10-04-2015, 03:50 PM
I highly recommend anybody interested in this topic check out David Graeber's Debt: The First 5,000 Years. It's a great anthropologically driven look at the history of debt in all its economic, spiritual, and moral dimensions. One thing he blew my mind with: so-called "virtual currency" was the original currency. Coinage came about because rulers wanted to monetize their subject's productive capacity.
Another concept that seems tangential to the Law of One: he says that the original forms of exchange were not "barter", and that in the anthropological record you see very little barter, mostly between tribes that had no ongoing history of interaction. Most exchanges were more of the form of: you have cows, I have chickens. I need a cow, so you give me a cow. Then, later on, when you need chickens, I'll give you chickens. Over hundreds and thousands of years, you forget who owes whom what, and everybody just kind of starts to see that their relationship with the members of their community comprises a debt and credit to ancient to account for. That, Graeber argues, is the origin of any kind of positive sense of collective identity or community: we owe and expect so much from one another, but it's all fuzzy and indeterminate, so [b]it's just easier to think in terms of all being part of one interest[/u] rather than closely accounting for debts and credits.
The kind of clearing transactions we have in modern society, where people pay in full, is actually anti-social, in a way. Graeber talks about how in more "primitive" societies, if you try to pay in full for something the people would be insulted. The reason makes perfect sense according to the logic I explained above: if you want to pay in full, that means we can go our separate ways with no further need for interaction. So paying in full is kind of like saying, "what, you want nothing more to do with me?"
Totally transformed how I looked at economics and sociology, highly recommended. Graeber's ideas in Debt also contributed to the debt focus of Occupy Wall Street, and he was the guy who came up with the 99% slogan.
Another concept that seems tangential to the Law of One: he says that the original forms of exchange were not "barter", and that in the anthropological record you see very little barter, mostly between tribes that had no ongoing history of interaction. Most exchanges were more of the form of: you have cows, I have chickens. I need a cow, so you give me a cow. Then, later on, when you need chickens, I'll give you chickens. Over hundreds and thousands of years, you forget who owes whom what, and everybody just kind of starts to see that their relationship with the members of their community comprises a debt and credit to ancient to account for. That, Graeber argues, is the origin of any kind of positive sense of collective identity or community: we owe and expect so much from one another, but it's all fuzzy and indeterminate, so [b]it's just easier to think in terms of all being part of one interest[/u] rather than closely accounting for debts and credits.
The kind of clearing transactions we have in modern society, where people pay in full, is actually anti-social, in a way. Graeber talks about how in more "primitive" societies, if you try to pay in full for something the people would be insulted. The reason makes perfect sense according to the logic I explained above: if you want to pay in full, that means we can go our separate ways with no further need for interaction. So paying in full is kind of like saying, "what, you want nothing more to do with me?"
Totally transformed how I looked at economics and sociology, highly recommended. Graeber's ideas in Debt also contributed to the debt focus of Occupy Wall Street, and he was the guy who came up with the 99% slogan.
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