Chapter One
ON THE EXPERIENCE OF MORAL CONFUSION
Looting of public resourses.
poor --> ritch. By depth
Dictator borrows, poor people pays debt.
Surely one needs to pay one's debts? Folfiling obligations?
Creditors and debters (master and slave)
Chapter Two
THE MYTH OF BARTER
Money is medium of exchange. More efficient then barter.
bad barter leads to drop it to another
good leads to brag and pride
With BARTER there is no defined quantity and division.
Chapter Three
PRIMORDIAL DEBTS
Paper is I-ow-you.
Slave Mentality. Minor luctiories, new takes, supperficial ideas (for consumer demand) to profit from.
Taxes debt to society?
shells, hides, feathers, gold
languege, habbits, learned from other people
debt to parents(cildren), society, government(taxex), nature, god, universe?
Who has right to speask for humanity, society, god?
Or let us look at the other side of the equation. Even if it is possible to imagine ourselves as standing in a position of absolute debt to the cosmos, or to humanity, the next question becomes: Who exactly has a right to speak for the cosmos, or humanity, to tell us how that debt must be repaid? If there’s anything more preposterous than claiming to stand apart from the entire universe so as to enter into negotiations with it, it is claiming to speak for the other side.
If one were looking for the ethos for an individualistic society such as our own, one way to do it might well be to say: we all owe an infinite debt to humanity, society, nature, or the cosmos (however one prefers to frame it), but no one else could possibly tell us how we are to pay it. This at least would be intellectually consistent. If so, it would actually be possible to see almost all systems of established authority—religion, morality, politics, economics, and the criminal-justice system—as so many different fraudulent ways to presume to calculate what cannot be calculated, to claim the authority to tell us how some aspect of that unlimited debt ought to be repaid. Human freedom would then be our ability to decide for ourselves how we want to do so.
Let me return again to that word, “society.” The reason that it seems like such a simple, self-evident concept is because we mostly use it as a synonym for “nation.” After all, when Americans speak of paying their debt to society, they are not thinking of their responsibilities to people who live in Sweden. It’s only the modern state, with its elaborate border controls and social policies, that enables us to imagine “society” in this way, as a single bounded entity. This is why projecting that notion backwards into Vedic or Medieval times will always be deceptive, even though we don’t really have another word.
These are also the intellectual and political circles that shaped the thought of Emile Durkheim, the founder of the discipline of sociology that we know today, who in a way did Comte one better by arguing that all gods in all religions are always already projections of society—so an explicit religion of society would not even be necessary. All religions, for Durkheim, are simply ways of recognizing our mutual dependence on one another, a dependence that affects us in a million ways that we are never entirely aware of. “God” and “society” are ultimately the same.
Chapter Four
CRUELTY AND REDEMPTION
Chapter Five
A BRIEF TREATISE ON THE MORAL GROUNDS OF ECONOMIC RELATIONS
Communism - common property.
It’s not just directions. Conversation is a domain particularly disposed to communism. Lies, insults, put-downs, and other sorts of verbal aggression are important—but they derive most of their power from the shared assumption that people do not ordinarily act this way: an insult does not sting unless one assumes that others will normally be considerate of one’s feelings, and it’s impossible to lie to someone who does not assume you would ordinarily tell the truth. When we genuinely wish to break off amicable relations with someone, we stop speaking to them entirely.
A debt, then, is just an exchange that has not been brought to completion.
... It’s precisely when the money changes hands, when the debt is cancelled, that equality is restored and both parties can walk away and have nothing further to do with each other.
, “From your past debts I shall free you.”
“What can I do but thank you?” Panurge replies.
Chapter Six
GAMES WITH SEX AND DEATH
Most of us don’t like to think much about violence. Those lucky enough to live relatively comfortable, secure lives in modern cities tend either to act as if it does not exist or, when reminded that it does, to write off the larger world “out there” as a terrible, brutal place, with not much that can be done to help it. Either instinct allows us not to have to think about the degree to which even our own daily existence is defined by violence or at least the threat of violence (as I’ve often noted, think about what would happen if you were to insist on your right to enter a university library without a properly validated ID), and to overstate the importance—or at least the frequency—of things like war, terrorism, and violent crime. The role of force in providing the framework for human relations is simply more explicit in what we call “traditional societies”—even if in many, actual physical assault by one human on another occurs less often than in our own.
Reduces people to commodities(facebook).
Chapter Seven
HONOR AND DEGRADATION
Borowing to persuage political desires.
