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Book: Debt - Updated and Expanded: The First 5,000 Years
Quotes of Book: Debt - Updated and Expanded:
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  1. David Graeber _ Debt - Updated and Expanded:

    The designated occasion for clearing Babylonia's financial slate was the New Year festival, celebrated in the spring. Babylonian rulers oversaw the ritual of "breaking the tablets," that is, the debt records, restoring economic balance as part of the calendrical renewal of society along with the rest of nature. Hammurabi and his fellow rulers signaled these proclamations by raising a torch, probably symbolizing the sun-god of justice Shamash, whose principles were supposed to guide wise and fair rulers. Persons held as debt pledges were released to rejoin their families. Other debtors were restored cultivation rights to their customary lands, free of whatever mortgage liens had accumulated.15 Over the next several thousand years, this same list-canceling the debts, destroying the records, reallocating the land-was to become the standard list of demands of peasant revolutionaries everywhere. In Mesopotamia, rulers appear to have headed off the possibility of unrest by instituting such reforms themselves, as a grand gesture of cosmic renewal, a recreation of the social universe-in Babylonia, during the same ceremony in which the king reenacts his god Marduk's creation of the physical universe. The history of debt and sin was wiped out, and it was time to begin again. But it's also clear what they saw as the alternative: the world plunged into chaos, with farmers defecting to swell the ranks of nomadic pastoralists, and ultimately, if the breakdown continued, returning to overrun the cities and destroy everything.
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  2. David Graeber _ Debt - Updated and Expanded:

    Similar declarations are to be found again and again, in Sumerian and later Babylonian and Assyrian records, and always with the same theme: the restoration of "justice and equity," the protection of widows and orphans, to ensure-as Hammurabi was to put it when he abolished debts in Babylon in 1761 BC-"that the strong might not oppress the weak."14 In the words of Michael Hudson, The designated occasion for clearing Babylonia's financial slate was the New Year festival, celebrated in the spring. Babylonian rulers oversaw the ritual of "breaking the tablets," that is, the debt records, restoring economic balance as part of the calendrical renewal of society along with the rest of nature. Hammurabi and his fellow rulers signaled these proclamations by raising a torch, probably symbolizing the sun-god of justice Shamash, whose principles were supposed to guide wise and fair rulers. Persons held as debt pledges were released to rejoin their families. Other debtors were restored cultivation rights to their customary lands, free of whatever mortgage liens had accumulated.15
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  3. David Graeber _ Debt - Updated and Expanded:

    As the great classicist Moses Finley often liked to say, in the ancient world, all revolutionary movements had a single program: "Cancel the debts and redistribute the land.
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  4. David Graeber _ Debt - Updated and Expanded:

    It is one of the great ironies of history that modern racism-probably the single greatest evil of our last two centuries-had to be invented largely because Europeans continued to refuse to listen to the arguments of the intellectuals and jurists and did not accept that anyone they believed to be a full and equal human being could ever be justifiably enslaved.
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  5. David Graeber _ Debt - Updated and Expanded:

    In the first century AD, for example, it was not uncommon for educated Greeks to have themselves sold into slavery to some wealthy Roman in need of a secretary, entrust the money to a close friend or family member, and then, after a certain interval, buy themselves back, thus obtaining Roman citizenship. This despite the fact that, during such time as they were slaves, if their owner decided to, say, cut one of his secretary's feet off, legally, he would have been perfectly free to do so.109
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  6. David Graeber _ Debt - Updated and Expanded:

    All of this helps explain why the Church had been so uncompromising in its attitude toward usury. It was not just a philosophical question; it was a matter of moral rivalry. Money always has the potential to become a moral imperative unto itself. Allow it to expand and it can quickly become a morality so imperative that all others seem frivolous in comparison. For the debtor, the world is reduced to a collection of potential dangers, potential tools, and potential merchandise.23 Even human relations become a matter of cost-benefit calculation. Clearly, this is the way the conquistadors viewed the worlds that they set out to conquer.
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  7. David Graeber _ Debt - Updated and Expanded:

    Part of the problem is the extraordinary place that economics currently holds in the social sciences. In many ways it is treated as a kind of master discipline. Just about anyone who runs anything important in America is expected to have some training in economic theory, or at least to be familiar with its basic tenets. As a result, those tenets have come to be treated as received wisdom, as basically beyond question {one knows one is in the presence of received wisdom when, if one challenges some tenet of it, the first reaction is to treat one as simply ignorant-"You obviously have never heard of the Laffer Curve"; "Clearly you need a course in Economics 101"-the theory is seen as so obviously true that no one exposed to it could possibly disagree}. What's more, those branches of social theory that make the greatest claims to "scientific status"-"rational choice theory," for instance-start from the same assumptions about human psychology that economists do: that human beings are best viewed as self-interested actors calculating how to get the best terms possible out of any situation, the most profit or pleasure or happiness for the least sacrifice or investment-curious, considering experimental psychologists have demonstrated over and over again that these assumptions simply aren't true.2
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  8. David Graeber _ Debt - Updated and Expanded:

    In English, "thank you" derives from "think." It originally meant, "I will remember what you did for me"-which is usually not true either-but in other languages {the Portuguese obrigado is a good example} the standard term follows the form of the English "much obliged"-it actually does mean, "I am in your debt." The French merci is even more graphic: it derives from "mercy," as in begging for mercy; by saying it you are symbolically placing yourself in your benefactor's power-since a debtor is, after all, a criminal.63 Saying "you're welcome" or "it's nothing" {French de rien, Spanish de nada}-the latter has at least the advantage of often being literally true-is a way of reassuring the one to whom one has passed the salt that you are not actually inscribing a debit in your imaginary moral account book. So is saying "my pleasure"-you are saying, "No, actually, it's a credit, not a debit-you did me a favor because in asking me to pass the salt, you gave me the opportunity to do something I found rewarding in itself!"64
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  9. David Graeber _ Debt - Updated and Expanded:

    Credit money is based on trust, and in competitive markets, trust itself becomes a scarce commodity.
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  10. David Graeber _ Debt - Updated and Expanded:

    Consider the custom, in American society, of constantly saying "please" and "thank you." To do so is often treated as basic morality: we are constantly chiding children for forgetting to do it, just as the moral guardians of our society-teachers and ministers, for instance-do to everybody else. We often assume that the habit is universal, but as the Inuit hunter made clear, it is not.62 Like so many of our everyday courtesies, it is a kind of democratization of what was once a habit of feudal deference: the insistence on treating absolutely everyone the way that one used only to have to treat a lord or similar hierarchical superior.
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  11. David Graeber _ Debt - Updated and Expanded:

    States created markets. Markets require states. Neither could continue without the other, at least,
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  12. David Graeber _ Debt - Updated and Expanded:

    top-down chains of command are not particularly efficient: they tend to promote stupidity among those on top and resentful foot-dragging among those on the bottom.
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