I affirm that what you call money is the devil of devils; the tyrant of the French, the source of all evils; the bane of souls and slaughterhouse of the living. To imagine one can live in the country of money and preserve one's soul is like imagining one could preserve one's life at the bottom of a lake. Money is the father of luxury, lasciviousness, intrigues, trickery, lies, betrayal, insincerity, - of all the world's worst behaviour. Fathers sell their children, husbands their wives, wives betray their husbands, brothers kill each other, friends are false, and all because of money.

'Security' takes many forms. There is the security of knowing one has a statistically smaller chance of getting shot with an arrow. And then there's the security of knowing that there are people in the world who will care deeply if one is.

It's hard to argue with the numbers, but as any statistician will tell you, statistics are only as good as the premises on which they are based.

Both tobacco and the 'black drink' [coffe] had originally been drugs ingested by shamans or other spiritual virtuosos in intense and highly concentrated doses so as to produce altered states of consciousness; now, instead, they were doled out in carefully measured portions to everyone assembled. What Jesuits reported in the [American] Northeast seems to apply here too: They believe that there is nothing so suitable as Tobacco to appease the passions; that is why they never attend a council without pipe or calumet in their mouths. The smoke, they say, gives them intelligence, and enables them to see clearly through the most intricate matters.

In crops, domestication is what happens when plants under cultivation lose features that allow them to reproduce in the wild. Among the most important is the facility to disperse seed without human assistance. […]

In domestic varieties, these aids to survival are lost. A genetic mutation takes place, switching off the mechanism for spontaneous seed dispersal and turning wheat from a hardy survivor into a hopeless dependant. […]

Is it wheat, they (historians) reminded us, that has domesticated people, just as much as people ever domesticated wheat.

If private property has an 'origin', it is as old as the idea of the sacred, which is likely as old as humanity itself. The pertinent question to ask is not so much when this happened, as how it eventually came to order so many other aspects of human affairs.

What to a settler‘a eye seemed savage, untouched wilderness usually turns out to be landscapes actively managed by indigenous populations for thousand of years through controlled burning, weeding, coppicing, fertilizing and pruning, terracing estuarine plots to extend the habitat of particular wild flora, building clam gardens in intertidal zones to enhance the reproduction of shellfish, creating weirs to catch salmon, bass and sturgeon, and so on. Such procedures were often labour intensive, and regulated by indigenous laws governing who could access groves, swamps, root beds, grasslands and fishing grounds, and who was entitled to exploit what species at any given time of year. In parts of Australia, these indigenous techniques of land management were such that, according to one recent study, we should stop speaking of ‘foraging' altogether, and refer instead to a different sort of farming.

Meanwhile, as we've seen, archaeological evidence is piling up to suggest that in the highly seasonal environments of the last Ice Age, our remote ancestors were behaving much like the Inuit, Nambikwara or Crow. They shifted back and forth between alternative social arrangements, building monuments and then closing them down again, allowing the rise of authoritarian structures during certain times of year then dismantling them - all, it would seem, on the understanding that no particular social order was ever fixed or immutable. The same individual could experience life in what looks to us sometimes like a band, sometimes a tribe, and sometimes like something with at least some of the characteristics we now identify with states.

We modern-day humans tend to exaggerate our differences. The results of such exaggerations are often catastrophic.

Equality here is a direct extension of freedom; indeed, it is its expression. It also has almost nothing in common with the more familiar (Eurasian) notion of ‘equality before the law.’ Which is ultimately equality before the sovereign — that is, once again? Equality in common subjugation. Americans, by contrast, were equal insofar as they were equally free to obey or disobey orders as they saw fit.

One of the reasons that missionary and travel literature became so popular in Europe was precisely because it exposed its readers to this kind of criticism, along with providing a sense of social possibility: the knowledge that familiar ways were not the only ways, since - as these books showed - there were clearly societies in existence that did things very differently. We will suggest that there is a reason why so many key Enlightenment thinkers insisted that their ideals of individual liberty and political equality were inspired by Native Americar sources and examples. Because it was true.

We could multiply examples, but assume that by now the reader gets the broader point we are making. When we simply guess as to what humans in other times and places might be up to, we almost invari- ably make guesses that are far less interesting, far less quirky - In a word, far less human than what was likely going on.

One gets the sense that indigenous life was, to put it very crudely, just a lot more interesting than life in a 'Western' town or city, especially insofar as the latter involved long hours of monotonous, repetitive, conceptually empty activity. The fact that we find it hard to imagine how such an alternative life could be endlessly engaging and interesting is perhaps more a reflection on the limits of our imagination than on the life itself.

After all, imagine we framed the problem differently, the way it might have been fifty or 100 years ago: as the concentration of capital, or oligopoly, or class power. Compared to any of these, a word like "inequality' sounds like it's practically designed to encour- age half-measures and compro- mise. It's possible to imagine overthrowing capitalism or break- ing the power of the state, but it's not clear what eliminating in- equality would even mean. (Which kind of inequality? Wealth? Oppor tunity? Exactly how equal would people have to be in order for us to be able to say we've 'eliminated inequality'?) The term "inequality' is a way of framing social problems appropriate to an age of technocratic reformers, who assume from the outset that no real vision of social transformation is on the table.

Jacques Rousseau left 7about the origins of s uality that Continues and retold, in endless ations, to this day. It i= y of humanity's origina cence, and unwitting rture from a state of pri licity on a voyage of nological discovery that ld ultimately guarantee 'complexity' and our avement. How did this