Some of my recent personal notes from anthropologist David Graeber's book Debt: The First 5,000 Years. These notes are excerpts that I've condensed and, to some extent, paraphrased or simplified.
NOTES:
The result during the Axial Age (800 BC-600 AD) was a new frame for making assumptions about human motivation. It simplified human motivation to concepts like "profit" and "advantage". They began to assume that "profit" and "advantage" are what all people are pursuing in every aspect of existence. Thus, with realities like the violence of war or the impersonal nature of the "marketplace", this simplified frame allowed them to drop the pretense that they cared. This, in turn, allowed human life to become a simple matter of means-to-end calculation--someยญthing that could be examined using the same means used to study the attraction and repulsion of celestial bodies.
It's not coincidental that this assumption resembles those of contemporary economists.
This picture of humanity begins to appear with consistency across Eurasia wherever we see coinage and philosophy appear. China provides a transparent example. In Confucius's time, Chinese thinkers spoke of the pursuit of profit as the driving force in human life. The term used was "li", a word first used to refer to the increase of grain harvested over and above what was originally planted (the Chinese pictogram for this word is a sheaf of wheat next to a knife). From there "li" came to mean commercial profit and a general term for "benefit" or "payback."
The following story tell's the reaction of a merchant's son named Lu Buwei on learning that an exiled prince was living nearby. It clearly illustrates the progression of "li" coming to mean "profit" or "return":
Upon coming home, he said to his father,
"What is the profit on investment that one can expect from plowing fields?"
"Ten times the investment," replied his father.
"And the return on investment in pearls and jades is how much?"
"A hundredfold."
"And the return on investment from establishing a ruler and securing the state would be how much?"
"It would be incalculable."
Lu then adopted the prince's cause and eventually contrived to make him King of Qin. He continued on to become first minister for the king's son, Qin Shi Huang, helping him defeat the other Warring States to became the first Emperor of China.
We still have a compendium of political wisdom that Lu commissioned for the new emperor. It contains such military advice as the following:
"As a general principle, when an enemy's army comes, it seeks some profit. Now if they come and find the prospect of death instead, they will consider running away the most profitable thing to do. When all one's enemies consider running to be the most profitable thing to do, no blades will cross. This is the most essential point in military matters."
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