Debt:
The First 5000 Years
A
Froogal Stoodent Review
If you're interested, you can find this book
at Amazon.
The first of a new series of book reviews from The Froogal Stoodent.
This book is far too
complex and entangled for me to cite some quotes and provide a quick
overview. You should read it for yourself!
In this instance,
I’ll just identify one quote that really struck me:
Casimir’s behavior [that is, Margrave Casimir of
Brandenburg-Ansbach, who sent a small army to brutalize his own
territories in the wake of a rebellion—and of course, took all the
gold]…seems, like that of Cortes’s angry foot soldiers when
unleashed on the Aztec provinces, to embody something essential about
the psychology of debt. Or more precisely, perhaps, about the debtor
who feels he has done nothing to deserve being placed in his
position: the frantic urgency of having to convert everything around
oneself into money, and rage and indignation at having been reduced
to the sort of person who would do so.”
—David
Graeber, Debt: The First 5000 Years,
p. 325