Herodotus was writing, in the Book I of his Histories, about the Persians:

There are many reasons for their horror of debt, but the chief is their conviction that a man who owes money is bound also to tell lies.

(translation by Aubrey de Sélincourt).

They were right: conditioning the individuals through debt is much more efficient than conditioning them through explicit imposition of rules by the state. So, the Persians’ insight is that any debt-based system will still appear flashy even the next day after its ruin; briefly, that the capitalism is built on bubbles and insidious slavery.

Histories can be read on the Internet Classics Archive at MIT (currently buggy: the Book I is truncated) or on eBooks@Adelaide.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 6th, 2007 at 11:07 pm and is filed under humanist. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.