Just as lawyers have spent a thousand years trying to make sense of Roman property concepts, so have philosophers spent centuries trying to understand how it could be possible for us to have a relation of domination over ourselves. The most popular solution - to say that each of us has something called a "mind" and that this is completely separate from something else, which we can call "the body," and that the first thing holds natural domination over the second - flies in the face of just about everything we know about cognitive science. It's obviously untrue, but we continue to hold on to it anyway, for the simple reason that none of our everyday assumptions about property, law, and freedom would make any sense without it.
David Graeber Debt The First 5000 Years (2011) p207
