Debt: The First 5000 Years - autonomous learning

210 DEBT
completely isolated beings. There is a direct line from the new Roman
conception of liberty-not as the ability to form mutual relationships
with others, but as the kind of absolute power of "use and abuse"
over the conquered chattel who make up the bulk of a wealthy Roman
man's household-to the strange fantasies of liberal philosophers like
Hobbes, Locke, and Smith, about the origins of human society in some
collection of thirty- or forty-year-old males who seem to have sprung
from the earth fully formed, then have to decide whether to kill each
other or begin to swap beaver pelts.129
European and American intellectuals, it is true, have spent much
of the last two hundred years trying to flee from the more disturbing
implications of this tradition of thought. Thomas Jefferson, that owner
of many slaves, chose to begin the Declaration of Independence by directly
contradicting the moral basis of slavery, writing "we hold these
truths to be self-evident, that all men ·are created equal, and that they
are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights . . . "­
thus undercutting simultaneously any argument that Africans were
racially inferior, and also that they or their ancestors could ever have
been justly and legally deprived of their freedom. In doing so, however,
he did not propose some radically new conception of rights and liberties.
Neither have subsequent political philosophers. For the most part,
we've just kept the old ones, but with the word "not" inserted here and
there. Most of our most precious rights and freedoms are a series of
exceptions to an overall moral and legal framework that suggests we
shouldn't really have them in the first place.
Formal slavery has been eliminated, but (as anyone who works
from nine to five can testify) the idea that you can alienate your liberty,
at least temporarily, endures. In fact, it determines what most of us
have to do for most of our waking hours, except, usually, on weekends.
The violence has been largely pushed out of sight.130 But this is largely
because we're no longer able to imagine what a world based on social
arrangements that did not require the continual threat of tasers and
surveillance cameras would even look like.