The mythological framing of this essay and its theme of good and evil as they appear in economics and war remind me of a great book, Elaine Scarry's The Body in Pain.

This book is an exploration of making and unmaking, where making is civilization as materialized care for pain and discomfort and unmaking is the opposite demonstrated by the document tendency of torturers in war to use benign household items as weapons, thus inverting the structure of civilization.

Here a simple quote to show Scarry's way of appreciating made objects:

> It is almost universally the case in everyday life that the most cherished object is one that has been hand-made by a friend: there is no mystery about this, for the object's material attributes themselves record and memorialize the intensely personal, extraordinary because exclusive, interior feelings of the maker for just this person: This is for you. But anonymous, mass-produced objects contain a collective and equally extraordinary message: Whoever you are, and whether or not I personally like or even know you, in at least this small way, be well.

And here a more in-depth quote from the book's introduction to show the deeper purpose of the book which is to hold up the imagining and construction of material civilization as a primary ethical concern, being the positive inverse of torture and war:

> The vocabulary of "creating," "inventing," "making," "imagining," is not in the twentieth century a morally resonant one: "imagining," for example, is usually described as an ethically neutral or amoral phenomenon; the phrase "material making" is similarly flat in its connotations, and is even (because of its conflation with "materialism") sometimes pronounced with a derisive inflection. But an unspoken question begins to arise in Part One which might be formulated in the following way: given that the deconstruction of creation is present in the structure of one event which is widely recognized as being close to an absolute of immorality (torture), and given that the deconstruction of creation is again present in the structure of a second event regarded as morally problematic by everyone and as radically immoral by some (war), is it not peculiar that the very thing being deconstructed—creation—does not in its intact form have a moral claim on us that is as high as the others' is low, that the action of creating is not, for example, held to be bound up with justice in the way those other events are bound up with injustice, that it (the mental, verbal, or material process of making the world) is not held to be centrally entailed in the elimination of pain as the unmaking of the world is held to be entailed in pain's infliction? The morality of creating cannot, of course, be inferred from the immorality of uncreating, and will instead be shown on its own terms. That we ordinarily perceive it as empty of ethical content is, it will be argued, itself a signal to us of how faulty and fragmentary our understanding of creation is, not only in this respect but in many others. It is not the valorization of making but its accurate description that is crucial, for if it is in fact laden with ethical consequence, then it may be that a firm understanding of what it is will in turn enable us to recognize more quickly what is happening not only in large-scale emergencies like torture or war but in other long-standing dilemmas, such as the inequity of material distribution.