Why do so many cling to the idea of american exceptionalism?

[leveymg]

33. We'll put off the quiz for a week, then. ;-) Let me know what you think about it

once you've had a chance to digest it.

If you like that one, companion work is by another French political anthropologist, Pierre Claustres, whose Society Against the State (1974), traces a lot of civilization's nastiness -- war, slavery, human sacrifice, capitalism -- through the Mayan example back to the advent of organized agriculture and the resulting need for mass labor, the creation and outfitting of armies to conquer peoples and territory, and internalized social control mechanisms (organized religion and ideologies of power) that enabled landowners to get and stay rich through accumulation of surplus value. One of Claustres great insights was an answer to why man in a state of nature would voluntarily subject himself to the exploitation of another. The answer he says, beyond violent duress, is the attraction of "magical thinking" held by a priestly class who created the myth that some men have higher wisdom. Embrace of the myth of superior intelligence and secret knowledge makes obedience possible, along with the maintenance of those who know how to wield that myth as power over others. Think Alan Greenspan at his height.

Jerod Dimond's book, Collapse (which you may already have) goes with that, whose application of Chaos Theory explains why even little flaws in the original condition of complex social systems will result in sudden, catastrophic collapse -- when people stop believing that the system works, systems built upon surplus value and the manipulation of illusions fall apart.