chapotraphouse

Graeber's book Debt goes into the ancient religious language used when referring to debt, the reasons for this, continual corruption of this meaning, and the resulting moral confusion in the modern era where people impoverished people in debt peonage are treated as the perpetrators while rich and powerful usurious lenders have victim status. here's a brief interview. https://davidgraeber.org/wp-content/uploads/What-is-Debt-%E2%80%93-An-Interview-with-Economic-Anthropologist-David-Graeber.pdf

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.