As for dominium, the word is derived from dominus, meaning “master” or “slave-owner,” but ultimately from domus, meaning “house”or “household.” It’s of course related to the English term “domestic,” which even now can be used either to mean “pertaining to private life,” or to refer to a servant who cleans the house. Domus overlaps somewhat in meaning with familia, “family”—but, as proponents of “family values” might be interested to know, familia itself ultimately derives from the word famulus, meaning “slave.” A family was originally all those people under the domestic authority of a paterfamilias, and that authority was, in early Roman law at least, conceived as absolute.101 A man did not have total power over his wife, since she was still to some degree under the protection of her own father, but his children, slaves, and other dependents were his to do with as he wanted—at least in early Roman law, he was perfectly free to whip, torture, or sell them. A father could even execute his children, provided he found them to have committed capital crimes.102 With his slaves, he didn’t even need that excuse.
Dominus and slave.
Relation of power.
One which has power and one which do not.
English word “free,” for instance, is derived from a German root meaning “friend,” since to be free meant to be able to make friends, to keep promises, to live within a community of equals. This is why freed slaves in Rome became citizens: to be free, by definition, meant to be anchored in a civic community, with all the rights and responsibilities that this entailed.
Medieval commentators immediately noticed the problem here. But wouldn’t this mean that everyone is free? After all, even slaves are free to do absolutely anything they’re actually permitted to do. To say a slave is free (except insofar as he isn’t) is a bit like saying the earth is square (except insofar as it is round), or that the sun is blue (except insofar as it is yellow), or, again, that we have an absolute right to do anything we wish with our chainsaw (except those things that we can’t.)
In fact, the definition introduces all sorts of complications. If freedom is natural, then surely slavery is unnatural, but if freedom and slavery are just matters of degree, then, logically, would not all restrictions on freedom be to some degree unnatural? Would not that imply that society, social rules, in fact even property rights, are unnatural as well? This is precisely what many Roman jurists did conclude—that is, when they did venture to comment on such abstract matters, which was only rarely
My right to free speech is others’ obligation not to punish me for speaking; my right to a trial by a jury of my peers is the responsibility of the government to maintain a system of jury duty. The problem is just the same as it was with property rights: when we are talking about obligations owed by everyone in the entire world, it’s difficult to think about it that way. It’s much easier to speak of “having” rights and freedoms. Still, if freedom is basically our right to own things, or to treat things as if we own them, then what would it mean to “own” a freedom—wouldn’t it have to mean that our right to own property is itself a form of property? That does seem unnecessarily convoluted. What possible reason would one have to want to define it this way?
Chapter Eight
CREDIT VERSUS BULLION
ONE MIGHT WELL ASK: If our political and legal ideas really are founded on the logic of slavery, then how did we ever eliminate slavery? Of course, a cynic might argue that we haven’t; we’ve just relabeled it.
Chapter Nine
THE AXIAL AGE
Pythagoras (570–495 bc), the Buddha (563–483 bc), and Confucius (551–479 bc), were all alive at exactly the same time, and that Greece, India, and China, in that period, all saw a sudden efflorescence of debate between contending intellectual schools, each group apparently, unaware of the others’ existence.
What was the connection? We might start by asking: What is a coin? The normal definition is that a coin is a piece of valuable metal, shaped into a standardized unit, with some emblem or mark inscribed to authenticate it. The world’s first coins appear to have been created within the kingdom of Lydia, in western Anatolia (now Turkey), sometime around 600 bc.5 These first Lydian coins were basically just round lumps of electrum—a gold-silver alloy that occurred naturally in the nearby Pactolus River—that had been heated, then hammered with some kind of insignia. The very first, stamped only with a few letters, appear to have been manufactured by ordinary jewelers, but these disappeared almost instantly, replaced by coins manufactured in a newly established royal mint. Greek cities on the Anatolian coast soon began to strike their own coins, and they came to be adopted in Greece itself; the same thing occurred in the Persian Empire after it absorbed Lydia in 547 bc.
Chapter Ten
THE MIDDLE AGES
Mohammed himself had begun his adult life as a merchant; and no Islamic thinker ever treated the honest pursuit of profit as itself intrinsically immoral or inimical to faith. Neither did the prohibitions against usury—which for the most part were scrupulously enforced, even in the case of commercial loans—in any sense mitigate against the growth of commerce, or even the development of complex credit instruments.69 To the contrary, the early centuries of the Caliphate saw an immediate efflorescence in both.
Chapter Twelve
(1971–The Beginning of Something Yet to Be Determined)
I would like, then, to end by putting in a good word for the non-industrious poor.41 At least they aren’t hurting anyone. Insofar as the time they are taking time 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-destruction.
At this point, however, the principle has been exposed as a flagrant lie. As it turns out, we don’t “all” have to pay our debts. Only some of us do. Nothing would be more important than to wipe the slate clean for everyone, mark a break with our accustomed morality, and start again.
