Debt: The First 5000 Years - autonomous learning

Chapter Six
GAMES WITH SEX AND DEATH
WHEN WE RET URN to an examination of conventional economic
history, one thing that jumps out is how much has been made to disappear.
Reducing all human life to exchange means not only shunting
aside all other forms of economic experience (hierarchy, communism),
but also ensuring that the vast majority of the human race who are
not adult males, and therefore whose day-to-day existence is relatively
difficult to reduce to a matter of swapping things in such a way as to
seek mutual advantage, melt away into the background.
As a result, we end up with a sanitized view of the way actual
business is conducted. The tidy world of shops and malls is the quintessential
middle-class environment, but at either the top or the bottom of
the system, the world of financiers or of gangsters, deals are often made
in ways not so completely different from ways that the Gunwinggu or
Nambikwara make them-at least in that sex, drugs, music, extravagant
displays of food, and the potential for violence do often play parts.
Consider the case of Neil Bush (George W.'s brother) who, during
divorce proceedings with his wife, admitted to multiple infidelities with
women who, he claimed, would mysteriously appear at his hotel-room
door after important business meetings in Thailand and Hong Kong.
"You have to admit it's pretty remarkable," remarked one of
his wife's attorneys, "for a man to go to a hotel-room door
and open it and have a woman standing there and have sex
with her."
"It was very unusual," Bush replied, admitting however that
this had happened to him on numerous occasions.
"Were they prostitutes "
"I don't know."'
In fact, such things seem almost par for the course when really big
money comes into play.