Debt: The First 5000 Years by David Graeber Book Review
Hello
and HAPPY DAY!
How does slowing down sound to you today?
Would you like to reduce the noise for just
a bit?
Are you ready to make a choice and decide
to listen?
My name is Igor, SF Walker.
I am here to remind people to slow down.
To reduce the noise.
To walk their lives into a natural flow.
Welcome back to the Book of the Week series.
Every week as I read another amazing title,
I share it with the world.
Today we look at: Debt The First 5,000 Years
by David Graeber.
In this video we will look at what is debt,
where does the language of debt come from
and how it applies to everyday life.
History of debt and debt through history.
Is this a question of morality or is it actually
something evil.
Are we actually in debt to the universe and
life itself?
Looking at the links between religion, payment
and the mediation of the sacred and profane
realms by “money.”
How is it that moral obligations between people
come to be thought of as debts and as a result,
end up justifying behavior that would otherwise
seem utterly immoral?
Stick around till the end, as I will
with you a way to explore the mystery of yourself
and your personality, how to find out why
you do the things you do, what are the hidden
motivators behind the scenes, these innate
human needs we are sometimes not even consciously
aware of.
debt • noun
1 a sum of money owed.
2 the state of owing money.
3 a feeling of gratitude for a favour or service.
— Oxford English Dictionary
If you owe the bank a hundred thousand dollars,
the bank owns you.
If you owe the bank a hundred million dollars,
you own the bank.
— American Proverb
Actually, the remarkable thing about the statement
“one has to pay one’s debts” is that
even according to standard economic theory,
it isn’t true.
A lender is supposed to accept a certain degree
of risk.
If all loans, no matter how idiotic, were
still retrievable—if there were no bankruptcy
laws, for instance—the results would be
disastrous.
Sounds like common sense, but the funny thing
is, economically, that’s not how loans are
actually supposed to work.
Financial institutions are supposed to be
ways of directing resources toward profitable
investments.
If a bank were guaranteed to get its money
back, plus interest, no matter what it did,
the whole system wouldn’t work.
The very fact that we don’t know what debt
is, the very flexibility of the concept, is
the basis of its power.
If history shows anything, it is that there’s
no better way to justify relations founded
on violence, to make such relations seem moral,
than by reframing them in the language of
debt—above all, because it immediately makes
it seem that it’s the victim who’s doing
something wrong.
Mafiosi understand this.
So do the commanders of conquering armies.
For thousands of years, violent men have been
able to tell their victims that those victims
owe them something.
If nothing else, they “owe them their lives”
because they haven’t been killed.
For the last five thousand years, with remarkable
regularity, popular insurrections have begun
the same way: with the ritual destruction
of the debt records—tablets, papyri, ledgers,
whatever form they might have taken in any
particular time and place.
After that, rebels usually go after the records
of landholding and tax assessments.
As the great classicist Moses Finley often
liked to say, in the ancient world, all revolutionary
movements had a single program: “Cancel
the debts and redistribute the land.”
Terms like “reckoning” or “redemption”
are only the most obvious, since they’re
taken directly from the language of ancient
finance.
In a larger sense, the same can be said of
“guilt,” “freedom,” “forgiveness,”
and even “sin.”
Arguments about who really owes what to whom
have played a central role in shaping our
basic vocabulary of right and wrong.
After all, to argue with the king, one has
to use the king’s language, whether or not
the initial premises make sense.
If one looks at the history of debt, then,
what one discovers first of all is profound
moral confusion.
Majority of human beings hold simultaneously
that (1) paying back money one has borrowed
is a simple matter of morality, and (2) anyone
in the habit of lending money is evil.
What, precisely, does it mean to say that
our sense of morality and justice is reduced
to the language of a business deal?
What does it mean when we reduce moral obligations
to debts?
What changes when the one turns into the other?
And how do we speak about them when our language
has been so shaped by the market?
Economists generally speak of three functions
of money: medium of exchange, unit of account,
and store of value.
All economic textbooks treat the first as
primary.
Human nature does not drive us to “truck
and barter.”
Rather, it ensures that we are always creating
symbols—such as money itself.
This is how we come to see ourselves in a
cosmos surrounded by invisible forces; as
in debt to the universe.
The “primordial debt,” writes British
sociologist Geoffrey Ingham, “is that owed
by the living to the continuity and durability
of the society that secures their individual
existence.”
In this sense it is not just criminals who
owe a “debt to society”—we are all,
in a certain sense, guilty, even criminals.
In all Indo-European languages, words for
“debt” are synonymous with those for “sin”
or “guilt,” illustrating the links between
religion, payment and the mediation of the
sacred and profane realms by “money.”
Perhaps what the authors of the Brahmanas
were really demonstrating was that, in the
final analysis, our relation with the cosmos
is ultimately nothing like a commercial transaction,
nor could it be.
That is because commercial transactions imply
both equality and separation.
These examples are all about overcoming separation:
you are free from your debt to your ancestors
when you become an ancestor; you are free
from your debt to the sages when you become
a sage, you are free from your debt to humanity
when you act with humanity.
All the more so if one is speaking of the
universe.
If you cannot bargain with the gods because
they already have everything, then you certainly
cannot bargain with the universe, because
the universe is everything— and that everything
necessarily includes yourself.
