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New Study Takes the Mask Off Capitalism and Extreme Poverty Discourse
No surprise: everything we’ve been told about our economic system is a lie — someone tell Steven Pinker and Bill Gates
“Evidence is always partial. Facts are not truth, though they are part of it — information is not knowledge. And history is not the past — it is the method we have evolved of organising our ignorance of the past. It’s the record of what’s left on the record. It’s the plan of the positions taken, when we to stop the dance to note them down. It’s what’s left in the sieve when the centuries have run through it — a few stones, scraps of writing, scraps of cloth. It is no more “the past” than a birth certificate is a birth, or a script is a performance, or a map is a journey. It is the multiplication of the evidence of fallible and biased witnesses, combined with incomplete accounts of actions not fully understood by the people who performed them. It’s no more than the best we can do, and often it falls short of that.” — Hilary Mantel
I love that quote, “history is not the past — it is the method we have evolved of organising our ignorance of the past.” I dedicate a lot of my time and thoughts to the myths and lies perpetrated by the collective West about how the world came to be the way it is. In other words, trying to confront my own ignorance of the past and sharing what I find.
There comes a point in our lives when we’re supposed to realize most of what we’ve been taught is a partial truth or complete fabrication. That is especially true of history and the modern field of shamanic tea leaf reading known as economics.
The myths surrounding capitalism are some of the most obviously false and egregious, yet the most believed. Like many great lies, bullsh*t such as ‘capitalism has lifted the world out of extreme poverty’ is repeated so often, it has become an internalized truth like the sun being the center of the solar system, two plus two equals four, and Jimmy Hendrix is the GOAT.
But scratch the surface, read a book or two, think about it for more than a second, and the narrative completely crumbles.
We confuse — or I think are intentionally taught to confuse — production and trade with…
