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the value of a unit of currency is not the measure of the value of an object, but the measure of one’s trust in other human beings.
To be in debt was to have a weight placed on you by Death.
A man, being born, is a debt; by his own self he is born to Death, and only when he sacrifices does he redeem himself from Death.
If our lives are on loan, who would actually wish to repay such a debt? To live in debt is to be guilty, incomplete. But completion can only mean annihilation. In this way, the “tribute” of sacrifice could be seen as a kind of interest payment, with the life of the animal substituting temporarily for what’s really owed, which is ourselves—a mere postponement of the inevitable.
When humans did begin to form communities, Nietzsche continues, they necessarily began to imagine their relationship to the community in these terms. The tribe provides them with peace and security. They are therefore in its debt. Obeying its laws is a way of paying it back (“paying your debt to society” again). But this debt, he says, is also paid—here too—in sacrifice: Within the original tribal cooperatives—we’re talking about primeval times—the living generation always acknowledged a legal obligation to the previous generations, and
the tribe […] Here the reigning conviction is that the tribe only exists at all only because of the sacrifices and achievements of its ancestors—and that people have to pay them back with sacrifices and achievements. In this people recognize a debt which keeps steadily growing because these ancestors in their continuing existence as powerful spirits do not stop giving the tribe new advantages and lending them their power. Do they do this for free? But there is no “for free” for those raw and “spiritually destitute” ages. What can people give back to them? Sacrifices (at first as nourishment
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Exchange is all about equivalence. It’s a back-and-forth process involving two sides in which each side gives as good as it gets.
Exchange allows us to cancel out our debts. It gives us a way to call it even: hence, to end the relationship. With vendors, one is usually only pretending to have a relationship at all.
In contrast, relations of explicit hierarchy—that is, relations between at least two parties in which one is considered superior to the other—do not tend to operate by reciprocity at all.
In practice, hierarchy tends to work by a logic of precedent.
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.
Debt is a very specific thing, and it arises from very specific situations. It first requires a relationship between two people who do not consider each other fundamentally different sorts of being, who are at least potential equals, who are equals in those ways that are really important, and who are not currently in a state of equality—but for whom there is some way to set matters straight.
Dionysius warns us that we cannot begin to understand how symbols work until we rid ourselves of the notion that divine things are likely to be beautiful. Images of luminous angels and celestial chariots are only likely to confuse us, since we will be tempted to imagine
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.
