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RE: The Story of Money: The Myth of Barter
I take from no one, I exchange freely. Perhaps not always on equal terms, but fundamentally my actions are done with mutual consent.
I take from no one, I exchange freely. Perhaps not always on equal terms, but fundamentally my actions are done with mutual consent.
Aye, I respect that mentality. Also, it would seem that there are some components of our global cult of industry that take everything they can get from the land, and the people who live there, often without consent, or anything resembling compensation. I mean, in the US, our entire country was taken largely from people who were well-meaning enough to attempt to share it, but systemically they were pried off of the most valuable places, and murdered, starved, and really rent into the ground.
And, it's not unusual, every place in the world that has people living there, was once occupied by different people before them. It's still happening today.
I don't speak for condemnation, but rather acknowledgement, there are hundreds of tribes of indigenous people in the amazon that have been persecuted, silenced, murdered, and god knows what by Chinese oil companies. They've destroyed vast distances of water sheds with faulty pipelines and spills...caused unmeasurable damage and suffering to people, animals, and the other beings there.
Those methods of acquiring cheap oil funds Chinese industry, which is unimaginably intertwined with every industrial nation on the planet. Was the final transaction we make at the grocery store done free and clear in the spirit of mutual consent? Probably.
But what about the extensive chain of financial/economic hegemony that must always extract value, must always keep growing, in order to support such commercial endpoints as a store, a business?
We are inextricably tied to such things.
The idea of well meaning indigeonus americans who tried to share there land is unfortunatly misplaced. The truth is that European colonizers were resisted almost everywhere they went and were only tolerated in so far as it either benefited a particular tribe or they had no choice. It is more accurate to think of the settling of north america as a long series of wars, but one that was doomed from the start for the natives as they were no match numerically or technologically for the Europeans.
Guess it depends who you listen to :P The bigger reality as I'm aware of it is that 90%+ of all of the natives were wiped out within 50 years of contact by European diseases.
Yes, definatly
And that mutual consent is all that matters. In an exchange each party values the other good MORE than their own, otherwise there would be no exchange.