## Metadata - Author: [[David Graeber]] - Full Title: Debt - Category: #books ## Highlights - 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. ([Location 1423](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00513DGIO&location=1423)) - Freuchen tells how one day, after coming home hungry from an unsuccessful walrus-hunting expedition, he found one of the successful hunters dropping off several hundred pounds of meat. He thanked him profusely. The man objected indignantly: “Up in our country we are human!” said the hunter. “And since we are human we help each other. We don’t like to hear anybody say thanks for that. What I get today you may get tomorrow. Up here we say that by gifts one makes slaves and by whips one makes dogs.” ([Location 1611](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00513DGIO&location=1611)) - Resistance, in the ancient Middle East, was always less a politics of rebellion than a politics of exodus, of melting away with one’s flocks and families—often before both were taken away.49 ([Location 3826](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00513DGIO&location=3826)) - Assyrian habit of veiling was not widely adopted in the Middle East, but it was adopted in Greece. As much as it flies in the face of our stereotypes about the origins of “Western” freedoms, women in democratic Athens, unlike those of Persia or Syria, were expected to wear veils when they ventured out in public.64 ([Location 3946](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00513DGIO&location=3946)) - On the one hand, a loan implies no ongoing responsibilities on the part of the creditor. On the other, as I have continually emphasized, a loan does assume a certain formal, legal equality between contractor and contractee. It assumes that they are, at least in some ways on some level, fundamentally the same kind of person. ([Location 4019](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00513DGIO&location=4019)) - If one looks across the expanse of history, one cannot help but notice a curious sense of identification between the most exalted and the most degraded; particularly, between emperors and kings, and slaves. Many kings surround themselves with slaves, appoint slave ministers—there have even been, as with the Mamluks in Egypt, actual dynasties of slaves. Kings surround themselves with slaves for the same reason that they surround themselves with eunuchs: because the slaves and criminals have no families or friends, no possibility of other loyalties—or at least that, in principle, they shouldn’t. But in a way, kings should really be like that too. As many an African proverb emphasizes: a proper king has no relatives either, or at least, he acts as if he does not.128 In other words, the king and slave are mirror images, in that unlike normal human beings who are defined by their commitments to others, they are defined only by relations of power. They are as close to perfectly isolated, alienated beings as one can possibly become. At this point we can finally see what’s really at stake in our peculiar habit of defining ourselves simultaneously as master and slave, reduplicating the most brutal aspects of the ancient household in our very concept of ourselves, as masters of our freedoms, or as owners of our very selves. It is the only way that we can imagine ourselves as completely isolated beings. There is a direct line from the new Roman conception of liberty—not as the ability to form mutual relationships with others, but as the kind of absolute power of “use and abuse” over the conquered chattel who make up the bulk of a wealthy Roman man’s household—to the strange fantasies of liberal philosophers like Hobbes, Locke, and Smith, about the origins of human society in some collection of thirty- or forty-year-old males who seem to have sprung from the earth fully formed, then have to decide whether to kill each other or begin to swap beaver pelts. ([Location 4416](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00513DGIO&location=4416)) - The truly remarkable thing, if one consults the historical record, is that slavery has been eliminated—or effectively eliminated—many times in human history. In Europe, for instance, the institution largely vanished in the centuries following the collapse of the Roman empire—an historical achievement rarely recognized by those of us used to referring to these events as the beginning of “the Dark Ages. ([Location 4454](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00513DGIO&location=4454)) - What’s more, the demise of ancient slavery was not limited to Europe. Remarkably, right around the same time—in the years around 600 ad—we find almost exactly the same thing happening in India and China, where, over the course of centuries, amidst much unrest and confusion, chattel slavery largely ceased to exist. What all this suggests is that moments of historical opportunity—moments when meaningful change is possible—follow a distinct, even a cyclical pattern, one that has long been far more coordinated across geographical space than we would ever have imagined. There is a shape to the past, and it is only by understanding it that we can begin to have a sense of the historical opportunities that exist in the present. ([Location 