Sutpen and Buendia:Two doomed races

William Faulkner and Gabriel Garcia Marquez were prophets. Thomas Piketty deciphered them.

Absalom, Absalom!, and One Hundred Years of Solitude, exemplify the cold logic of capitalism. The authors did not have to painstakingly go through the French Tax Records from 1789 to the present to know what they wrote about: They just knew.

The rest of us need proof, just like the Greek mathematicians did, with The Elements of Geometry written by Euclid. Step by step demonstrations, so we  don't lose the argument. We could use a computer, like Thomas Piketty did, but at the end of the day we have to see with our mind's eye, what prophets know without these tools, just like paper, pencil, and eraser, the rest of us need these tools so we can understand. The Scientific Method, is the guide to the unenlightened masses. Knowledge is collective, or it is not knowledge. The human race may be the first conscious species of the Universe.

After finishing Absalom, Absalom! I see the destruction of the Sutpen family. Out of nowhere a Scott-Irish rolls down from the Appalachian Mountains down to the Southern plains. Thomas Sutpen was a half conscious son of a drunk father. He has enough understanding to go to Haiti and father a mixed race son. After the Independence War in that God forsaken land, he leaves with ill gotten wealth, with the intention to start a dynasty in the semi-tropical South of the United States of America.

Sutpen buys land and slaves, with the help of a Methodist Minister, too idealistic to survive that jungle. Eventually he gets a white wife and lets the blind forces of capitalism do the rest.

The story ends like Gabriel Garcia Marquez's, incest and inequality destroy those races.