... All of these things have been shaped much more by violence and military operations than we'd ever imagine, to the point where I think we're going to have to start thinking in dramatically new terms to even come up with a realistic idea of what a free society would be like. If "freedom" is the ability to make real promises, then, what sort of promises would free women and men make to one another? How would they be kept? We hardly know what it would even mean to start asking these questions, but in order to find out, we need to clear away a lot of the conceptual legacy of millennia of war, slavery, and debt, that keeps us from being able to find out. That's not the explicit message of the book, but it's one of the things I was really trying to convey.