4467](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00513DGIO&location=4467)) - In the case of money, one event stands out above all others: the invention of coinage. Coinage appears to have arisen independently in three different places, almost simultaneously: on the Great Plain of northern China, in the Ganges river valley of northeast India, and in the lands surrounding the Aegean Sea, in each case, between roughly 600 and 500 bc. ([Location 4475](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00513DGIO&location=4475)) - The origins of interest will forever remain obscure, since they preceded the invention of writing. The terminology for interest in most ancient languages is derived from some word for “offspring,” causing some to speculate that it originates in loans of livestock, but this seems a bit literal-minded. More likely, the first widespread interest-bearing loans were commercial: temples and palaces would forward wares to merchants and commercial agents, who would then trade them in nearby mountain kingdoms or on trading expeditions overseas.8 ([Location 4531](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00513DGIO&location=4531)) - In fact, the entire Roman empire, at its height, could be understood as a vast machine for the extraction of precious metals and their coining and distribution to the military—combined with taxation policies designed to encourage conquered populations to adopt coins in their everyday transactions. ([Location 4837](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00513DGIO&location=4837)) - if one relegates a certain social space simply to the selfish acquisition of material things, it is almost inevitable that soon someone else will come to set aside another domain in which to preach that, from the perspective of ultimate values, material things are unimportant; that selfishness—or even the self—are illusory, and that to give is better than to receive. If nothing else, it is surely significant that all the Axial Age religions emphasized the importance of charity, a concept that had barely existed before. Pure greed and pure generosity are complementary concepts; neither could really be imagined without the other; both could only arise in institutional contexts that insisted on such pure and single-minded behavior; and both seem to have appeared together wherever impersonal, physical, cash money also appeared on the scene. ([Location 5252](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00513DGIO&location=5252)) - When coins go out of circulation, after all, the metal doesn’t simply disappear. In the Middle Ages—and this seems to have been true across Eurasia—the vast majority of it ended up in religious establishments, churches, monasteries, and temples, either stockpiled in hoards and treasuries or gilded onto or cast into altars, sanctums, and sacred instruments. Above all, it was shaped into images of gods. As a result, those rulers who did try to put an Axial Age–style coinage system back into circulation—invariably, to fund some project of military expansion—often had to pursue self-consciously anti-religious policies in order to do so. Probably the most notorious was one Harsa, who ruled Kashmir from 1089 to 1101 ad, who is said to have appointed an officer called the “Superintendent for the Destruction of the Gods.” According to later histories, Harsa employed leprous monks to systematically desecrate divine images with urine and excrement, thus neutralizing their power, before dragging them off to be melted down.9 He is said to have destroyed more than four thousand Buddhist establishments before being betrayed and killed, the last of his dynasty—and his miserable fate was long held out as an example of where the revival of the old ways was likely to lead one in the end. ([Location 5342](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00513DGIO&location=5342)) - Politically, it is never a particularly good idea to first tell people they are your equals, and then humiliate and degrade them. This is presumably why peasant insurrections, from Chiapas to Japan, have so regularly aimed to wipe out debts, rather than focus on more structural issues like caste systems, or even slavery.20 The British Raj discovered this to their occasional chagrin when they used debt peonage—superimposed on the caste system—as the basis of their labor system in colonial India. Perhaps the paradigmatic popular insurrection was the Deccan riots of 1875, when indebted farmers rose up to seize and systematically destroy the account books of local money-lenders. Debt peonage, it would appear, is far more likely to inspire outrage and collective action than is a system premised on pure inequality. ([Location 5417](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00513DGIO&location=5417)) - There were decades in Chinese history when the rate of recorded peasant uprisings was roughly 1.8 per hour. ([Location 5439](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00513DGIO&location=5439)) - While markets are ways of exchanging goods through the medium of money—historically, ways for those with a surplus of grain to acquire candles and vice versa (in economic shorthand, C-M-C’, for commodity-money-other commodity)—capitalism is first and foremost the art of using money to get more money (M-C-M’). Normally, the easiest way to do this is by establishing some kind of formal or de facto monopoly. For this reason, capitalists, whether merchant princes, financiers, or industrialists, invariably try to ally themselves with political authorities to limit the freedom of the market, so as to make it easier for them to do so.27 From this perspective, China was for most of its history the ultimate anti-capitalist market state.28 Unlike later European princes, Chinese rulers systematically refused to team up with would-be Chinese capitalists (who always existed). Instead, like their officials, they saw them as destructive parasites—though, unlike the usurers, ones whose fundamentally selfish and antisocial motivations could still be put to use in certain ways. In Confucian terms, merchants were like soldiers. Those drawn to a career in the military were assumed to be driven largely by a love of violence. As individuals, they were not good people; but they were also necessary to defend the frontiers. ([Location 5476](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00513DGIO&location=5476)) - exchange, unless it’s an instantaneous cash transaction, creates debts. Debts linger over time. If you imagine all human relations as exchange, then insofar as people do have ongoing relations with one another, those relations are laced with debt and sin. The only way out is to annihilate the debt, but then social relations vanish too. ([Location 5617](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00513DGIO&location=5617)) - According to one famous Hindu myth, two gods, the brothers Kartikeya and Ganesha, had a quarrel over who should be the first to marry. Their mother Parvati suggested a contest: the winner would be the one to most quickly circle the entire universe. Kartikeya set off on the back of a giant peacock. It took him three years to transverse the limits of the cosmos. Ganesha bided his time, then, finally, walked in a circle around his mother, remarking, “You are the universe to me. ([Location 5635](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00513DGIO&location=5635)) - any system of exchange is always necessarily founded on something else, something that, in its social manifestation at least, is ultimately communism. With all those things that we treat as eternal, that we assume will always be there—our mother’s love, true friendship, sociality, humanity, belonging, the existence of the cosmos—no calculation is necessary, or even ultimately possible; insofar as there is give and take, they follow completely different principles. What, then, happens to such absolute and unlimited phenomena when one tries to imagine the world as a set of transactions—as exchange? Generally, one of two things. We either ignore or deify them. (Mothers, and caregiving women in general, are a classic case in point.) Or we do both. ([Location 5640](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00513DGIO&location=5640)) - The Middle Ages were marked by a general move toward abstraction: real gold and silver ended up largely in churches, monasteries, and temples, money became virtual again, and at the same time, the tendency everywhere was to set up overarching moral institutions meant to regulate the process and, in particular, to establish certain protections for debtors. ([Location 5655](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00513DGIO&location=5655)) - as the Song came under increasing military pressure, the temptation to simply print money with little or no backup became overwhelming—and, moreover, Chinese governments were rarely completely willing to accept their own paper money for tax purposes. Combine this with the fact that the bills were worthless outside China, and it’s rather surprising that the system worked at all. Certainly, inflation was a constant problem and the money would have to be recalled and reissued. Occasionally the whole system would break down, but then people would resort to their own expedients: “privately issued tea checks, noodle checks, bamboo tallies, wine tallies, etc.”56 Still, the Mongols, who ruled China from 1271 to 1368 ad, chose to maintain the system, and it was only abandoned in the seventeenth century. ([Location 5694](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00513DGIO&location=5694)) - the centuries when paper money was in use are usually considered the most economically dynamic in Chinese history. ([Location 5703](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00513DGIO&location=5703)) - terms like “fiat money,” however common, are deceptive. Almost all of the new forms of paper money that emerged were not originally created by governments at all; they were simply ways of recognizing and expanding the use of credit instruments that emerged from everyday economic transactions. ([Location 5706](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00513DGIO&location=5706)) - If it was only China that developed paper money in the Middle Ages, this was largely because only in China was there a government large and powerful enough, but also, sufficiently suspicious of its mercantile classes, to feel it had to take charge of such operations. ([Location 5708](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00513DGIO&location=5708)) - Since