#history
#mythology
#capitalism
#afrofuturism
Not convinced about the role of mythology today? David Wengrow, one of the authors of “The Dawn Of Everything” alongside David Graeber, spent a decade assessing and bringing attention to the mythology that exists at the foot of Mount Capital - we tend to think that in our object-orient, objectivist-positivist-scientific, post-enlightenment reality, we have done away with needing “creation myths” to justify the formation of society and nature. Yet, as Wengrow makes clear from the offset, there are many important myths that underpin our capitalist society which are simply not true. They’re fabrications massaged and embroidered retrospectively to extinguish tensions.
Wengrow identifies that the whole history of humanity, leading up to now, is a big misunderstanding, and the process of setting that story straight deeply undermines Capitalism as we know it. He begins by identifying the key myth of Capitalism that is explored by many of the period’s preferred philosophers, Rousseau, Hobbes. The story from Rousseau goes that at one point humanity was part of the primordial soup, a part of nature, innocent, living in small egalitarian bands. At some point our innocence was lost, and as our communities grew, we moved into cities and away from nature, and since then everything has been corrupt and perverse. Hobbes is even more cynical, he fundamentally agrees with the core of the myth, only replacing the idea of a state of nature as not defined by innocence, but defined by violence.
We are left with a story that has been shaped to support and justify capitalism: