Episode 94 - Debt

Transcript

Ellie: 0:04

Hello and welcome to Overthink,

David: 0:14

the podcast where we owe it to you to apply philosophy to everyday life.

Ellie: 0:19

I'm Ellie Anderson,

David: 0:20

and I am David Peña Guzman.

Ellie: 0:23

I heard on the radio recently that Americans' credit card debt reached an all time high in 2023. During the early phases of the pandemic, many people paid down their debts, but now we're back and more in debt than ever. And in fact, one of every two Americans who owns a credit card has debt. Credit card interest rates, what's more, are upward of 20 percent. So Americans are spending hefty amounts of money every month in interest.

David: 0:52

I am weirdly thankful to my parents who have very much an immigrant mentality about this because they instilled in me a tremendous fear of going in debt. So I didn't have a credit card, Ellie, until actually just a couple of years ago for the first time. And I've tried to live my life in a way that avoids debt. The only problem with that is that of course the American financial system requires you to go into debt to build things like credit. Yeah. Yeah.

Ellie: 1:23

Yeah. Absolutely. Or to buy a car unless you can pay up front for it, et cetera. And of course, given things like our healthcare system, sometimes even with the best intentions to stay out of debt, people are still ending up in debt nonetheless.

David: 1:37

Yeah. And in the case of my parents, their desire to get me not to go into debt came out of their own experience as immigrants who were targeted by some pretty predatory lenders over the course of their lives. And they even got stuck with one of those subprime mortgages during the crisis, which led them to lose their house. In the 2008, 2009. Yeah. I got a really difficult phone call from my mother and my stepfather saying, Hey, David, we just want you to know. We've lost our house and we will have to move and figure out what to do. And at the time I was a graduate student, I didn't have any money. So I also felt very impotent knowing that I could barely support myself and I was not in a position to help them.

Ellie: 2:23

Yeah. And I think what you're describing, David, is such an awful story and a really classically American story in this century. One that is enabled by the economic system that we live in such that despite individuals best efforts, there can still be, or there is still this relation to an unjust system. And I was really surprised again by the statistic that at this point half of credit card owners in America are in debt. I do my best to stay out of debt, but I did get into some debt last year that I finally recently paid off.

David: 2:57

Woo. I think that's something to celebrate.

Ellie: 3:00

Yeah. It feels really good when you do that, right?

David: 3:02

Yeah. No, I, I've done that because I had student loans for several years and I finally paid them off when I got my position as assistant professor at SF State. And I have to say for a while, I was really tempted though to pull a Socrates from the Republic in connection to my lender because Socrates in the opening scenes of the Republic has a discussion about justice where somebody says justice is giving people what you owe them or making sure that people get what they are owed and Socrates says, That's not always just, and I just wanted to latch onto that. But he gives this example of what happens when a friend lends you weapons and then when they're not in the right state of mind, asks for those weapons back. And so Socrates says, if the lender is not in the right state of mind, then it would be unjust for the person who is in their debt to pay their debt because they would actually just cause harm. Okay. In the act of paying back what they owe. And so I really wanted to look at the banks and be like, banks are not in their state. They're not in their state of mind. They are persons apparently, they're not in the right state of mind. So I'm doing them a favor. And there was that. There was that I forget who it was a psychiatrist who wrote a little piece that went viral several years ago about corporate personhood, saying that if you really take that seriously, then what kind of person is a corporation? And there are people who distrust everybody, are hyper competitive so they're actually sociopaths, corporations, they're sociopathic individuals. So I'll keep my loan, please. No, but I actually did pay it back.

Ellie: 4:43

Yeah, and that's remarkable because I know that you had a pretty hefty scholarship in undergrad. And so you're, you had to take out some loans, but you were able to pay them back. And I am super lucky not to have student loans, we are definitely in the lucky, I don't know if it's a lucky minority. I'm not actually sure on the statistics about that, but very possibly so and certainly even if it's not the minority student debt is a giant thing for so many Americans. And we had a professor in grad school who was still paying off his undergrad student debt while we were students of his after he'd already been a professor for 10 years. And that's somebody in the humanities, right? Let alone, say, medical school or other forms of professional or degree programs or graduate degree programs that cost an unbelievable amount of money that require you to take hundreds of thousands of dollars out in loans.

David: 5:40

Yeah. And so it depends on what kind of program you went into for your studies, but also what kind of university. Because in my case, I did get a scholarship through competitive collegiate debate that helped me. But what really helped me is that I went to a state university where the tuition was not that expensive. I also worked throughout my undergrad, so I had to balance school with employment in order to make ends meet. But, there is such stigma associated with your debt number that most people refuse to talk about it for very good reasons. And now I've seen a kind of campaign online of share your number so that people know what it is. And it made me think, yeah, I should say it because I also was very lucky in that I didn't have to take out very much money. So when I graduated undergrad, I was about only 15, 000 in debt. And of course I carried that with me through grad school. And it was only after a couple of years of working as an assistant professor and saving all the money that I could, that I wasn't able to pay it off in one payment.

Ellie: 6:45

We're living in a time where this is a very live topic of conversation for millions of people in America. And this has led, I think, to a resurgence of movements to cancel debt. The forgiveness of student loans has been a huge topic of debate in recent years. And one thing I'm excited to talk about today is that although this seems to many Americans to be a sort of brand new and progressive kind of approach. It actually has quite a long history.

David: 7:17

Today we are talking about debt.

Ellie: 7:20

How does the concept of debt structure our relation to money and other people?

David: 7:24

Is it true that you always have to pay your debts?

Ellie: 7:27

And what is the link between debt and morality? I want to start with a very common story that you hear in economics. And this is that the first economic exchanges were barter systems. Let's say I'm good at making bows and arrows, but not so good at actually hunting deer. But you, David, are great at hunting deer, but you're not good at making bows and arrows. So we simply exchange our goods. However, one day I need meat, but you don't need bows and arrows. Also, I'm just realizing as I'm saying this that it's like funny that you would be the one hunting deer as like somebody who works in animal rights, but sorry, this is before.

David: 8:16

I'm a man. I'm a hunter, Ellie, obviously.

Ellie: 8:19

And I'm making my bows and arrows. Okay. So one day I need meat, but you don't need bows and arrows. You're like, I'm good. I have a backlog of bows and arrows from you. And that would put me in a very tricky spot. But you do need sandals. So I go to the sandal guy, hoping he needs bows and arrows, so that I can exchange those with him, and then come back to you with sandals, so that you'll give me meat in return.

David: 8:45

Sounds complicated. Precisely. But, according to this theory, this is where money then emerges, because in order to simplify the transactions, we start exchanging money so that then you can get what you need with what I've paid you, let's say, for your bows and arrows. In this case, and this is especially important as human societies become larger and more complex, money appears precisely in order to minimize the number of transactions needed to get everybody what they need. It's, it's the original Splitwise, simplifying things.

Ellie: 9:21

I love that Splitwise app. It's super helpful. This is not an advertisement, guys. But yeah, so that, that's right. And this is the Story that the founder of economics, Adam Smith, tells in 1776. According to this story, first comes a barter system, and then comes a money system. And then after the money system is established, then a credit system comes along, and people start to owe each other. We finally get debt. So even though this might have been the story that you heard, I know I heard it actually in high school already. And certainly if you've studied econ 101, it's likely that you have heard it as well. Or if you've studied, history, a lot of times you hear it there too. But here you go. In the book Debt, the *anthropologist* David Graeber argues that this whole story of the barter system is nothing but a myth. There is no evidence of it ever happening, even though countless economists have parroted it for a long time. So money came before barter? Yes. But even more than that, credit came before money. We had debts before we had exchanges of coins. So rather than going from barter system to money system to credit system. Graeber argues that the story is actually the opposite. We go from credit system to money system and then occasionally we'll get barter in cases where money and credit, can't really be upheld. But that's a side point. So let me tell you a little bit about how the credit system first came to be. Graeber points to early documents from Mesopotamia that show that credit systems preceded the inventions of coins. Not just by a week or two, but by thousands of years. Sumerian temple bureaucrats would keep track of how many silver shekels they owed the workers in the temple complex. And these silver shekels corresponded to rations of barley that the workers could use to make food. Similar systems were used in Mesopotamian marketplaces and in, so outside of these bureaucratic temple complexes. And this included buying beer. If you bought beer from an ale woman, which yes, is an actual term in the book, you would run up a tab that you settled at harvest time with barley or whatever else you had on hand. Coins only came much later.

David: 11:53

This is interesting because the metaphor of debt for the human condition runs really deep, having very long historical roots. The British sociologist Geoffrey Ingham notes that in all Indo European languages, words for debt are synonymous with those for sin or guilt. For example, the German word for money, Geld, is related to guilt, and even the English verb to pay is derived from a word for to pacify or to appease.

Ellie: 12:26

Yeah, the notion of humans as having a fundamental debt to pay just by virtue of our existence is one that Graeber traces back to some of the earliest texts of human civilization, the Vedic poems written in Sanskrit, as well as the later Brahmanas. So I want to say a little bit about this before then we come back to some of these like German origins of guilt and debt, Graeber notes that the Vedas are the earliest historical reflections on death that we know of. And here debt is treated synonymously with guilt and sin. Being in debt means having a weight placed upon you by Yama, who's the god of death. And you have to beg the gods to release you from this debt. There's a great formulation of this in the Shatapatha Brahmana, which is an ancient Sanskrit text that codifies the theme of debt in the early Vedic poems. This Brahmana states the following, a man being born is a debt. By his own self he is born to death, and only when he sacrifices does he redeem himself from death. End of quote. Graeber notes that here we are in debt to invisible forces, so sure, gods, but you might also think about them in terms of primordial debt to society.

David: 13:40

This brings to mind a much more recent articulation of our inherent indebtedness to society from Cathy Park Hong's book, Minor Feelings.

Ellie: 13:48

You know, I'm obsessed with that book. My one regret is that I don't have any annotations in that book because I had to listen to it on audiobook. I read it early in the pandemic and it was sold out everywhere. And because of the way that my mind works, I have forgotten a lot because I always forget everything when I listen to audiobooks. But I do vividly remember listening to it while doing my piecework tchotchke puzzle and drinking white wine, which is like such an early quarantine vibe.

David: 14:15

Okay, cool. And also random story. But Needed my moment to talk about the obsession with Hong. Yes. No, and it's a good book. And Hong writes about feeling indebted throughout her life and the sense of being indebted to her parents in particular, she says, put a lot of pressure on her growing up as an Asian American, she feels indebted to those in her family who immigrated here supposedly to give her a better life. This is a common immigrant feeling. And that sense of being indebted makes her feel small and cautious. And it also sometimes makes her doubt her own voice. But she does this beautiful thing in the book where she ends up really affirming the condition of indebtedness rather than regretting it and holding it up as a sort of ethical contrast to, let's say, the white man who takes up space by going on and on at a dinner party without realizing that he's actually just one member of a broader community. And so feeling indebted can be an alternative to selfish individualism or to the illusion that you are this independent, autonomous, self sufficient subject.

Ellie: 15:32

Yeah, and I think that relates to the topic of her book in general, which is minor feelings. And those minor feelings aren't always It's straightforwardly negative feelings, but they're feelings that we don't really attend to or valorize in our everyday life. And I think you could say that the feeling of being indebted is a double edged sword. Because on the one hand, the feeling of being indebted might lead you to structure your life too much in relation to others and to feel constrained by their expectations of you. Parents expectations of you are a big theme of Hong's book and also a theme that she connects to a broader Asian American experience with respect to choice of jobs that immigrants children are taking and so on and so forth. But there's also this side of it that, as you pointed to David, reveals the way that we are not purely self creating either. And so perhaps that feeling of indebtedness can be a beautiful form of honoring and actually enjoying and appreciating the fact that Others have put us in a position to be able to live our lives in a way that, I don't know, that we would like to, or that is affirming in some way.

David: 16:52

Yeah, and I, do you know that I'm working on a project about indebtedness, in this sense right now? Did I tell you that?

Ellie: 16:59

I actually don't think you did, which is very weird because we like, yeah, we talk a long time. We not only do we talk a lot, but we talked a lot about this episode before we recorded it.

David: 17:07

Okay. So I'm letting you know now, I'm working on a project about the abiding indebtedness of the figure of the philosopher, thinking about the ways in which often even those of us who are philosophers do deep down entertain this idea that we just like are these solo creators who come up with ideas and concepts from the deepest recesses of our own mind, as if philosophical creation happens in a vacuum. And what this leads to is a very solitary conception of what it means to be a philosopher. And so we're trying to, in this project, which I'm co authoring with our mutual friend, Rebekah Spera, we're trying to think about philosophy precisely as a communal ecological practice that happens within ties of intellectual debt, right? No philosopher is the sole author of their philosophical theories, their condensations of flows of influence.

Ellie: 18:07

Yeah. At the same time, though, I wonder to what extent we should consider that a debt. So I think it makes sense to consider it as a debt, but I also think that not all legacies indebt us, if that makes sense. To be able to recognize that I as a philosopher am drawing on the views of others, and that theories that I take to be original have been in some way set up for me at minimum by previous philosophers, wouldn't you say that doesn't necessarily mean I'm indebted to them? Could it just mean that I'm, like, inspired by them?

David: 18:43

Yeah, it depends on where you draw the line between those two, but I would want to say that we are. For instance, I would say you are indebted to the founders of the phenomenological tradition. It seems like you work a lot out of Simone de Beauvoir so you are indebted to her contributions to feminist theory and philosophy, similarly with me and some of the people that have shaped my thinking. And so I would consider that a debt, it's just not a debt in the traditional sense of something that can be paid off, but neither is the kind of debt that Hong is talking about in connection to her culture, in connection to her family. So I think of debt as something that has contributed to nourishing us in some way, and that comes from others.

Ellie: 19:26

And you mentioned, David, that it depends on how we're defining debt here, so maybe we can just say a little bit about that. Because a debt is an obligation, but it's an obligation of a specific form. On the one hand, debts differ from other forms of obligations because they are, at least strictly speaking, the obligation to pay something, usually money, and they can thus be quantified. Even in that early, even in the Shatapatha Brahmana that we mentioned earlier, I'm looking back at this quote now. The claim is that a man, by being born, is a debt. So the claim is that my own life. Is the amount that I owe, and only when I sacrifice do I redeem myself from death. So I don't know that that Brahmana is expressing as much of a quantified debt as, Hey, I owe you $20, $80 or something. But I do think that there is something that is like a tit for tat reciprocal. There's an exchange model, an economic exchange model in debt that you don't necessarily have with other forms of obligation. There's this quantifiable aspect of debt. But on the other hand, debts are also often used as metaphors for an unquantifiable debt. And that is the debt we owe to those who brought us into existence.

David: 20:45

Yeah, but think about the formulation that you just gave me. You said debts are metaphors for other debts. So then the other ones are not like Then both of them are debts, right? And so people usually...

Ellie: 20:58

No, I said the debts Wait, I said that What did I say? Oh yeah, I said that debt is often used as a metaphor, that debts are often used as metaphors for unquantifiable debts. Is that what I meant? I think that's what I meant.

David: 21:10

Yeah, but like that, that we use the financial conception of being indebted to make sense of our relationship of dependence, maybe? But it's not even dependence. It's like we owe something. It's just not money.

Ellie: 21:23

So like the Cathy Park Hong form of indebtedness to her ancestors or to her parents is a metaphor for you owing me $2.

David: 21:30

No, the other way around. The money would be a meta- oh no. Wait, what? No, hold on. I don't know exactly where this is going. But the point being here that I think the two are debts and that it's not as if like only financial debts are really debts. And that means that neither the quantifiability requirement nor the payback requirement is part of my definition of debt. And this is, for instance, how people talk about in connection to this quote that you gave us. I read an article about our unquantifiable and unpayable debt to god. But yeah, we still use that language because it holds us in a bind. That's the definition for me of a debt. Something that binds you to somebody else in a moral or maybe just normative sense.

Ellie: 22:20

But when we say something that binds you, what are we talking about? And I think we're talking about It's an asymmetry. It, exactly. So it does have to do with that sort of Reciprocity thought of on an exchange model. So I would say that the core notion of debt is that financial or economic exchange model. And then that metaphorical sense of debt is that same original sense of debt, but maybe extended far beyond what we would usually think of as something that we could reasonably pay back, perhaps to infinity. So we owe, for instance, an infinite debt to God for our existence.

David: 22:56

Yeah, and so used in that extended sense, I would include the religious conception of debt, also the historical sense of debt, because in, in many ways, any debt that you have to somebody who's already dead cannot be paid off. And so if we require the paying off of a debt to be part of the definition of debt, then as soon as my lender dies, then I could say that I'm not in debt with them anymore because I can't pay them back.

Ellie: 23:24

My debt to Simone de Beauvoir is infinite. I don't know about that.

Segment: 23:34

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David: 23:56

The standard view is that debt is primarily an economic idea, but we do use debt to refer to any relation that binds us to other people. For instance, we talk about our debt to our parents, to our countries, to the past. In academia, we also talk about the importance of acknowledging our intellectual debts. And the general idea behind this expanded sense of debt, as you mentioned, Ellie, is that what we have or who we are is not something of our own creation. We have it and we are it, thanks to other people, which means that we have some kind of obligation to them, even if it's just an obligation of recognizing the asymmetry. In the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche combines this literal and this expanded sense of debt by arguing that the origin of morality is to be found precisely in the literal sense of debt, in the debtor creditor relation.

Ellie: 24:56

Yes, I think this is certainly not only a very influential concept of morality, but probably the most famous philosophical treatment of debt because Nietzsche turns our usual ways of thinking about the origins of morality on their head in this text by saying that morality, which we usually think of as Stemming from this beautiful, altruistic aspect of human nature actually has a dirty and corrupt origin in the debtor creditor relation. And in particular, the creditor's pleasure in feeling like a master over the powerless debtor.

David: 25:34

My students can't get enough of this argument from The Genealogy of Morals, because, they have been taught to think...

Ellie: 25:41

My students usually hate it. Oh, really? Yeah, they like hate it at first, and then they weirdly love it at the end.

David: 25:45

Oh, my students love it from beginning to end, because I'm a really good teacher.

Ellie: 25:51

No, but I mean I let my students come along in the journey of first having a negative reaction to something, and then starting to see that it might have more to say than they originally thought. Okay, sorry.

David: 26:01

Yes. A deeper pedagogy at work here. But I think it's fair to say that most students have been taught to think of morality precisely as the opposite of economics, right? Economics is about utility. It's about pursuing your personal interest while morality is what prevents us from just devolving into a society that is entirely guided by utilitarian considerations. And then suddenly here you have Nietzsche arguing that morality literally evolves out of a contractual relationship between a creditor and a debtor. So morality emerges originally from economics.

Ellie: 26:42

Yeah. And what's more, the perverse pleasure that the creditor takes in punishing the debtor. Nietzsche begins by pointing out that in the simplest creditor debtor relationship, the creditor gives something to the debtor who promises to pay it back And to give something else to the creditor in case they cannot make the payment. So like in the case of the famous Shakespeare play, The Merchant of Venice, I forget what the creditor's name is, sorry, what the debtor's name is. But anyway, is it Antonio or something? Quick fact check. Yes. Okay. It is indeed Antonio. Owes a debt to the creditor Shylock and says if he can't pay it back, then he will pay with a pound of his flesh. So that's like this. Creditor debtor relationship. I owe you money, but if I can't pay it back, I will give you a pound of my flesh. Yeah. And originally people used all kinds of things as collateral for their debts. Especially things that could be construed as their property, such as their freedom.

David: 27:43

And even their wives. So wives, of course, were property historically, and so they could be used to quote unquote pay things back. And also, as you mentioned with this reference to a pound of flesh, is that people could also use their own body as a way of securing a loan. And this is why most early penal systems stipulate that if you don't pay your debt, your creditor has the right to claim a certain part of your body as repayment. And this is precisely where that idea of claiming your pound of flesh comes from. And in fact, some early penal codes go almost into fastidious detail about this, about how much flesh you take from what part of the body, almost like in this very surgical legalistic way, and even specifying how that pound is to be drawn.

Ellie: 28:35

Yeah. And the key thing about this for Nietzsche has to do with the fact that as human beings, we actually enjoy delivering punishment to others. So there is a sense in which the creditor is paid back with wives, children and body parts, but they are also paid in the pleasure of harming another person, of making them suffer.

David: 28:56

And he says that also the pleasure that we take in making others suffer is greater when the person that we get to punish is technically of a higher rank in society than ourselves. So a poor person, for example, gets more psychological value or pleasure from punishing a rich person than vice versa. But either way. The point here is that a creditor is paid primarily in a certain kind of pleasure. And that's really important for Nietzsche because it points to what he calls the pleasure of cruelty. And this sets in motion a certain historical evolution for Nietzsche whereby at the beginning, we get to claim our pound of flesh directly. Ellie, you didn't pay me my debt, so I take a chunk of your shoulder, for example, or of your thigh.

Ellie: 29:49

No thank you!

David: 29:50

And so I get to bask in my cruelty, in my ability to exercise power over you. The problem is that as society evolves, as it expands, and especially as social institutions are created, that start mediating the relations between individuals. I lose the right to claim my pound of flesh directly. Suddenly, in a more complex, evolved society, I actually have to alienate my right to cruelty, Nietzsche says, onto those third parties, such as the state, or even in the case of societies with a strong religion, God, so you start seeing here the link to Christianity in the historical narrative that Nietzsche is tracing because in Christianity, we no longer punish other people directly God takes over that job for us, and he starts punishing sinners for their transgressions.

Ellie: 30:50

Yeah, and while this might seem like a case of moral progress and a humanization of society, Nietzsche thinks that this prevents us from doing something that we want to do, which is Be cruel. So Christian morality blocks the discharge of our instinct for cruelty, which according to Nietzsche, makes us spiritually sick. If you can't externalize cruelty, you end up being cruel to yourself. I just want to briefly note here that this doesn't mean that Nietzsche is let's go back to a time before society was installed and just all be cruel to each other. That is not at all how I read Nietzsche here, but there is a sense of the domestication of humans leading us to turn our instincts against ourselves. And that is this famous critique of Christian morality, which is that it makes us enemies of ourselves.

David: 31:37

Yeah. Once I can't punish other people, then I basically have to take out that instinct against myself. But here it's where you start seeing how the economic conception of debt starts organizing Christian morality from within or rather how this morality takes the concept of debt to its most absurd extreme, let's say. Because Nietzsche says that Christianity is basically debt on steroids. And the reason for this is because of the specific nature of our relationship to God under a Christian worldview. So our relationship to God is basically the relationship of a debtor to their creditor. We owe God literally everything. We owe God the creation of the very universe. And not only that, the relation is so asymmetrical. between God and ourselves that we can never even hope to pay back that original debt. We can never discharge our debt to the divine. And according to Nietzsche, this sense that we have this infinite debt to God, which can never be paid back, is the foundation of our feeling of guilt. We are guilty before God.

Ellie: 32:52

You've been talking a little bit about this on the debtor side, but I also think we need to point out that the creditor, when we're thinking about God as creditor is a very particular one. God is not just any creditor. A creditor, ordinarily, like Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, will want what they are owed back. But what's paradoxical about Christianity, and this is what distinguishes Christianity for Nietzsche from other forms, it like really takes, he thinks it takes Jewish morality to a different level, like it transforms the concept of the debtor-creditor relation in Judaism, by adding in this paradoxical element, which is that God is also merciful. God forgives us when we don't deserve it. And the figure for this in Christianity is Jesus, the son of God who is simultaneously also God, who comes to earth and forgives us all of our sins, which means forgiving us all of our debts. Jesus is dying on the cross is a way of cancelling debts. So we're in an even more intense debt to God, debt to the second power, strangely, because we owe God everything. And yet we can never pay him back. So he forgives our debt, which like strangely you could say makes us even more in debt.

David: 34:09

Yes. Yes. No. And I think this is exactly where Nietzsche is going. That forgiveness of a debt is an act of power. Think about that. If I lend you 20 and then I'm like, Ellie. I know you can't pay me back, just keep it. But yeah, Nietzsche is heading in this direction, and your comment about God's son, Jesus, who is also God, is particularly important. Because of course, according to the doctrine of the Trinity, the three are one, the one is three. And Nietzsche makes the argument, the fact that God, gifts his son to cleanse the sins of humanity to erase the debts and sacrifices himself / his own son means that Christianity goes even further than what you said. It's not just a creditor that forgives the debt, but it's actually a creditor that takes his own pound of flesh as repayment in the form of his son. So it's like God carving out his own body. So it's not just forgiveness. It's like a self sacrifice, which is an incoherent notion from the standpoint of the traditional economic conception of debt.

Ellie: 35:27

And all of what you're talking about speaks to the violence on Nietzsche's view of the Christian virtue of forgiveness. Jesus turns the other cheek, right? In doing so, he's accepting someone slapping him twice rather than once. There's a rejection of justice in Christianity in the sense of getting what is due. There's a rejection of traditional distributive justice.

David: 35:51

But the problem, then, it's not just that God represents this all forgiving, graceful God that carves himself to pieces for us. The problem is also that we, as believers, are expected to behave like God and like Jesus and to embody those principles if we want to be good Christians. And the problem is that as humans, because we have this instinct for revenge and for cruelty and for getting what is due, when we're not able to do that, when we're not able to get our pound of flesh. We start developing what Nietzsche calls ressentiment, we start channeling all that aggressivity that normally would be directed towards our debtor on to ourselves, which is why under Christianity, we come to basically loathe ourselves, like I'm a sinner and I'm fundamentally bad.

Ellie: 36:47

Yeah. And from my own personal experience of having been Christian for quite a long time, I felt like it wasn't just about that self loathing. There were also a lot of moments of grace where you feel blessed by God, but there was a sense of you not really having power over when and how that cycle happened, that cycle of guilt and forgiveness, because it was a matter of mercy and grace on the part of a being that is beyond you and beyond your control.

David: 37:20

And what this all amounts to from a psychological point of view is that under Christianity, we as human beings, and by that I mean as animals or primates with all these dark impulses that are just part of who we are, there is no possibility of self affirmation. We cannot love ourselves as we are because Part of what we are is not forgiving. It is not graceful or Jesus like So under Christianity, there is nothing lovable about our humanity. Our bodies are corrupted. Our minds are tempted by sin. We are fallen creatures, even from before the moment we are born.

Ellie: 38:04

It depends on your theology.

David: 38:06

Yeah, it does depend on your theology. But this is why Nietzsche says that In the end, the Christian believer has no choice but to turn back against themselves, and to start taking themselves as the object of all those negative drives and impulses that have no expression outward. So we start seeing each other as perpetually indebted, unworthy of the credit that has been extended to us, and unable to pay back. In 2023, the United States Supreme Court voted against President Biden's plan for student debt forgiveness under the HEROES Act, which would wipe out about 10, 000 to 20, 000 in debt per student. Dashing the hopes of many students to find debt relief.

Ellie: 39:16

This was so disappointing. And although I don't have student debt, I know this was extremely important for lots of people, including tons of people close to me. And especially those who got locked into adjustable interest rates that made it virtually impossible to pay them back.

