“In Sanskrit, Hebrew, Aramaic, ‘debt,’ ‘guilt,’ and ‘sin’ are actually the same word. Much of the language of the great religious movements – reckoning, redemption, karmic accounting and the like – are drawn from the language of ancient finance. But that language is always found wanting and inadequate and twisted around into something completely different. It’s as if the great prophets and religious teachers had no choice but to start with that kind of language because it’s the language that existed at the time, but they only adopted it so as to turn it into its opposite: as a way of saying debts are not sacred, but forgiveness of debt, or the ability to wipe out debt, or to realize that debts aren’t real – these are the acts that are truly sacred.
How did this happen? Well, remember I said that the big question in the origins of money is how a sense of obligation – an ‘I owe you one’ – turns into something that can be precisely quantified? Well, the answer seems to be: when there is a potential for violence. If you give someone a pig and they give you a few chickens back you might think they’re a cheapskate, and mock them, but you’re unlikely to come up with a mathematical formula for exactly how cheap you think they are. If someone pokes out your eye in a fight, or kills your brother, that’s when you start saying, “traditional compensation is exactly twenty-seven heifers of the finest quality and if they’re not of the finest quality, this means war!”-David Graeber, author of Debt: The First 5,000 Years
So interesting!
Regarding relationships, exchange and determining value:
In our own lives we so often see human relationship value being quantified- particularly with couples (his salary, her weight, his age, her …etc.). Like it or not, a certain set of metrics is always on the mind.
I don’t know if I subscribe to that Nietzschean idea that ‘all ongoing relations are debts but I think the idea is really interesting. Along those lines, I do wonder how our present-day financial system and our obsession with pricing and assigning precise “value” (also see: The Value of Nothing by Raj Patel) has influenced how we understand fairness and value in interpersonal relationships? …And vice-versa?
Big question. Must I always view this issues through the humanistic lens? Apparently…
related post: What is Money?
P.S. Save your eyes; use Readability.
