Debt: The First 5000 Years - autonomous learning

THE MORAL GROUNDS OF ECONOMIC RELA TIONS 113
exactly the same thing: as, for instance, when fans of certain Nigerian
pop stars throw money onto the stage during concerts, and the pop
stars in question make occasional tours of their fans' neighborhoods
tossing (the same) money from the windows of their limos. When this
is all that's going on, we may speak of an absolutely minimal sort of
hierarchy. In much of Papua New Guinea, social life centers on "big
men," charismatic individuals who spend much of their time coaxing,
cajoling, and manipulating in order to acquire masses of wealth to give
away again at some great feast. One could, in practice, pass from here
to, say, an Amazonian or indigenous North American chief. Unlike
big men, their role is more formalized; but actually such chiefs have
no power to compel anyone to do anything they don't want to (hence
North American Indian chiefs' famous skill at oratory and powers of
persuasion). As a result, they tended to give away far more than they
received. Observers often remarked that in terms of personal possessions,
a village chief was often the poorest man in the village, such was
the pressure on him for constant supply of largesse.
Indeed, one could judge how egalitarian a society really was by exactly
this: whether those ostensibly in positions of authority are merely
conduits for redistribution, or able to use their positions to accumulate
riches. The latter seems most likely in aristocratic societies that add
another element: war and plunder. After all, just about anyone who
comes into a very large amount of wealth will ultimately give at least
part of it away-often in grandiose and spectacular ways to large numbers
of people. The more of one's wealth is obtained by plunder or
extortion, the more spectacular and self-aggrandizing will be the forms
in which it's given away.44 And what is true of warrior aristocracies
is all the more true of ancient states, where rulers almost invariably
represented themselves as the protectors of the helpless, supporters of
widows and orphans, and champions of the poor. The genealogy of
the modern redistributive state-with its notorious tendency to foster
identity politics-can be traced back not to any sort of "primitive communism"
but ultimately to violence and war.
Shifting between Modalities
I should underline again that we are not talking about different types
of society here (as we've seen, the very idea that we've ever been organized
into discrete "societies" is dubious) but moral principles that
always coexist everywhere. We are all communists with ·our closest