David: 39:32

Yeah, and now I think there is a lot of people who know that they will probably die without paying back their student loans. Not because they're not making their monthly payment or anything like that, but just because the loans keep increasing despite being paid on regularly because of these predatory terms. And recently the scholar Jeffrey R. Di Leo argued that the problem with the prevalence of insurmountable student debt is not just that it sours people's relationship to their own education because they come to see it as a source of major problems in their lives moving forward, but also that it's actually rewiring the entire landscape of higher education itself. DiLeo's book is called Corporate Humanities, and it is about that. It's about the neoliberal university and about the crisis of the humanities all combined In short, he argues that for most of the 20th century, American students were encouraged to think of themselves as entrepreneurs. You go to college for cheap, especially in the 60s and 70s. Think about our, like the boomer generation. You gain some skills and then you can make money after graduation if you work hard enough. And then bam, you have the fairy tale American life. But then in the 1970s in particular. Neoliberalism starts restructuring and taking over higher education. There is less state spending for welfare programs, for public goods. And you also witnessed during this decade the opening up of universities to all sorts of privatization efforts. And what resulted from this shift in the 1970s was a movement from the entrepreneurial to the indebted student subject.

Ellie: 41:25

And I imagine this difference has pretty profound effects on the experience of people going to college, like from their first person perspective.

David: 41:34

Correct. And the main difference, aside from the obvious material fact that now students have to take on obscene amounts of debt just to go to school, is that it pushes students to a new psychology rooted in despair rather than hope. So the entrepreneurial student of the 1960s, it was a hopeful student, somebody who thought that they had a better life on the other side of their educational journey. But now when students have to take on, as you pointed out, a hundred, maybe even$200,000 in student loan debt, they can't see an other side to come out of in. Sorry, like there is no other side, right? Like you're submerging yourself into debt without any sense that you'll ever liberate yourself from it. And for Di Leo this puts students in a really dangerous cycle, a psychological cycle of being in debt. Without having the hope of no longer being in debt.

Ellie: 42:34

Yeah. And yet there's still got to be a hope that's involved there, which is that hope of a better life, maybe not the fairytale life, but the hope that your education is worth it. And so it seems like maybe it's even a case of cruel optimism, that famous phrase that comes from Lauren Berlant. Because you have students who are willingly getting into debt, knowing they may never be able to pay it off, but they do hope that their education is worth it. And they're obviously investing in their education in a sense that shows that they think it's worth it.

David: 43:10

Yeah. And the question is then in what sense are they investing in their education? Because of course they're literally investing. But then when we think about education, we think about the kind of humanistic conception of education, right? Like I'm investing in my future, I'm investing in my personal development. But Di Leo makes the claim that the problem with the excess of debt in higher education is that it's changing the way students relate to their education in an even deeper sense. And here he plays on the concept of interest. He says, debt interest, i. e. the interest rate on your loans. Ends up determining your intellectual interests when you're a student, because if you're a student and you experience education from the very beginning from like freshman year of college as already going into debt, then your primary concern as a student is how in the world am I going to get out of this debt? And that means that you're going to be more interested in pursuing. An education in fields that promise you financial solvency and a job at the end of that. And that, that's not going to be the humanities. It's going to be the STEMs, it's going to be business school, it's going to be maybe going to law school.

Ellie: 44:27

Quick plug for philosophy, it actually might be. Philosophy because people who major in philosophy tend to have quite high median incomes at the middle of their careers, but I don't think that's the widespread perception, of course. And so it's less about what majors even actually lead to high salaries and more about what people imagine leads to high salaries. I hear a lot from students that their parents don't want them to major in philosophy because they're afraid that they're not going to be able to get a job after, to which I respond, that is a misconception. But anyway, that's neither here nor there. But I think this also points to the fact that education is no longer conceived as the social equalizer that we thought it was because it's often the students who are having to go into debt who are the ones who are most concerned. about being able to have a salary on the other side of it. Or even if they're low income students who have full scholarships, they're also concerned about possibly going into debt by not having a job after graduation. And so there's a way that the student debt model and just like the extreme expense of the American education system replicates social inequalities that exist outside of it.

David: 45:35

And it's not an equalizer in part because of how hard it is to discharge your student loan debt under federal bankruptcy laws. And so students get locked into these predatory loans that are going to cage them for a very long time and without which they may not have access to education in the first place. And then on top of that, we culpabilize students for having made the decision to go to college and to go into debt.

Ellie: 46:05

What did you expect?

David: 46:06

Yeah. What did you expect when you signed that contract? When, students are not allowed to smoke a cigarette when they're 18, but yet they can sign a contract to go $180,000 into debt.

Ellie: 46:18

Yeah. We have a mutual friend who posted a meme recently about this, which was like, it was somebody, it was a tweet where somebody said, when I was 17 years old my parents wouldn't let me get a Nirvana tattoo and I was so upset that I punched through a wall. I needed their permission, to get the tattoo in this case. Just weeks later, I was permitted to take on over $100,000 in student loans.

David: 46:43

Yeah, and I think that's also the root of what earlier I called the stigma of our debt number. That most people, especially those who have a lot of debt, really feel deep, profound shame around this. And it's something that they carry almost like a scarlet letter.