One could in fact interpret this that the
only way of “freeing oneself” from the
debt was not literally repaying debts, but
rather showing that these debts do not exist
because one is not in fact separate to begin
with, and hence that the very notion of canceling
the debt and achieving a separate, autonomous
existence was ridiculous from the start.
This is a great trap of the twentieth century:
on one side is the logic of the market, where
we like to imagine we all start out as individuals
who don’t owe each other anything.
On the other is the logic of the state, where
we all begin with a debt we can never truly
pay.
We are constantly told that they are opposites
and that between them they contain the only
real human possibilities.
But it’s a false dichotomy.
States created markets.
Markets require states.
Neither could continue without the other,
at least, in anything like the forms we would
recognize today.
Markets aren’t real.
They are mathematical models, created by imagining
a self-contained world where everyone has
exactly the same motivation and the same knowledge
and is engaged in the same self-interested
calculating exchange.
Economists are aware that reality is always
more complicated; but they are also aware
that to come up with a mathematical model,
one always has to make the world into a bit
of a cartoon.
There’s nothing wrong with this.
The problem comes when it enables some (often
these same economists) to declare that anyone
who ignores the dictates of the market shall
surely be punished—or that since we live
in a market system, everything (except government
interference) is based on principles of justice:
that our economic system is one vast network
of reciprocal relations in which, in the end,
the accounts balance and all debts are paid.
How is it that moral obligations between people
come to be thought of as debts and as a result,
end up justifying behavior that would otherwise
seem utterly immoral?
Answer: by making a distinction between commercial
economies and “human economies”—that
is, those where money acts primarily as a
social currency, to create, maintain, or sever
relations between people rather than to purchase
things.
As Rospabé so cogently demonstrated, it is
the peculiar quality of such social currencies
that they are never quite equivalent to people.
If anything, they are a constant reminder
that human beings can never be equivalent
to anything—even, ultimately, to one another.
Historically, war, states, and markets all
tend to feed off one another.
Conquest leads to taxes.
Taxes tend to be ways to create markets, which
are convenient for soldiers and administrators.
In the specific case of Mesopotamia, (origins
of patriarchy) all of this took on a complicated
relation to an explosion of debt that threatened
to turn all human relations—and by extension,
women’s bodies—into potential commodities.
At the same time, it created a horrified reaction
on the part of the (male) winners of the economic
game, who over time felt forced to go to greater
and greater lengths to make clear that their
women could in no sense be bought or sold.
Freedom is the natural faculty to do whatever
one wishes that is not prevented by force
or law.
Slavery is an institution according to the
law of nations whereby one person becomes
private property (dominium) of another, contrary
to nature.
Government was essentially a contract, a kind
of business arrangement, whereby citizens
had voluntarily given up some of their natural
liberties to the sovereign.
Finally, similar ideas have become the basis
of that most basic, dominant institution of
our present economic life: wage labor, which
is, effectively, the renting of our freedom
in the same way that slavery can be conceived
as its sale.
It’s not only our freedoms that we own;
the same logic has come to be applied even
to our own bodies, which are treated, in such
formulations, as really no different than
houses, cars, or furniture.
We own ourselves, therefore outsiders have
no right to trespass on us.
Debt had two possible outcomes.
The first was that the aristocrats could win,
and the poor remain “slaves of the rich”—which
in practice meant that most people would end
up clients of some wealthy patron.
Such states were generally militarily ineffective.
The second was that popular factions could
prevail, institute the usual popular program
of redistribution of lands and safeguards
against debt peonage, and thus create the
basis for a class of free farmers whose children
would, in turn, be free to spend much of their
time training for war.
The modern banking system manufactures money
out of nothing.
The process is perhaps the most astounding
piece of sleight of hand that was ever invented.
Banking was conceived in iniquity and born
in sin.
Bankers own the earth; take it away from them,
but leave them with the power to create credit,
and with the stroke of a pen they will create
enough money to buy it back again.
If you wish to remain slaves of Bankers, and
pay the cost of your own slavery, let them
continue to create deposits.
We could end by putting in a good word for
the non-industrious poor.
At least they aren’t hurting anyone.
Insofar as the time they are taking off from
work is being spent with friends and family,
enjoying and caring for those they love, they’re
probably improving the world more than we
acknowledge.
Maybe we should think of them as pioneers
of a new economic order that would not share
our current one’s penchant for self-annihilation.
It seems to me that we are long overdue for
some kind of Biblical-style Jubilee: one that
would affect both international debt and consumer
debt.
It would be salutary not just because it would
relieve so much genuine human suffering, but
also because it would be our way of reminding
ourselves that money is not ineffable, that
paying one’s debts is not the essence of
morality, that all these things are human
arrangements and that if democracy is to mean
anything, it is the ability to all agree to
arrange things in a different way.
What is a debt, anyway?
A debt is just the perversion of a promise.
It is a promise corrupted by both math and
violence.
If freedom (real freedom) is the ability to
make friends, then it is also, necessarily,
the ability to make real promises.
What sorts of promises might genuinely free
men and women make to one another?
At this point, we can’t even say.
It’s more a question of how we can get to
a place that will allow us to find out.
And the first step in that journey, in turn,
is to accept that in the largest scheme of
things, just as no one has the right to tell
us our true value, no one has the right to
tell us what we truly owe.
And there you have it.
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Love&Respect
