The Myth of Money and the Myth of Religion are Two Sides of the Same Myth (Part I)

 Here is an exert from  David Graeber's excellent book Debt: The First 5000 Years, p.75-83, that explains how Nietzsche was only insane, to the same degree of his perception of how insane the world really was, when you think about it; it's just that most people not only don't want to think about it, which is why his own curiosity stuck out like a sore thumb in a room full of pinkies, but prefer not to.  And trust me, I don't blame them a bit!

 What Graeber explains below, with the help of the brilliant insights of Nietzsche, also explains how the "religion" of Christianity for the poor, became the religion of the money changers in the temple of Goldman Sachs. And in an interesting parallel we see today in the world, to that of the Original Twelve Tribes of Israel, is that the reasons the Ten Northern Tribes opposed the building of the temple of Solomon in Jerusalem, are the very same reasons why all but maybe as much as 10% of the world's population are opposed to the temple of finance run by David M. Solomon, CEO of Goldman Sachs. 

 As Graeber explains:

Our two origin stories-the myth of barter and the myth of primordial debt-may appear to be about as far apart as they could be, but in their own way, they are also two sides of the same coin. One assumes the other. It's only once we can imagine human life as a series of commercial transactions that we're capable of seeing our relation to the universe in terms of debt.

To illustrate, let me call a perhaps surprising witness, Friedrich Nietzsche, a man able to see with uncommon clarity what happens when you try to imagine the world in commercial terms.

Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals appeared in 1887. In it, he begins with an argument that might well have been taken directly from Adam Smith-but he takes it a step further than Smith ever dared to, insisting that not just barter, but buying and selling itself, precede any other form of human relationship. The feeling of personal obligation, he observes, has its origin in the oldest and most primitive personal relationship there is, in the relationship between seller and buyer, creditor and debtor. Here for the first time one person moved up against another person, here an individual measured himself against another individual. We have found no civilization still at such a low level that something of this relationship is not already perceptible.

 

 To set prices, to measure values, to think up equivalencies, to exchange things-that preoccupied man's

very first thinking to such a degree that in a certain sense it's what thinking itself is. Here the oldest form of astuteness was bred; here, too, we can assume are the first beginnings of man's pride, his feeling of pre-eminence in relation to other animals. Perhaps our word "man" (manas) continues to express directly something of this feeling of the self: the human being describes himself as a being which assesses values, which values and measures, as the "inherently calculating animal. "  

Selling and buying, together with their psychological attributes, are even older than the beginnings of any form of social organizations and groupings; out of the most rudimentary form of personal legal rights the budding feeling of exchange, contract, guilt, law, duty, and compensation was instead first transferred to the crudest and earliest social structures (in their relationships with similar social structures) , along with the habit of comparing power with power, of measuring, of calculating.7

Smith, too, we will remember, saw the origins of language-and hence of human thought-as lying in our propensity to "exchange one thing for another," in which he also saw the origins of the market.R The urge to trade, to compare values, is the very thing that makes us intelligent beings, and different from other animals. Society comes later, which means our ideas about responsibilities to other people first take shape in strictly commercial terms.

 Unlike with Smith, however, it never occurred to Nietzsche that you could have a world where all such transactions immediately cancel out. Any system of commercial accounting, he assumed, will produce creditors and debtors. In fact, he believed that it was from this very fact that human morality emerged. Note, he says, how the German word "schuld" means both "debt" and "guilt." At first, to be in debt was simply to be guilty, and creditors delighted in punishing debtors unable to repay their loans by inflicting "all sorts of humiliation and torture on the body of the debtor, for instance, cutting as much flesh off as seemed appropriate for the debt."

In fact, Nietzsche went so far as to insist that those original barbarian law codes that tabulated so much for a ruined eye, so much for a severed finger, were not originally meant to fix rates of monetary compensation for the loss of eyes and fingers, but to establish how much of the debtor's body creditors were allowed to take! Needless to say, he doesn't provide a scintilla of evidence for this (none exists).  But to ask for evidence would be to miss the point. We are dealing here not with a real historical argument but with a purely imaginative exercise. 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 especially to the earliest one which had founded 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 understood very crudely) , festivals, chapels, signs of honor, above all, obedience--for all customs, as work of one's ancestors, are also their statutes and commands. Do people ever give them enough ? This suspicion remains and grows."

