Inceldom and The Spirit of Capitalism

Another Thing of me Thinking Out Loud

So there was this thing in David Graeber’s book “Debt” which stuck out to me that may or may not be true, because Graeber is a sloppy scholar, but made me think about unconscious lessons learned by young men from pop culture and the implications thereof.

It is incredibly frustrating to me, an aspiring anarchist, that Graeber is so sloppy with the stuff I know a lot about (namely, Tanach and Jewish history), which causes me to doubt all of his other conclusions. To use one example, in his section on the economy of the Medieval Muslim world (which I am about to talk about), he quotes studies of contracts written up by Jewish merchants which were found in a trove of Jewish documents in “Geniza, Egypt” which is a bit like, (actually, exactly like) talking about the Gnostic texts found in “Library, Egypt”.

So one of the things he talks about is how modern the medieval Muslim’s world conception of economics was. The “Laffer Curve” used to justify Reaganomics was actually talked about by Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406), a guy who pretty much invented economics, sociology, historiography, and political science as fields of study. Look him up! He’s very cool! There was a very similar environment to the origins of modern capitalism, where long sea voyages were undertaken to access untold riches in foreign lands. There was also an expectation that governments would not interfere in commerce except to keep the sea safe from pirates.

But there were some key differences between our modern capitalism and that of Medieval Islam. For one, the Muslim ban on lending with interest, which is obviously important, but I don’t know much about. For another, the cultural norms of mutual aid were much much stronger in Muslim society¹, and the rich were expected to help the poor to a much greater degree than we think of as normal. This is apparent when you read the Rambam, who stresses over and over again the obligations of the rich towards the poor. Every holiday he reminds you that your first priority is not the food at your table, but that the poor are taken care of. Obviously there’s a fair bit of Judaism in that too, but the Rambam was a product of his cultural context, and that was part of his cultural context.

But the thing that was most interesting to me as a difference between Medieval Muslim Capitalism and Modern Capitalism was the assumption of risk. The way Graeber words it, and again, take him and the ideas I build off of this with heavy grains of salt, is that the Medieval Muslims viewed profit as reward for risk. If you had the gumption to take on a lot of risk by voyaging across the sea in search of profit, and you succeeded, then you deserved to be rich. If you were unwilling to take on risk, then you weren’t. Sometimes you’d win big. Sometimes you’d fail big. But the risk was real, and your willingness to take on that risk in proportion to the potential gain was where money was made.

This seems to me to be a huge contrast between Medieval Muslim Capitalism and Modern Capitalism, which started out with similar inputs (untold riches to be made through dangerous voyages across the sea) but Modern Capitalism ends up innovating in risk mitigation, in the form of stock trading, corporations, and insurance, both of which were invented to mitigate the risk of merchant voyages to the Americas by the Dutch and English respectively.² Fewer fortunes were lost, and at least in theory fewer lives were ruined by a freak storm at sea, but at the cost of eroding the idea that wealth is a reward for genuine risk. When you can invest money with the risk of losing it all mitigated, you become more and more reckless with regards to other things, like environmental concerns, workers rights, indigenous rights, etc.

More to the point, it seems that at some point we adopted the idea that investors are entitled to risk-free investment with unlimited growth, and society started to evolve ways for governments to ensure that unlimited return on investment. We seem to operate under the assumption that an investor is entitled to do anything to make sure that their investment returns money. If that means, say, having to fire workers not for performance related issues, but merely to make the stock price goes up, so be it. Since the investors put up the money, they are entitled to dump the risk on everyone else but them, while taking the profits for themselves. It is no longer the case that wealth is a reward for risk. Rather wealth is a reward for having wealth.