Survival of The Twitter-iest: Part I

Update: 2021-07-10

Description

What are the evolution-honed traits that allowed humanity to rocket to the top of the food-chain?

Will they be enough when we're face-to-face with one of the many great filters?

In this first part of our two-part episode, "Survival of The Shittiest", we'll explore the fundamental nature of humanity and where we may have taken a wrong turn in respect to fulfilling our true potential as a supra-organism optima.

This episode's quote:

(note: in this quote, Alex Danco is explaining David Graeber's arguments from his book, "The First 5,000 Years of Debt", and does not necessarily reflect his personal opinions on the matter.)

"The conquered people now have to somehow obtain those physical coins in order to pay their taxes, which puts them at an enormous disadvantage in trading: they must accept any terms they can get for their own labor. What looks like a “global free market”, facilitated by universal coins, is really just debt peonage. The coins don’t facilitate; they restrict.

[...] all debt, especially interest-drawing debt, is intimately related to its enforcement mechanism. [...] when money is a hard, fungible unit of scarcity, enforcement isn’t a matter of trust; it’s a matter of force. When your enforcement mechanism is state-backed violence, lenders and debtors have a pretty different relationship."

--Alex Danco