In other words, for Nietzsche, starting from Adam Smith's assumptions about human nature means we must necessarily end up with something very much along the lines of primordial-debt theory. On the one hand, it is because of our feeling of debt to the ancestors that we obey the ancestral laws: this is why we feel that the community has the right to react "like an angry creditor" and punish us for our transgressions if we break them. 

In a larger sense, we develop a creeping feeling that we could never really pay back the ancestors, that no sacrifice (not even the sacrifice of our first-born) will ever truly redeem us. We are terrified of the ancestors, and the stronger and more powerful a community becomes, the more powerful they seem to be, until finally, "the ancestor is necessarily transfigured into a god . " As communities grow into kingdoms and kingdoms into universal empires, the gods themselves come to seem more universal, they take on grander, more cosmic pretensions, ruling the heavens, casting thunderbolts-culminating in the Christian god, who, as the maximal deity, necessarily "brought about the maximum feeling of indebtedness on earth . " Even our ancestor Adam is no longer figured as a creditor, but as a transgressor, and therefore a debtor, who passes on to us his burden of Original Sin:

"Finally, with the impossibility of discharging the debt, people also come up with the notion that it is impossible to remove the penance, the idea that it cannot be paid off ( "eternal punishment") . . . until all of a sudden we confront the paradoxical and horrifying expedient with which a martyred humanity found temporary relief, that stroke of genius of Christianity: God sacrificing himself for the guilt of human beings, God paying himself back with himself, God as the only one who can redeem man from what for human beings has become impossible to redeem-the creditor sacrificing himself for the debtor, out of love (can people believe that?) , out of love for his debtor!"

It all makes perfect sense if you start from Nietzsche's initial premise. The problem is that the premise is insane. There is also every reason to believe that Nietzsche knew the premise was insane; in fact, that this was the entire point. What Nietzsche is doing here is starting out from the standard, common-sense assumptions about the nature of human beings prevalent in his day (and to a large extent, still prevalent)-that we are rational calculating machines, that commercial self-interest comes before society, that "society" itself is just a way of putting a kind of temporary lid on the resulting conflict. 

That is, he is starting out from ordinary bourgeois assumptions and driving them to a place where they can only shock a bourgeois audience.

It's a worthy game and no one has ever played it better; but it's a game played entirely within the boundaries of bourgeois thought. It has nothing to say to anything that lies beyond that. The best response to anyone who wants to take seriously Nietzsche's fantasies about savage hunters chopping pieces off each other's bodies for failure to remit are the words of an actual hunter-gatherer-an Inuit from Greenland made famous in the Danish writer Peter Freuchen's Book of the Eskimo.

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."13 The last line is something of an anthropological classic, and similar statements about the refusal to calculate credits and debits can be found through the anthropological literature on egalitarian hunting societies. Rather than seeing himself as human because he could make economic calculations, the hunter insisted that being truly human meant refusing to make such calculations, refusing to measure or remember who had given what to whom, for the precise reason that doing so would inevitably create a world where we began "comparing power with power, measuring, calculating" and reducing each other to slaves or dogs through debt. (Emphasis added.) (Note, also, how doing such calculations, and indeed coming to depend upon them to regiment every aspect of what it means to be human, is how religions seek to turn people into domesticated computers; computers that are built to be capable of becoming anything they can imagine, but shackled to the enslavement of a single idea of a child waiting for their father to come and take them home, and deliver them from the hell he stranded them here on earth to have to endure, in order to reveal his love and benevolence.) 

It's not that he, like untold millions of similar egalitarian spirits throughout history, was unaware that humans have a propensity to calculate. If he wasn't aware of it, he could not have said what he did. Of course we have a propensity to calculate. We have all sorts of propensities. In any real-life situation, we have propensities that drive us in several different contradictory directions simultaneously. No one is more real than any other. The real question is which we take as the foundation of our humanity, and therefore, make the basis of our civilization. If Nietzsche's analysis of debt is helpful to us, then, it is because it reveals that when we start from the assumption that human thought is essentially a matter of commercial calculation, that buying and selling are the basis of human society-then, yes, once we begin to think about our relationship with the cosmos, we will necessarily conceive of it in terms of debt.

