Conjecture

When profit demands an act a group's moral code forbids, the group invents a story that moves the victims outside the code; here the story followed the money rather than leading it. Ansary's ch. 19: "codes of virtue governing how people ought to treat one another usually only applied to members of the group in question"; "The question was only how to define the other." On the Atlantic trade: "The trade was going to happen no matter what, for there was money to be made. But anyone making that money needed to feel that capturing humans and working them to death didn't necessarily mean they were bad people." "Racism provided the bridge": "slavery based explicitly on a notion of race, the notion that people were of essentially different types and some were slaves by nature." This is the null case for C-D4V09E12M1 in Ansary's own words: a story that explains afterwards what incentive was already doing. Clay's step: our own stories need checking for whether they license what our incentives already want.

Stories that make people act