The Almightier summary

Let’s set the scene in Jerusalem, 2,000 years ago. A wandering carpenter named Yeshua – passionate, radical, and utterly convinced of God’s law. Part of that law was that wealth was a barrier to God’s kingdom, and that he was in Jerusalem to erase the debts that were crushing the poor.

At the heart of Yeshua’s message was the Golden Rule: treat others as you would want to be treated yourself. That principle had echoed through ancient civilizations for millennia, but in Yeshua’s hands it became the cornerstone of his moral revolution. Would you want to lose your land, your livelihood, or be sold into slavery over a debt? No. God’s law demanded something better – compassion, equality, and the forgiveness of crushing debts.

By 25, Cosimo de’ Medici was already a name whispered in Florence’s taverns and marketplaces. His father, Giovanni, had built the Medici Bank into a trusted institution with clients as lofty as the pope, but Cosimo wasn’t content to simply inherit. Over the next 40 years, he transformed the family’s modest business into a European financial powerhouse and effectively ruled Florence as an uncrowned king.

But what set Cosimo apart was how he used his wealth. He turned his private fortune into public magnificence. Inspired by Aristotle’s “Magnificent Man,” he funded libraries, churches, and grand works of art, binding his legacy to Florence’s very architecture.

When Constantinople fell to the Ottomans in 1453, it cut off European trade routes to Asia, forcing them to look for sea routes instead. This marked the dawn of the Age of Exploration, famously driven by “gold, God, and glory.” Wealth and religion had become so intertwined that if riches were seen as a sign of divine favor, then seizing them – by any means – was not only acceptable but righteous.

Columbus’s 1492 return from the Bahamas, filled with tales of gold, ignited a frenzy. Explorers like Hernando de Soto followed, combining military force with relentless extraction. In just a century after Columbus’s arrival, the population of the Americas plummeted from around 50 million to 8 million, driven largely by European diseases and exploitation.

By the eighteenth century, Europe’s money-driven order was showing its cracks. In the Americas, Native populations were being decimated, Africans were enslaved, and at home, inequality was stretching society to its limits. Could it be that greed – once sold as a civilizing force – was leaving deep, lasting damage?

In 1755, the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau claimed as much in his searing critique Discourse on Inequality. A Protestant Calvinist, Rousseau envisioned a society where leaders and citizens shared aligned interests, without fear of being cheated. But the world he saw was built on hoarding wealth, exploiting the masses, and elevating the few at everyone else’s expense. 

After the Revolution, America was broke and unstable. The central government had next to zero authority. There was no power to tax, no strong judiciary, and, most importantly for the wealthy creditor class, no real way to enforce debt collection. Most currency was worthless anyway.

This set the stage for the age-old showdown between creditors and debtors. A popular uprising in Massachusetts known as Shays's Rebellion was put to a violent end, but for the land-owning elite, this was a nightmare. These men hadn’t fought a revolution to lose control of their wealth to mobs of armed farmers. They needed a stronger system to protect their interests. The answer would be the US Constitution.

Meanwhile, in the mid-1800s, Europe was a hotbed of uprisings due to growing inequality. Bold new ideas were sprouting, and one of the loudest voices belonged to 30-year-old Karl Marx, a newspaper editor in Cologne, Germany.

In The Communist Manifesto, Marx described history as one long brawl between classes – the oppressors and the oppressed. Marx’s economic insight was sharp: capital wasn’t money, it was labor. Workers didn’t just produce goods – they produced capital itself. Without them, owners had nothing to invest, no machinery to run, no profits to hoard. The system demeaned the very source of its wealth.

Throughout history, people have stared at inequality and asked the same thing: Can’t we do better? The truth is, we can and we should. Aristotle knew 2,000 years ago that money is a human creation, and if it distorts society, we have both the right and the duty to change it.

That change begins with the oldest rule – the one that takes us full circle: treat others as you’d want to be treated. Centuries of glorifying greed have pulled us far from that simple principle. The belief that unrestrained greed benefits everyone has eroded our sense of mutual reliance. Ironically enough, the reminder is right there on the US dollar – e pluribus unum, “out of many, one.” Working together isn’t ideology; it’s common sense, the foundation of shared prosperity.