I I I I I

I do think Nietzsche helps us in another way as well : to understand the concept of redemption. Nietzsche's account of "primeval times" might be absurd, but his description of Christianity-of how a sense of debt is transformed into an abiding sense of guilt, and guilt to self-loathing, and self-loathing to self-torture-all of this does ring very true. Why, for instance, do we refer to Christ as the "redeemer" ? The primary meaning of "redemption" is to buy something back, or to recover something that had been given up in security for a loan; to acquire something by paying off a debt. It is rather striking to think that the very core of the Christian message, salvation itself, the sacrifice of God's own son to rescue humanity from eternal damnation, should be framed in the language of a financial transaction. Nietzsche might have been starting from the same assumptions as Adam Smith, but clearly the early Christians weren't. The roots of this thinking lie deeper than Smith's with his nation of shopkeepers. The authors of the Brahmanas were not alone in borrowing the language of the marketplace as a way of thinking about the human condition. Indeed, to one degree or another, all the major world religions do this.

The reason is that all of them-from Zoroastrianism to Islam arose amidst intense arguments about the role of money and the market in human life, and particularly about what these institutions meant for fundamental questions of what human beings owed to one another. The question of debt, and arguments about debt, ran through every aspect of the political life of the time. These arguments were set amidst revolts, petitions, reformist movements. Some such movements gained allies in the temples and palaces. Others were brutally suppressed. Most of the terms, slogans, and specific issues being debated, though, have been lost to history. We j ust don't know what a political debate in a Syrian tavern in 750 BC was likely to be about. As a result, we have spent thousands of years contemplating sacred texts full of political allusions that would have been instantly recognizable to any reader at the time when they were written, but whose meaning we now can only
guess at.

(NOTE: To a degree, and as history has shown so well, what is important may be simply understanding the difference between how they were understood by revolutionaries on the one hand, and on the other, by oppressors who use the same ideas only to oppress in the name of "freedom." From our perspective, is is about interpreting an allegorical book of stories not into facts that we must fight and die defending as facts, in order to win the love of an abstraction we call "God," but as reflections of our own world today, in characters where only the names have been changed. Hence, the Republicans and the Democrats are simply the Pharisees and the Sadducees of the New Jerusalem, America, with the "new Israelites" (i.e. Christians) worshiping their "Jesus" in the very same way the Sanhedrin worshiped its' Yahweh, by crucifying anyone who dares to blaspheme agaisnt their religion or their Holy "God," and so on.)


The reason is that all of them - from Zoroastrianism to Islam - arose amidst intense arguments about the role of money and the market in human life, and particularly about what these institutions meant for fundamental questions of what human beings owed to one another. The question of debt, and arguments about debt, ran through every aspect of the political life of the time. These arguments were set amidst revolts, petitions, reformist movements. Some such movements gained allies in the temples and palaces. Others were brutally suppressed. Most of the terms, slogans, and specific issues being debated, though, have been lost to history. We just don't know what a political debate in a Syrian tavern in 750 BC was likely to be about.

As a result, we have spent thousands of years contemplating sacred texts full of political allusions that would have been instantly recognizable to any reader at the time when they were written, but whose meaning we now can only guess at.
 
One of the unusual things about the Bible is that it preserves some bits of this larger context. To return to the notion of redemption: the Hebrew words padah and goal, both translated as "redemption," could be used for buying back anything one had sold to someone else, particularly the recovery of ancestral land, or to recovering some object held by creditors in way of a pledge. The example foremost in the minds of prophets and theologians seems to have been the last: the redemption of pledges, and especially, of family members held as debt pawns. It would seem that the economy of the Hebrew kingdoms, by the time of the prophets, was already beginning to develop the same kind of debt crises that had long been common in Mesopotamia: especially in years of bad harvests, the poor became indebted to rich neighbors or to wealthy moneylenders in the towns, they would begin to lose title to their fields and to become tenants on what had been their own land, and their sons and daughters would be removed to serve as servants in their creditors' households, or even sold abroad as slaves.  The earlier prophets contain allusions to such crises, but the book of Nehemiah, written in Persian times, is the most explicit.

Some also there were that said, "We have mortgaged our lands,
vineyards, and houses, that we might buy corn, because of the
dearth . "There were also those that said, "We have borrowed money
for the king's tribute, and that upon our lands and vineyards.
"Yet now our flesh is as the flesh of our brethren, our children
as their children: and, lo, we bring into bondage our sons
and our daughters to be servants, and some of our daughters
are brought unto bondage already: neither is it in our power
to redeem them; for other men have our lands and vineyards. "
And I was very angry when I heard their cry and these words.
Then I consulted with myself, and I rebuked the nobles, and
the rulers, and said unto them, "Ye exact usury, every one of
his brother. " And I set a great assembly against them.

