The first question for the @davidagraeber's Pirate Enlightenment panelists @piercepenniless, @ayca_cu, @OwenJones84 was great:
"Why do we need all these half-baked stories? We need the truth."
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"Why do we need all these half-baked stories? We need the truth."
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The questioner more or less said: we need to fight for justice right now, not waste time on entertaining literary tales and speculation.
For me, the best answer to this is the screen adaptation of Dangerous Liaisons (1988).
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For me, the best answer to this is the screen adaptation of Dangerous Liaisons (1988).
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This film may seem to be about sex, blood, and perhaps about the French Revolution, but Dangerous Liaisons is really about literature and the human capacity to tell stories to one another.
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The film's protagonists struggle not only for power, but also for their personal freedom in the stuffy, unjust French society of the eighteenth century.
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They seem to think that by scheming, seducing, fighting, falling in love, and breaking up with each other, they can control their own lives, and even the lives of others, but if you look closely, they do so only by writing to one another lots and lots of letters.
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It is through these letters that the characters constantly produce a secret mechanism that sets in motion the complex machinery of social relations, which controls both individual intrigues and the general behavioral code of society as a whole.
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The Vicomte de Valmont's (John Malkovich) first affair involves
an attempt to buy back the correspondence of his future lover.
In bed with his lovers, he is too mostly busy writing letters.
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an attempt to buy back the correspondence of his future lover.
In bed with his lovers, he is too mostly busy writing letters.
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Throughout the film, the writing, sending, and printing of letters is a major visual theme.
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The Marquise de Merteuil's (Glenn Close) bloodstained stack of letters to Valmont (John Malkovich) will be her public verdict and social suicide, no less horrific than the deaths of Valmont and his lover.
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It was neither sex that killed them nor a violation of social rules, but the stories they told to each other about their relationships, fixed in letters, told and distributed in a specific way.
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Almost all of the scenes in the film are shot as theatrically intimate scenes. The viewer can examine the characters closely to understand the mechanism that drives this strange world.
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Christian morality, with its fidelity to marriage and eternal love, looks no less cynical and cruel than the beliefs of the Valmont (John Malkovich) and the de Merteuil's (Glenn Close) in individual freedom and the right to control the destinies of their fellow human beings.
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As the film unfolds, it becomes clear that they act more as liberators, reprogramming society and partially freeing the participants of the game.
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Cécile de Volanges (Uma Thurman) at first appears to be a victim of Valmont's deception and violence, but when one recalls that the girl is soon to marry an unloved and elderly husband. After that, the circumstances in which Cécile loses her innocence look very different.
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How society decides what is good and what is bad, what should be punished and what one should be proud of is shown through the exchange of secret letters between the characters of the film,
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which becomes public in the final scene where Marquise de Merteuil is cast out of society.
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It seems that any society––whether it is 18th century France, or Madagascar society during the Golden Age of Pirates, as described by David in Pirate Enlightenment, or our modern one––operates as a single organism governed by stories, rather than "the truth."
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Only the ways Stories are produced and disseminated are changing.
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Through gossip and rumor, private correspondence, and participation in social media or literary salons, storytelling is always a living and collective endeavor. Whereas "truth" is always the domain of power.
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In Dangerous Liaison, that "truth", preserved by authorities is Christian morality, presented in the form of violent weddings, patriarchy, blatant social injustice and inequality.
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Today we are protected from "none-truth" by various moral committees of commercial corporations, running our social media or censorship committees established by the authoritarian regimes of most nation-states.
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There are two main points in all of this:
1) storytelling shapes our society.
2) Stories are not created by authorities but by free collectives, like the Madagascar Pirates or #JulianAssange (@StellaAssange) and Wikileaks.
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1) storytelling shapes our society.
2) Stories are not created by authorities but by free collectives, like the Madagascar Pirates or #JulianAssange (@StellaAssange) and Wikileaks.
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I think that's what this and almost all of David's other books are about.
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