But we now know that hunter-gatherers like the Ju/’hoansi did not live constantly on the edge of starvation. Rather, they were usually well nourished; lived longer than people in most farming societies; rarely worked more than fifteen hours a week; and spent the bulk of their time at rest and leisure. We also know that they could do this because they did not routinely store food, cared little for accumulating wealth or status, and worked almost exclusively to meet only their short-term material needs. Where the economic problem insists that we are all cursed to live in the purgatory between our infinite desires and limited means, hunter-gatherers had few material desires, which could be satisfied with a few hours of effort. Their economic life was organized around the presumption of abundance rather than a preoccupation with scarcity. And this being so, there is good reason to believe that because our ancestors hunted and gathered for well over 95 percent of Homo sapiens’ 300,000-year-old history, the assumptions about human nature in the problem of scarcity and our attitudes to work have their roots in farming.

For Jameson, that is, the rationalisation of bourgeois society shattered the social collectivity, giving rise to a nuclear family that would come to occupy the boundary between the public and the private spheres. It is not by accident, therefore, that the entire collection of psychoanalytic dramas - childhood trauma, primal scene fantasies, the Oedipus complex - relied on the historically located institution of the bourgeois family. Indeed, psychoanalysis is completely dependent on the capitalist mode of production for its supply of patients: energies that were distributed over the entire social body came to be invested exclusively in the family, with calamitous outcomes. As cultural critic Michael Venture notes, “In a world where most people do work that is not only unsatisfying but also, with its pressures, deeply unsettling; and in a world where there’s nothing more rare than a place that feels like a community, we load all our needs onto a relationship or expect them to be met by a family. And then we wonder why our relationships and family crack under the load.

Like love and hate, envy and greed are two sides of the same coin. That envy should become greed is perfectly plausible with the shoe on the other foot and deprivation turning into abundance. In both cases, a compromised self-formation makes it extremely difficult to slow down what are compelling - and ultimately destructive - psychic processes.

I have maintained over the course of this book that various forms of inequality reverberate in the subterraneous life of South Africans, and that the major fallout has been the corruption of our relational needs. But is there empirical evidence of such a link between our external and internal worlds?

In the age of globalization — an ad hoc, temp-job, fiercely competitive age — hope is not a fiction. Extreme poverty is being alleviated gradually, unevenly, nonetheless significantly. But as capital rushes around the planet and the idea of permanent work becomes anachronistic, the unpredictability of daily life has a way of grinding down individual promise. Ideally, the government eases some of the instability. Too often, weak government intensifies it and proves better at nourishing corruption than human capability.

The effect of corruption I find most underacknowledged is a contraction not of economic possibility but of our moral universe. In my reporting, I am continually struck by the ethical imaginations of young people, even those in circumstances so desperate that selfishness would be an asset.