Michael Hudson's recent book goes into how predatory lending has been used to siphon value out of the larger community since the dawn of civilization. Here is an interview;
The tendency of the elites to divide and conquer has become so ingrained, it's effectively instinctive at this point. That's why I tend not to spend much emotional energy on having political and economic debates, because the heat quickly overwhelms the light.
The conceptual issues I'm trying to raise, such as that a spiritual absolute would be the essence of sentience, from which we rise, not an ideal of wisdom and judgement, from which we fell, or of time as an effect and the larger reality being more thermodynamic feedback loops, than temporally linear, go much deeper into the physical reality and the basis of the cultural paradigm. If a conversation can be started on that level, people would be more able to look deeply into how our social, political, economic structures function, without having their fear and flight buttons pushed.
If that conversation could blossom, the current, linear beliefs propelling our tendency toward economic extremes, without natural circuit breakers kicking in, would be just roadkill.