Nehemiah was a Jew born in Babylon, a former cup-bearer to the Persian emperor. In 444 Be, he managed to talk the Great King into appointing him governor of his native Judea. He also received permission
to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem that had been destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar more than two centuries earlier. In the course of rebuilding, sacred texts were recovered and restored; in a sense, this was the moment of the creation of what we now consider Judaism.The problem was that Nehemiah quickly found himself confronted with a social crisis. All around him, impoverished peasants were unable to pay their taxes; creditors were carrying off the children of the poor. His first response was to issue a classic Babylonian-style "clean slate" edict-having himself been born in Babylon, he was clearly familiar with the general principle. All non-commercial debts were to be forgiven.

Maximum interest rates were set. At the same time, though, Nehemiah managed to locate, revise, and reissue much older Jewish laws, now preserved in Exodus, Deuteronomy, and Leviticus, which in certain ways went even further, by institutionalizing the principle. The most famous of these is the Law of Jubilee: a law that stipulated that all debts would be automatically cancelled "in the Sabbath year" (that is, after seven years had passed), and that all who languished in bondage owing to such debts would be released.

"Freedom," in the Bible, as in Mesopotamia, came to refer above all to release from the effects of debt. Over time, the history of the Jewish people itself came to be interpreted in this light: the liberation from bondage in Egypt was God's first, paradigmatic act of redemption; the historical tribulations of the Jews (defeat, conquest, exile) were seen as misfortunes that would eventually lead to a final redemption with the coming of the Messiah-though this could only be accomplished, prophets such as Jeremiah warned them, after the Jewish people truly repented of their sins (carrying each other off into bondage, whoring after false gods, the violation of commandments) Y In this light, the adoption of the term by Christians is hardly surprising. Redemption was a release from one's burden of sin and guilt, and the end of history would be that moment when all slates are wiped clean and all debts finally lifted when a great blast from angelic trumpets will announce the final Jubilee.

If so, "redemption" is no longer about buying something back. It's really more a matter of destroying the entire system of accounting. In many Middle Eastern cities, this was literally true: one of the common acts during debt cancellation was the ceremonial destruction of the tablets on which financial records had been kept, an act to be repeated, much less officially, in just about every major peasant revolt in history.

This leads to another problem : What is possible in the meantime, before that final redemption comes ? In one of his more disturbing parables, the Parable of the Unforgiving Servant, Jesus seemed to be explicitly playing with the problem:

Therefore, the kingdom of heaven is like a king who wanted to
settle accounts with his servants. As he began the settlement, a
man who owed him ten thousand talents was brought to him.
Since he was not able to pay, the master ordered that he and
his wife and his children and all that he had be sold to repay
the debt.

The servant fell on his knees before him. "Be patient with
me, " he begged, "and I will pay back everything." The servant's
master took pity on him, canceled the debt, and let him go.
But when that servant went out, he found one of his fellow
servants who owed him a hundred denarii. He grabbed him
and began to choke him. "Pay back what you owe me!" he
demanded.

His fellow servant fell to his knees and begged him, "Be
patient with me, and I will pay you back."

But he refused. Instead, he went off and had the man thrown
into prison until he could pay the debt. When the other servants
saw what had happened, they were greatly distressed and
went and told their master everything that had happened.

Then the master called the servant in. "You wicked servant,"
he said, "I canceled all that debt of yours because you
begged me to. Shouldn't you have had mercy on your fellow
servant just as I had on you ?" In anger his master turned him
over to the jailers to be tortured, until he should pay back all
he owed.

This is quite an extraordinary text. On one level it's a joke; in others, it could hardly be more serious.

(NOTE: The difference between the King and the Servant in this story, is that the Servant here is also the Christian, who refuses to forgive the "sinner" their sin here on earth, for being homosexual or being a witch or an atheist or a communist and so on, even though they know God - the King - will surely "forgive" them their own sins, whatever they may be, in Heaven, for refusing to admit they could ever be wrong about thinking about judging such people to be "sinners" who offend their dear God.)