Ask HN: Who’s the most underrated person in history?

I don't even see it as pure generosity anymore. There could have been a survival motive behind it. Before Squanto, the Brits who landed at Turtle Island had been treated either with shunning, captivity, or adoption into local tribes. Squanto visited them and taught them technology and government. There are a lot of theories about why he chose to deal with the settlers so differently from the rest of his countrymen but I don't think he was the "noble savage" he's usually portrayed as.

He means the slow, grinding processes that virtually eliminated all natives in the Americas, stealing their lands and lives with phony treaties, disease, and war, leading to a most ridiculous zeitgeist know as Manifest Destiny, wherein we whitewashed colonial genocide of the highest order over generations in the name of freedom, established a country built on slave labor, and then allowed industry and military to establish a virtual high priest sect know as modern finance. With the high priests now failing us every few years, seemingly worse each time, and pestilence all around us, the drama continues to unfold. I think he means something like that, synthesis culture being euphemistic. I suppose that has a nicer ring to it than assimilation.

I bought this fiddle from some dude on eBay call Nero. Shall we play?

By synthesis culture, I meant the period of intense cultural exchange between the Anglos and the Iroquois during the great migration and beyond. Squanto taught the Plymouth crew agriculture, politics, and war along the Indian pattern, and he died a Christian. Roger Williams brought Christianity to the Indians, and Indian culture back to the Anglos. They were probably thousands of praying Indians. By 1636 there was already a pidgin language in the area (“What cheer, netop?”) You can still see the lasting effect of Indian culture on American culture with Iroquois loanwords or translated concepts like caucus, powwow, peace pipe, warpath, etc. Williams was a relative and some even say a mentor to Oliver Cromwell.

Adam Smith realized that the laws of supply and demand apply to wages as well when he observed that Anglos on the North American continent were being paid more for the same kind of work that they did in England. The low labor supply was probably not due to a low population, but because the Indian gardening techniques had allowed the average household to be self-sufficient, taking the average colonist out of the labor market and allowing him to demand a higher wage for the same service.

This Anglo-Iroquois synthesis culture was overwhelmed by the successive waves of Anglos, from southwest England, Scotland, and Ireland, who did not benefit from this cultural exchange. The Plymouth colony was absorbed into the Massachusetts Bay colony after 100 years. But I believe it was pivotal to forming a national identity for the United States, which is why we still referred to the Puritan colony as the formation of America, and not the Roanoke colony, the Jamestown colony, or the Charleston colony, all of which preceded the Puritan colony. I also believe it was a prototype for the dominant form of capitalism over the past 200 years in the United States, which is now receding in favor of older forms like feudalism, in the form of techno-feudalism, and mercantilism in the form of global trade deals.