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- Опубліковано 1 січ 2024
- Episode 94. Debt
You owe this one a listen. In episode 94 of Overthink, Ellie and David discuss everything debt, from student loans and bank bailouts to the importance of honoring one’s intellectual forebears. Did Shakespeare’s Antonio really pay Shylock with “a pound of flesh”? Why does Nietzsche say that the Christian God is a creditor of infinite debt? Who really benefits from bailouts under capitalism today? And might it be time to bring back good old “jubilees,” i.e., sanctioned acts of collective debt cancellation? As they talk through these questions, your hosts explore how debt has structured social, family, and religious bonds across history, from Vedic India, to Plato’s Athens, and how the notion of being “indebted” to one’s cultural past conditions the experience of immigrants in America today.
Overthink is a philosophy podcast hosted by your favorite new professors, Ellie Anderson (Pomona College) and David Peña-Guzmán (San Francisco State University). Check out our episodes for deep dives into concepts such as existential anxiety, empathy, and gaslighting.
Works Discussed
Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism
Jeffery R. Di Leo, Corporate Humanities in Higher Education
David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years
Cathy Park Hong, Minor Feelings
Geoffery Ingham, The Nature of Money
Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals
Plato, Republic
Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice
Shatapatha Brahmana
Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations
HEROES act
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You deserve a lot of credit for covering debt.
Yayayaya
David Graeber's Debt: The First 5000 Years is my favorite book.
It gets even better in German. "Schuld", the word for debt, also means "fault, blame, guilt". Usage is in the plural, "Schulden". To say "I owe you..." is "Ich schulde dir..."; "I'm in debt..." is "Ich bin verschuldet...". The moral implications of the etymology couldn't be clearer. To say "Es ist meine Schuld" means "It's my fault".
"A bank is an institution that lends you an umbrella when it's sunny, and asks for it back when it starts to rain." ~ Robert Frost ~
So happy you guys made this episode. It’s really well done.
Graeber is great on Debt so is Michael Hudson
Discussion of interest is great… let us push it to Derrida’s play on the French word which is imposition and marshalling in the militaristic sense
Thank you for this fascinating discussion. I hugely admired David Graeber's Debt, with fascinating ideas about the origin of money, about debt forgiveness, even slavery.
You didn't have time to mention the campaign to write off Third World debt, often taken on by corrupt rulers to no benefit to their citizens, who were unable to service the debt, but the lenders in wealthy countries of course resisted the idea.
As for owing your parents a debt for bringing you up, although you talked about a metaphorical sense of debt, I would rather see that as a gift relationship. (I have two grown children) Surely if children are made to feel they owe something back to their parents, that's a rather toxic relationship! Lewis Hyde's The Gift has interesting thoughts on gift relationships.
Thank you for your stimulating series of podcasts.
That movie "The Corporation" changed my early 20s and made me a Marxist. I am now one of those people, an exploitive capitalist. I was never able to afford a home or build the adobe utopia. They sent the SWAT team. The debt thing is serious business and directly tied to guberment. Thanks again. I feel like we should all eat mushrooms at an EDM festival one day.
Today, the German federal government is in debt to the tune of 64% of annual GDP. The United States is at 122%. There are now problems in Germany with insufficient public investment in infrastructure, a hot political topic. But, at least students don't have to worry -- all higher education is free. During the height of the neoliberal period, circa 1998-2008, the Christian Democrats were in favour of introducing tuition as a way of funding education and competing with the fancy Anglo-American colleges. They even introduced them, in some of the regions under their control, but popular blowback forced them to retreat.
Nietzsche and Freud realized this over a century ago: guilt and debt
The insanely punitive Versailles treaty definitely contributed to the rise of Hitler, so I guess the Allies didn't want a repetition. However, Germany did pay a lot, not to mention high reparations to Israel. Versailles created the greatest hyperinflation in history, and when, in response to tardy payments, the French occupied the Rhineland, shipping home the coal and even factories, it did create a lot of resentment towards the Western powers, not surprisingly. It is a common misconception that the Marshall Plan was meant to rebuild Germany, but in fact, the UK, France and Italy all received more from that fund than did Germany.
"A Lannister always pays his debts"
In the interest of thoroughness you should have contrasted the usual optimist's sense of children being indebted to their parents with the pessimist's opposite sense as detailed by e.g. David Benatar/Thomas Ligotti
Not mine.
It's funny that Yama means 'ditch' in slavic languages, including Russian and Ukrainian ... I guess some shared PIE roots.
I think you mix up debt and gratitude. In debt there is always an exchange often involving power relations. Gratitude is felt when you are given something out of goodness and compassion. In this case there is actually an emotional relationship involved. When you are given something out of goodness and you do not reciprocate with an expression of gratitude, you are not punished. There may be some kind of sadness or disappointment on the part of the giver.
So I may feel gratitude towards my parents for bringing me to the world and taking care of me when growing up. They may expect a reciprocation of care when they become old. But there is nothing binding about it. It is a moral issue. You may be “sanctioned’ by the community, if you do not reciprocate. When an economic or financial element is involved in terms of material bequeathal/inheritance in order to force reciprocation, it is frowned upon.
But what about when you do something nice for somebody else, without expecting anything in return, and they say "I am now in your debt" or "I owe you"? Even though they know they won't be punished if they aren't grateful, and they know you don't expect anything in return, they may feel like they owe something anyway. Maybe their own moral compass would be "punishing" them if they didn't make it up to you somehow.
Just my 2 cents, supposing that I understood your comment correctly
@@ulysseh4598 You are right. Debt can be used metaphorically to mean gratitude. I just wanted to distinguish an instrumental, financial exchange of credit and debt from an expressive act of giving out of love and goodness and feeling gratitude towards the giver as a result and wanting to reciprocate. I think there's an essential difference between the two.
Person and persona…are people flesh or masks for something else