Sublime

There are reasons to think, however, that “realists” like Mearsheimer have a selective view of historical reality and that the law of the jungle is itself a myth. As de Waal and many other biologists documented in numerous studies, real jungles—unlike the one in our imagination—are full of cooperation, symbiosis, and altruism displayed by countless

As recipients of US foreign aid, it was in their best interest to appear to be supporting the US in its war effort.

But it can also go the other way. What economics has missed is that adding an incentive—a fine or a bonus—may be subtracting something else, the individual’s sense of responsibility, or obligation, or intrinsic pleasure.

To our ears, much of the rhetoric commonplace at the time, even among the most sophisticated scholars, sounds startlingly condescending: ‘A man who spends his whole life following animals just to kill them to eat,’ wrote the prehistorian Robert Braidwood in 1957, ‘or moving from one berry patch to another, is really living just like an animal himse

The philosopher Hannah Arendt complicated both Polanyi’s and Marx’s notion. She observed that primitive accumulation wasn’t just a one-time primal explosion that gave birth to capitalism. Rather, it is a recurring phase in a repeating cycle as more aspects of the social and natural world are subordinated to the market dynamic.

Property and mastery: nothing else counts. Earth will be monetized until all trees grow in straight lines, three people own all seven continents, and every large organism is bred to be slaughtered.

“The freedom to abandon one’s

Guha, who first visited the United States in the 1980s, has reflected on his experiences with the chauvinistic attitudes of deep ecologists like Roderick Nash, author of Wilderness and the American Mind. His response to Nash, who hoped that “the less developed nations may eventually evolve economically and intellectually to the point where nature p