Episode 1 - Maize, Gold, and Shared Fictions: How Human Societies Invent Power and Justify Conflict

The Saga of Human Civilization

This episode embarks on a comparative journey across history to explore how human societies structure power and cooperate based on "shared fictions"—ideas, laws, and beliefs that exist in our intersubjective reality. The material basis for these shared beliefs is critical; the power of the Olmec civilization, for instance, was rooted in the cultivation of maize (corn), which reliably produced a surplus above 200 pounds per acre. This guaranteed abundance provided the bedrock for a shared political and spiritual belief system, where the ruler was explicitly linked to the maize ear, the source of life.

This concept is paralleled in the power of the Byzantine Empire, which lasted over 700 years due to the incredible durability and predictable value of its gold standard—a coin (the nomisma) of precise purity. The coin itself carried a political message, depicting the emperor being crowned by Christ, explicitly showing that the emperor's right to rule was based on divine mandate. The fragility of these power structures is exposed when external forces challenge the shared fictions; the fall of Constantinople was a clash between the myth of an impregnable Christian Empire and the pragmatic, relentless ambition of the Ottomans. Similarly, the Spanish conquest of the Mexica succeeded not through superior force but by challenging the shared fiction of the sacred power of the ruler, Moctezuma II, whose seizure caused "baffled horror" and a fatal seven-month delay in counter-attack.

The analysis also covers the economic engine of slavery, with the British West Indies sugar economy serving as an early form of industrial capitalism requiring massive upfront capital investment, making exploitation a necessary structural component. The long history of power then connects to modern times through thinkers like Thomas Paine, who saw that the external conflict of warring kings was often a mere "theatre" masking the unified self-interest of a powerful elite. Finally, the philosophical strategy for enduring this chaos is found in Marcus Aurelius's Stoicism, which advises one to retreat to the "little part of thyself," focusing only on one's own virtuous actions, regardless of the unjust and unpredictable external world.