people who live in Western Europe have so long been in the habit of thinking of Islam as the very definition of “the East,” it’s easy to forget that, from the perspective of any other great tradition, the difference between Christianity and Islam is almost negligible. ([Location 5720](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00513DGIO&location=5720)) - From a world-historical perspective, it seems much more sensible to see Judaism, Christianity, and Islam as three different manifestations of the same great Western intellectual tradition, which for most of human history has centered on Mesopotamia and the Levant, extending into Europe as far as Greece and into Africa as far as Egypt, ([Location 5726](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00513DGIO&location=5726)) - for most of the Middle Ages, Islam was not only the core of Western civilization; it was its expansive edge, working its way into India, expanding in Africa and Europe, sending missionaries and winning converts across the Indian Ocean. ([Location 5735](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00513DGIO&location=5735)) - The king once summoned Nasruddin to court. “Tell me,” said the king, “you are a mystic, a philosopher, a man of unconventional understandings. I have become interested in the issue of value. It’s an interesting philosophical question. How does one establish the true worth of a person, or an object? Take me for example. If I were to ask you to estimate my value, what would you say?” “Oh,” Nasruddin said, “I’d say about two hundred dinars.” The emperor was flabbergasted. “What?! But this belt I’m wearing is worth two hundred dinars!” “I know,” said Nasruddin. “Actually, I was taking the value of the belt into consideration. ([Location 5758](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00513DGIO&location=5758)) - Islamic law took aim at just about all the most notorious abuses of earlier, Axial Age societies. Slavery through kidnapping, judicial punishment, debt, and the exposure or sale of children, even through the voluntary sale of one’s own person—all were forbidden, or rendered unenforceable.67 Likewise with all the other forms of debt peonage that had loomed over the heads of poor Middle Eastern farmers and their families since the dawn of recorded history. Finally, Islam strictly forbade usury, which it interpreted to mean any arrangement in which money or a commodity was lent at interest, for any purpose whatsoever. ([Location 5789](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00513DGIO&location=5789)) - The great urban civilizations of the Middle East had always been dominated by a de facto alliance between administrators and merchants, both of whom kept the rest of the population either in debt peonage or in constant peril of falling into it. In converting to Islam, the commercial classes, so long the arch-villains in the eyes of ordinary farmers and townsfolk, effectively agreed to change sides, abandon all their most hated practices, and become instead the leaders of a society that now defined itself against the state. It was possible because from the beginning, Islam had a positive view toward commerce. 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. ([Location 5798](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00513DGIO&location=5798)) - As Pierre Bourdieu was later to point out in describing a similar economy of trust in contemporary Algeria: it’s quite possible to turn honor into money, almost impossible to convert money into honor. ([Location 5843](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00513DGIO&location=5843)) - Over the course of the Middle Ages, the Indian Ocean effectively became a Muslim lake. Muslim traders appear to have played a key role in establishing the principle that kings and their armies should keep their quarrels on dry land; the seas were to be a zone of peaceful commerce. ([Location 5847](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00513DGIO&location=5847)) - In Islamic society, the merchant became not just a respected figure, but a kind of paragon: like the warrior, a man of honor able to pursue far-flung adventures; unlike him, able to do so in a fashion damaging to no one. ([Location 5856](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00513DGIO&location=5856)) - One much-repeated story held that the Prophet himself had refused to force merchants to lower prices during a shortage in the city of Medina, on the grounds that doing so would be sacrilegious, since, in a free-market situation, “prices depend on the will of God.”82 Most legal scholars interpreted Mohammed’s decision to mean that any government interference in market mechanisms should be considered similarly sacrilegious, since markets were designed by God to regulate themselves. ([Location 5882](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00513DGIO&location=5882)) - many of the specific arguments and examples that Smith uses appear to trace back directly to economic tracts written in Medieval Persia. For instance, not only does his argument that exchange is a natural outgrowth of human rationality and speech already appear both in both Ghazali (1058–1111 ad), and Tusi (1201–1274 ad); both use exactly the same illustration: that no one has ever