![]() ![]() Or for many millions more lives ended or blighted by “gentle commerce” and “free trade,” which as we’ll see could materialize at your border in the form of a genocidal corporate army bent on “premium-empathy”-ing your way of life into your own blood-soaked dust.Ĭonsider what classical-liberalism’s gentle-commerce blessings brought to the basic business of staving off starvation. For all of Pinker’s elegant-stats-wielding elite-soothing sermons that “in fact a free market puts a premium on empathy,” there was little empathy, empirically evident, for the likes of the Banda Islanders. ![]() One reason this hushed-up history matters is that even today economic “rationality” and plunder often remain partners in crime. Economist Albert Hirschman, in The Passions and the Interests, an influential book on the long process of alchemizing the once-deadly vice of avarice into plainly-rational “self-interest” during the rise of early capitalism, confirms there was “much talk… about the douceur of commerce.” Douceur translates to “sweetness, softness, calm, and gentleness… the antonym of violence.” Hirschman and Pinker cite a long list of Enlightenment luminaries, for instance, Kant in 1795 wrote that “The spirit of commerce … can not exist side-by-side with war.” Pinker concurs, “commercial powers …tended to favor trade over conquest.”īut this majestic myth-making of modernity-the Enlightenment as a triumph of rationality and humanism-must not be allowed to mask that the Age of Reason ran parallel to and often justified the vast violent plunder of imperial economics (now often euphemistically called “free trade”). Pinker isn’t wrong in reporting Enlightenment views. The cursed spice of Ghosh’s title was so valuable that a handful of nutmegs “ could buy a house or ship.” which sadly meant Coen’s gentle-commerce genocide made greedy profits even at the cost of 5,000 slaves per year (“labor” didn’t last long under gentle-commerce conditions). This involved 50 vessels, and 2,000 men (including 80 Japanese ronin, masterless samurai mercenaries) who displaced, “ killed, captured, or enslaved” 90% of the 15,000 indigenous “trading partners.” This “almost total annihilation of the population of the Banda Islands clearly a genocidal act” (concluded a 2012 paper in the Journal of Genocide Studies). He ordered a monopoly-securing massacre of the Banda Islanders. Unlike Pinker’s, Coen’s words weren’t abstract theorizing, and he concretely came to the opposite conclusion on the value of trading “partner” lives. That’s a quote from Amitav Ghosh’s The Nutmeg’s Curse (an eloquently alarming book about gigantic ideological gaps in climate crisis discourse). In it Pinker preaches thinking “like an economist” using “the theory of gentle commerce from classical liberalism,” under which trade becomes “more appealing than … war.” Rationally-enlightened leaders reasoned that your “trading partner suddenly becomes more valuable to you alive than dead.”Ĭompare that glorified life-affirming tradeoff to the views of a frontline practitioner of that so-called gentle commerce: “ There can be no trade without war,” declared Jan Pieterzoon Coen of the Dutch East India Company. This essay will walk you through why the “liberal world order’s” free markets are not really remotely in the business of maximizing flourishing-to rightly judge their track record requires reckoning with the greedocracy’s glossed-over genocides and hushed-up holocausts.Ĭonsider how “rational optimist” Steven Pinker paints the history of trade in his billionaire-beloved good-news-bearing bible, The Better Angels of Our Nature (its “ the most inspiring book I’ve ever read” gushed Bill Gates, the prominent predatory philanthropist). But the grand narrative usually used to justify this world-shaping greed-is-good creed vigorously ignores salient history, and disingenuously suppresses data on greed’s present-day harms. ![]() ![]() Gussied-up as the only rational way, greed has become the guilt-free guiding star of global elites. I’d argue that we live under “greedocracy” disguised as a form of liberalism. What role should greed play in how we run the world? Should it rule us and shape all that we do? ![]()
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