Humankind by Rutger Bregman & Elizabeth Manton & Erica Moore

Author:Rutger Bregman & Elizabeth Manton & Erica Moore [Bregman, Rutger & Manton, Elizabeth & Moore, Erica]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2020-06-02T00:00:00+00:00

For millennia, we could afford to be sceptical about the stories we were told. If some loudmouth stood up announcing he’d been singled out by the hand of God, you could shrug it off. If that person became a nuisance, sooner or later he or she would get an arrow in the backside. Homo puppy was friendly, not naive.

It wasn’t until the emergence of armies and their commanders that all this changed. Just try standing up to a strongman who has all opposition skinned, burned alive, or drawn and quartered. Your criticisms suddenly won’t seem so urgent. ‘This is the reason,’ Machiavelli wrote, ‘why all armed prophets have triumphed and all unarmed prophets have fallen.’

From this point on, gods and kings were no longer so easily ousted. Not backing a myth could now prove fatal. If you believed in the wrong god, you kept it to yourself. If you believed the nation state was a foolish illusion, it could cost you your head. ‘It is useful,’ advised Machiavelli, ‘to arrange matters so that when they no longer believe, they can be made to believe by force.31

You might think violence isn’t a big part of the equation any more–at least not in tidy democracies with their boring bureaucracy. But make no mistake: the threat of violence is still very much present, and it’s pervasive.32 It’s the reason families with children can be kicked out of their homes for defaulting on mortgage payments. It’s the reason why immigrants can’t simply stroll across the border in the fictions we call ‘Europe’ and ‘the United States’. And it’s also the reason we continue to believe in money.

Just consider: why would people hole up in cages we know as ‘offices’ for forty hours a week in exchange for some bits of metal and paper or a few digits added to their bank account? Is it because we’ve been won over by the propaganda of the powers that be? And, if so, why are there virtually no dissenters? Why does no one walk up to the tax authorities and say, ‘Hey mister, I just read an interesting book about the power of myths and realised money is a fiction, so I’m skipping taxes this year.’

The reason is self-evident. If you ignore a bill or don’t pay your taxes, you’ll be fined or locked up. If you don’t willingly comply, the authorities will come after you. Money may be a fiction, but it’s enforced by the threat of very real violence.33

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