And so here and ever since, an unnatural thing happened: Animal skin was put on our human skin. We feel (much) better that way. This desire to be shielded by something, a desire to own (to protect oneself through ownership), to protect oneself (not to be alone in this world, not to be naked), to not be so easily wounded, led to our losing our freedom and becoming dependent on things because we started to need them. This is beautifully captured in a quote from Rousseau: The savage breathes nothing but liberty and repose; he desires only to live and be at leisure; and the ataraxia of the Stoic does not approach his indifference for every other object. The citizen, on the contrary, toils, bestirs and torments himself without end, to obtain employments which are still more laborious; he labors on till his death, he even hastens it, in order to put himself in a condition to live, or renounces life to acquire immortality... For such in reality is the true cause of all those differences: the savage lives in himself; the man of society, always out of himself, cannot live but in the opinions of others, and it is, if I may say so, from their judgment alone that he derives the sentiment of his own existence. This was similar to Enkidu—he also lived like an animal; he lacked nothing. Shamhat awoke insufficiency within him. In the city he became a citizen; he tasted beer, which is unnatural, it is not found in the natural state of nature.

Sedlacek, Tomas: Economics of Good and Evil (2011)

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