askchapo

it gave me context to feel a compassionate through-line for human existence and appreciate more the historical development of global civilization from a pretty materialist lens. as applied to my personal history, having a lens to view the development of judaism and christianity as an expression of cultural response to material conditions and in relation to debt and economic relations gave me a way to psychologically distance myself from feeling a need to negotiate with the religion as an insider. approaching it from a historical materialist perspective, i think graeber also unintentionally paints a convincing portrait of the interaction of technology, capital, people, and the psychological traumas people inflict upon one another. i had been raised to be generally compassionate in principle, but by relatively ignorant and poor practitioners. in other words, graeber's approach to history and the specific content that he focused on to develop his theory of debt as a panhistorical economic driver and instrument of power and recurring example of a superhuman (larger than a human can successfully reason about concretely) abstract that drove humans to think more abstractly about everything. that last part, along with a materialist approach to integrating history, filled in the gaps that I had from understanding Marx as applied with less eurocentrism than Marx was capable of.