(Excerpt from Wanting by Luke Burgis)
As Peter Thiel points out in Zero to One, Karl Marx and William Shakespeare had very different views about why people fight. Marx thought conflict happens because people are different. People fight because they have different goals, desires, and ideas due to differences in the material goods they possess. In this framework, we would expect people who have the same material goods to fight less. Shakespeare’s view seems to be exactly the opposite: people fight when they are similar, like the Capulets and Montagues in Romeo and Juliet.