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.
ON THE EXPERIENCE OF MORAL CONFUSION
Looting of public resourses.
poor --> ritch. By depth
Dictator borrows, poor people pays debt.
Surely one needs to pay one's debts? Folfiling obligations?
Creditors and debters (master and slave)
Chapter Two
THE MYTH OF BARTER
Money is medium of exchange. More efficient then barter.
bad barter leads to drop it to another
good leads to brag and pride
With BARTER there is no defined quantity and division.
Chapter Three
PRIMORDIAL DEBTS
Paper is I-ow-you.
Slave Mentality. Minor luctiories, new takes, supperficial ideas (for consumer demand) to profit from.
Taxes debt to society?
shells, hides, feathers, gold
languege, habbits, learned from other people
debt to parents(cildren), society, government(taxex), nature, god, universe?
Who has right to speask for humanity, society, god?
Or let us look at the other side of the equation. Even if it is possible to imagine ourselves as standing in a position of absolute debt to the cosmos, or to humanity, the next question becomes: Who exactly has a right to speak for the cosmos, or humanity, to tell us how that debt must be repaid? If there’s anything more preposterous than claiming to stand apart from the entire universe so as to enter into negotiations with it, it is claiming to speak for the other side.
If one were looking for the ethos for an individualistic society such as our own, one way to do it might well be to say: we all owe an infinite debt to humanity, society, nature, or the cosmos (however one prefers to frame it), but no one else could possibly tell us how we are to pay it. This at least would be intellectually consistent. If so, it would actually be possible to see almost all systems of established authority—religion, morality, politics, economics, and the criminal-justice system—as so many different fraudulent ways to presume to calculate what cannot be calculated, to claim the authority to tell us how some aspect of that unlimited debt ought to be repaid. Human freedom would then be our ability to decide for ourselves how we want to do so.
Let me return again to that word, “society.” The reason that it seems like such a simple, self-evident concept is because we mostly use it as a synonym for “nation.” After all, when Americans speak of paying their debt to society, they are not thinking of their responsibilities to people who live in Sweden. It’s only the modern state, with its elaborate border controls and social policies, that enables us to imagine “society” in this way, as a single bounded entity. This is why projecting that notion backwards into Vedic or Medieval times will always be deceptive, even though we don’t really have another word.
These are also the intellectual and political circles that shaped the thought of Emile Durkheim, the founder of the discipline of sociology that we know today, who in a way did Comte one better by arguing that all gods in all religions are always already projections of society—so an explicit religion of society would not even be necessary. All religions, for Durkheim, are simply ways of recognizing our mutual dependence on one another, a dependence that affects us in a million ways that we are never entirely aware of. “God” and “society” are ultimately the same.
Chapter Four
CRUELTY AND REDEMPTION
Chapter Five
A BRIEF TREATISE ON THE MORAL GROUNDS OF ECONOMIC RELATIONS
Communism - common property.
It’s not just directions. Conversation is a domain particularly disposed to communism. Lies, insults, put-downs, and other sorts of verbal aggression are important—but they derive most of their power from the shared assumption that people do not ordinarily act this way: an insult does not sting unless one assumes that others will normally be considerate of one’s feelings, and it’s impossible to lie to someone who does not assume you would ordinarily tell the truth. When we genuinely wish to break off amicable relations with someone, we stop speaking to them entirely.
A debt, then, is just an exchange that has not been brought to completion.
... It’s precisely when the money changes hands, when the debt is cancelled, that equality is restored and both parties can walk away and have nothing further to do with each other.
, “From your past debts I shall free you.”
“What can I do but thank you?” Panurge replies.
Chapter Six
GAMES WITH SEX AND DEATH
Most of us don’t like to think much about violence. Those lucky enough to live relatively comfortable, secure lives in modern cities tend either to act as if it does not exist or, when reminded that it does, to write off the larger world “out there” as a terrible, brutal place, with not much that can be done to help it. Either instinct allows us not to have to think about the degree to which even our own daily existence is defined by violence or at least the threat of violence (as I’ve often noted, think about what would happen if you were to insist on your right to enter a university library without a properly validated ID), and to overstate the importance—or at least the frequency—of things like war, terrorism, and violent crime. The role of force in providing the framework for human relations is simply more explicit in what we call “traditional societies”—even if in many, actual physical assault by one human on another occurs less often than in our own.
Reduces people to commodities(facebook).
Chapter Seven
HONOR AND DEGRADATION
Borowing to persuage political desires.
