The legacy of bullshit ideas

I have read David Graeber and David Wengrow’s the Dawn of Everything: A New History of Everything. I was struck by the thought that the great tragedy in human history is how easily we fall victim to our own bullshit ideas.

The sickness we have suffered throughout history is our callousness to the intrinsic value of life. Exploited people everywhere and throughout history have been treated at things. What is both striking and revealing is how entangled violence and exploitation are. This is enabled by elaborate legal theory.

An obvious example is slavery. In Roman Law, the power of the master rendered the slave as a thing. Slaves were kept suspended in social death awaiting their actual physical death. A slave master’s only interest was to keep them fit to work. If a Roman legionary was enslaved and managed to escape, he had to go through an elaborate process of restoring all his social relationships, including remarrying his wife.

Another example is patriarchy. Roman Law inserted arbitrary violence into the most intimate social relations. A father had arbitrary command over his dependants and their property. Children were to be submissive to their parents, wives to husbands, and subjects to rulers. The superior party was expected to exercise violence with impunity when considered appropriate. Violence was assumed to be bound up with love and affection.

These are just two examples. The legacy of bullshit ideas is still with us today. It doesn’t have to be this way!

Related post:
Book Review: The Dawn of Everything