observed two dogs exchanging bones.84 Even more dramatically, Smith’s most famous example of division of labor, the pin factory, where it takes eighteen separate operations to produce one pin, already appears in Ghazali’s Ihya, in which he describes a needle factory, where it takes twenty-five different operations to produce a needle.85 The differences, however, are just as significant as the similarities. One telling example: like Smith, Tusi begins his treatise on economics with a discussion of the division of labor; but where for Smith, the division of labor is actually an outgrowth of our “natural propensity to truck and barter” in pursuit of individual advantage, for Tusi, it was an extension of mutual aid: ([Location 5888](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00513DGIO&location=5888)) - once you start from the initial premise that markets are primarily about cooperation rather than competition—and while Muslim economic thinkers did recognize and accept the need for market competition, they never saw competition as its essence87—the moral implications are very different. ([Location 5911](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00513DGIO&location=5911)) - lending money at interest must be illegitimate, since it means using money as an end in itself: “Money is not created to earn money.” In fact, he says, “in relation to other goods, dirhams and dinars are like prepositions in a sentence,” words that, as the grammarians inform us, are used to give meaning to other words, but can only do because they have no meaning in themselves. Money is a thus a unit of measure that provides a means of assessing the value of goods, but also one that operates as such only if it stays in constant motion. ([Location 5939](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00513DGIO&location=5939)) - The spread of Islam allowed the market to become a global phenomenon, operating largely independent of governments, according to its own internal laws. But the very fact that this was, in a certain way, a genuine free market, not one created by the government and backed by its police and prisons—a world of handshake deals and paper promises backed only by the integrity of the signer—meant that it could never really become the world imagined by those who later adopted many of the same ideas and arguments: one of purely self-interested individuals vying for material advantage by any means at hand. ([Location 5953](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00513DGIO&location=5953)) - When Aristotle argued that coins are merely social conventions, the term he used was symbolon—from which our own word “symbol” is derived. Symbolon was originally the Greek word for “tally”—an object broken in half to mark a contract or agreement, or marked and broken to record a debt. So our word “symbol” traces back originally to objects broken to record debt contracts of one sort or another. This is striking enough. What’s really, remarkable, though, is that the contemporary Chinese word for “symbol,” fu, or fu hao, has almost exactly the same origin. ([Location 6323](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00513DGIO&location=6323)) - debt—that peculiar agreement between two equals that they shall no longer be equals, until such time as they become equals once again. ([Location 6414](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00513DGIO&location=6414)) - Legally, our notion of the corporation is very much a product of the European High Middle Ages. The legal idea of a corporation as a “fictive person” (persona ficta)—a person who, as Maitland, the great British legal historian, put it, “is immortal, who sues and is sued, who holds lands, has a seal of his own, who makes regulations for those natural persons of whom he is composed”166—was first established in canon law by Pope Innocent IV in 1250 ad, and one of the first kinds of entities it applied to were monasteries—as also to universities, churches, municipalities, and guilds. ([Location 6447](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00513DGIO&location=6447)) - we are used to assuming that there’s something natural or inevitable about the existence of corporations, in historical terms, they are actually strange, exotic creatures. No other great tradition came up with anything like it.170 They are the most peculiarly European addition to that endless proliferation of metaphysical entities so characteristic of the Middle Ages—as well as the most enduring. ([Location 6464](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00513DGIO&location=6464)) - The creation of central banks represented a permanent institutionalization of that marriage between the interests of warriors and financiers that had already begun to emerge in Renaissance Italy, and that eventually became the foundation of financial capitalism. ([Location 7696](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00513DGIO&location=7696)) - The essence of U.S. military predominance in the world is, ultimately, the fact that it can, at will, drop bombs, with only a few hours’ notice, at absolutely any point on the surface of the planet.11 No other government has ever had anything remotely like this sort of capability. In fact, a case could well be made that it is this