As for dominium, the word is derived from dominus, meaning “master” or “slave-owner,” but ultimately from domus, meaning “house”or “household.” It’s of course related to the English term “domestic,” which even now can be used either to mean “pertaining to private life,” or to refer to a servant who cleans the house. Domus overlaps somewhat in meaning with familia, “family”—but, as proponents of “family values” might be interested to know, familia itself ultimately derives from the word famulus, meaning “slave.” A family was originally all those people under the domestic authority of a paterfamilias, and that authority was, in early Roman law at least, conceived as absolute.101 A man did not have total power over his wife, since she was still to some degree under the protection of her own father, but his children, slaves, and other dependents were his to do with as he wanted—at least in early Roman law, he was perfectly free to whip, torture, or sell them. A father could even execute his children, provided he found them to have committed capital crimes.102 With his slaves, he didn’t even need that excuse.
Dominus and slave.
Relation of power.
One which has power and one which do not.
English word “free,” for instance, is derived from a German root meaning “friend,” since to be free meant to be able to make friends, to keep promises, to live within a community of equals. This is why freed slaves in Rome became citizens: to be free, by definition, meant to be anchored in a civic community, with all the rights and responsibilities that this entailed.
Medieval commentators immediately noticed the problem here. But wouldn’t this mean that everyone is free? After all, even slaves are free to do absolutely anything they’re actually permitted to do. To say a slave is free (except insofar as he isn’t) is a bit like saying the earth is square (except insofar as it is round), or that the sun is blue (except insofar as it is yellow), or, again, that we have an absolute right to do anything we wish with our chainsaw (except those things that we can’t.)
In fact, the definition introduces all sorts of complications. If freedom is natural, then surely slavery is unnatural, but if freedom and slavery are just matters of degree, then, logically, would not all restrictions on freedom be to some degree unnatural? Would not that imply that society, social rules, in fact even property rights, are unnatural as well? This is precisely what many Roman jurists did conclude—that is, when they did venture to comment on such abstract matters, which was only rarely
My right to free speech is others’ obligation not to punish me for speaking; my right to a trial by a jury of my peers is the responsibility of the government to maintain a system of jury duty. The problem is just the same as it was with property rights: when we are talking about obligations owed by everyone in the entire world, it’s difficult to think about it that way. It’s much easier to speak of “having” rights and freedoms. Still, if freedom is basically our right to own things, or to treat things as if we own them, then what would it mean to “own” a freedom—wouldn’t it have to mean that our right to own property is itself a form of property? That does seem unnecessarily convoluted. What possible reason would one have to want to define it this way?
Chapter Eight
CREDIT VERSUS BULLION
ONE MIGHT WELL ASK: If our political and legal ideas really are founded on the logic of slavery, then how did we ever eliminate slavery? Of course, a cynic might argue that we haven’t; we’ve just relabeled it.
Chapter Nine
THE AXIAL AGE
Pythagoras (570–495 bc), the Buddha (563–483 bc), and Confucius (551–479 bc), were all alive at exactly the same time, and that Greece, India, and China, in that period, all saw a sudden efflorescence of debate between contending intellectual schools, each group apparently, unaware of the others’ existence.
What was the connection? We might start by asking: What is a coin? The normal definition is that a coin is a piece of valuable metal, shaped into a standardized unit, with some emblem or mark inscribed to authenticate it. The world’s first coins appear to have been created within the kingdom of Lydia, in western Anatolia (now Turkey), sometime around 600 bc.5 These first Lydian coins were basically just round lumps of electrum—a gold-silver alloy that occurred naturally in the nearby Pactolus River—that had been heated, then hammered with some kind of insignia. The very first, stamped only with a few letters, appear to have been manufactured by ordinary jewelers, but these disappeared almost instantly, replaced by coins manufactured in a newly established royal mint. Greek cities on the Anatolian coast soon began to strike their own coins, and they came to be adopted in Greece itself; the same thing occurred in the Persian Empire after it absorbed Lydia in 547 bc.
Chapter Ten
THE MIDDLE AGES
Mohammed himself had begun his adult life as a merchant; and no Islamic thinker ever treated the honest pursuit of profit as itself intrinsically immoral or inimical to faith. Neither did the prohibitions against usury—which for the most part were scrupulously enforced, even in the case of commercial loans—in any sense mitigate against the growth of commerce, or even the development of complex credit instruments.69 To the contrary, the early centuries of the Caliphate saw an immediate efflorescence in both.
Chapter Twelve
(1971–The Beginning of Something Yet to Be Determined)
I would like, then, to end by putting in a good word for the non-industrious poor.41 At least they aren’t hurting anyone. Insofar as the time they are taking time 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-destruction.
At this point, however, the principle has been exposed as a flagrant lie. As it turns out, we don’t “all” have to pay our debts. Only some of us do. Nothing would be more important than to wipe the slate clean for everyone, mark a break with our accustomed morality, and start again.
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.
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