just imagine a world beyond market capitalism—beyond the impersonal mechanisms of The Market—we might be able to find an escape from it still.