very power that holds the entire world monetary system, organized around the dollar, together. ([Location 7733](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00513DGIO&location=7733)) - The unique thing about the Chinese empire is that it has, since the Han dynasty at least, adopted a peculiar sort of tribute system whereby, in exchange for recognition of the Chinese emperor as world-sovereign, they have been willing to shower their client states with gifts far greater than they receive in return. The technique seems to have been developed almost as a kind of trick when dealing with the “northern barbarians” of the steppes, who always threatened Chinese frontiers: a way to overwhelm them with such luxuries that they would become complacent, effeminate, and unwarlike. ([Location 7818](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00513DGIO&location=7818)) - money has no essence. It’s not “really” anything; therefore, its nature has always been and presumably always will be a matter of political contention. ([Location 7842](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00513DGIO&location=7842)) - One can see the great crash of 2008 in the same light—as the outcome of years of political tussles between creditors and debtors, rich and poor. True, on a certain level, it was exactly what it seemed to be: a scam, an incredibly sophisticated Ponzi scheme designed to collapse in the full knowledge that the perpetrators would be able to force the victims to bail them out. On another level it could be seen as the culmination of a battle over the very definition of money and credit. ([Location 7856](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00513DGIO&location=7856)) - We were all to think of ourselves as tiny corporations, organized around that same relationship of investor and executive: between the cold, calculating math of the banker, and the warrior who, indebted, has abandoned any sense of personal honor and turned himself into a kind of disgraced machine. ([Location 7928](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00513DGIO&location=7928)) - that great embarrassing fact that haunts all attempts to represent the market as the highest form of human freedom: that historically, impersonal, commercial markets originate in theft. More than anything else, the endless recitation of the myth of barter, employed much like an incantation, is the economists’ way of fending off any possibility of having to confront it. But even a moment’s reflection makes it obvious. Who was the first man to look at a house full of objects and to immediately assess them only in terms of what he could trade them in for in the market likely to have been? Surely, he can only have been a thief. Burglars, marauding soldiers, then perhaps debt collectors, were the first to see the world this way. It was only in the hands of soldiers, fresh from looting towns and cities, that chunks of gold or silver—melted down, in most cases, from some heirloom treasure, that like the Kashmiri gods, or Aztec breastplates, or Babylonian women’s ankle bracelets, was both a work of art and a little compendium of history—could become simple, uniform bits of currency, with no history, valuable precisely for their lack of history, because they could be accepted anywhere, no questions asked. And it continues to be true. Any system that reduces the world to numbers can only be held in place by weapons, whether these are swords and clubs, or nowadays, “smart bombs” from unmanned drones. ([Location 8125](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00513DGIO&location=8125)) - For me, this is exactly what’s so pernicious about the morality of debt: the way that financial imperatives constantly try to reduce us all, despite ourselves, to the equivalent of pillagers, eyeing the world simply for what can be turned into money—and then tell us that it’s only those who are willing to see the world as pillagers who deserve access to the resources required to pursue anything in life other than money. ([Location 8194](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00513DGIO&location=8194)) - The argument might perhaps make sense if one agreed with the underlying assumption—that work is by definition virtuous, since the ultimate measure of humanity’s success as a species is its ability to increase the overall global output of goods and services by at least 5 percent per year. The problem is that it is becoming increasingly obvious that if we continue along these lines much longer, we’re likely to destroy everything. That giant debt machine that has, for the last five centuries, reduced increasing proportions of the world’s population to the moral equivalent of conquistadors would appear to be coming up against its social and ecological limits. Capitalism’s inveterate propensity to imagine its own destruction has morphed, in the last half-century, into scenarios that threaten to bring the rest of the world down with it. And there’s no reason to believe that this propensity is ever going to go away. ([Location 8201](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00513DGIO&location=8201)) - 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. ([Location 8209](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00513DGIO&location=8209))