Thanks for sharing this it’s amazing. What is it? Who are they? I read
this one which is to do with the history of debt. And how that could have come about through the establishment of priests , and the effects of developing groups of intermediaries between the sacred and profane. It’s really great, it explains everything , it’s foolproof , completely inarguable. The idea being that we can imagine a situation where people who gained some knowledge of “the mysteries”, who at one point in time could communicate more proficiently with “the spirits”, who particularly understood the grand cause and effect incurred by say, removing some ore from the ground to make a knife, knew that for this transaction to be fair the spirits responsible for say, the ore, or the knife, etc, would have to be appropriately ameliorated. by looking to capitalise on some of the things they might have learnt they could persuade, for instance, the people who owned all the knives that they had some spiritual authority, in return for military support, passing on the debt owed to the spirits responsible. This combination then gives rise to the first states and the eternal transferal of debt. Maybe everyone already learnt all this in primary school I don’t know but it’s got a really good ending this one you should all read it
One thing that happened when reading this, and I suppose this goes for the internet in general, is the endless number of tabs and hyperlinks to wikipedia for minoan crete and dubious ethnologists stuff, I wasn’t able to really get through the essay in one straight go, it’s punctuated by all these tangents and rabbit holes that then collect on the screen by mistake . Given the nature of what theyre write about in this series and the huge history of the world scale it has you end up coming across all the information sort of at the same time. it syncs quite curiously with the sense of all this information and history happening concurrently , all at one time and outside of time in certain ways. A lot of internet reading does that anyway but this felt a bit weirder and important.
The final part concludes in this uplifting way that’s coherent with the themes of the whole series, it feels dareisay psychedelic in the sense of a grand harmonious resolution that seems to resonate at lots of different levels. it’s dealing with a scale that’s too big to fail. It feels quite impressive to be able to get that effect with writing given the difficulty of trying to fix that sense and make it permanent, something that you can sleep on and reread in the morning. I don’t want to ruin the ending for anyone but I’m curious as to what “imagination” might be in the way it’s used here.
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