Ellie: 47:01

Yeah. So I want to talk a little bit now, David, about the notion that we have to pay our debts. You mentioned how hard it is to discharge federal student loans. And one thing that's come up a lot in recent discourse about student debt is, Oh, these snowflakes just think that they can have all their debt canceled. That's not how debts work. Like everybody has to pay their debts. One of the great things about David Graeber's book on this is that he shows that is so not the case. It has been baked into the system of credit and debt since the beginning, that there are periodic debt forgiveness programs. As capitalism was emerging, interest became legalized. And then by the 1580s in England, for example, interest bearing loans became common between villagers. So that. Alehouse woman from Mesopotamia was not making you pay interest, but your neighbor in England in 1590 was. So debt then became criminalized as well, and you saw the rise of debtor's prison. Prior to this rise of things like debtor's prisons, it was pretty common to have periodic jubilees where all debts were forgiven.

David: 48:12

And the politics of those jubilees continuing to the present moment, because do you remember a few years ago when the Greek economy had tanked? And there were a lot of questions about Greece's debts to the EU and Germany voted against that restructuring for Greece, even though then people pointed out that Germany itself was able to enjoy a very robust period of economic growth in the second half of the 20th century, only because It's debts following World War Two were restructured in a way that allowed them to pay back if they had just had to pay their debts as they were originally articulated. The German economy would have plummeted. And so who is a beneficiary of those moments of debt cancellation is interesting, right? Because even in connection to students. Based on the Supreme Court decision from a few months ago, students don't receive a debt cancellation, but corporations have. Think about the 2008 financial crisis and the bailout of the banks.

Ellie: 49:16

Exactly. So this is part of what is so frustrating. about the narrative around debt. It's everybody has to pay back their debts, but corporations are persons according to the law, and they certainly don't have to pay back their debts, at least a lot of them.

David: 49:31

Yeah. Greece, poor country in Europe has to pay their debts exactly as they are, but Germany can restructure their debts in order to make ends meet. And so this just shows the extent to which there are moments of exceptionality, where exceptions are made in connection to debt. And also that the criminalization has always been unevenly distributed. So the idea of cancelling debts precedes capitalism. It's actually capitalism that has more or less rejected the idea that individuals can have their debts cancelled, and yet strangely preserved the idea that corporations can have their debts cancelled. Yeah. And I've heard the argument to that, capitalism is capitalism for the poor, but socialism for the rich.

Ellie: 50:16

We also recently saw that there was a form of free money given to Americans a little bit different from debt cancellation. But in the case of the pandemic, every American got that $600 check. I think we got two, right? Yeah. We got our $600 checks. And that was very nice. And that was part of what enabled Americans to get out of debt during the pandemic.

David: 50:39

Yeah. And that relief during the pandemic also helped people see that it's possible to give money directly to citizens in a way that could help them. And it's what galvanized the more recent movement to cancel student debt.

Ellie: 50:53

And so David Graeber, as I imagine many of our listeners may know, was the, Thought leader, if we could, I hate that term.

David: 51:02

Thought leader, mind control.

Ellie: 51:05

No, you don't know that term, do you? Thought leader? You supposedly live in San Francisco and you don't even know the term thought leader. David, you got to get with the times. It's like what people use to refer to like popular podcasts, like Jordan Peterson would be a thought leader or Esther Perel, a more positive. Okay. Gosh. Yeah. They're like. They don't necessarily have to be theorists, but they're people who are shaping thought in a big way today. Anyway, David Graeber was, we could say the theorist because he's like a legit historian. He was the theorist behind the Occupy Wall Street movement and this idea of the one percent. He came up with this concept of the one percenters. And he said, and was arguing for many years before his death, that it's time for a biblical style jubilee. Both on the level of international debt and consumer debt. So the jubilee is that day when all debts are canceled. Graeber thinks that the very idea of debt in our society, a society that's characterized by massive wealth inequality, is an odd one. And he asks in the book Debt, what is a debt anyway? A debt is just the perversion of a promise. It is a promise corrupted by both math and violence. But we're not in the position to make real promises if we don't have real freedom. And arguably, under the current system of American capitalism, especially for college students, there is not such a freedom. And so if these students lack the real freedom to make the real promises, Then the question is was their student debt just agreed to under coercion? And if so, then do they really have the obligation to pay that back?

David: 52:46

And this appeal to real freedom, I think, is a helpful reminder for many of us that under capitalism, all interest is violence and it's theft. And those of us who are indebted in one way or another are indebted to people simply because they have more money than us. And therefore more power than us. So there is no debt under capitalism that is not fundamentally unjust.

Segment: 53:12

We hope you enjoyed today's episode. Please rate and review us on Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Consider supporting us on Patreon for exclusive access to bonus content, live Q and A's and And thanks to those of you who already do. To reach out to us and find episode info, go to overthinkpodcast.com and connect with us on Twitter and Instagram at overthink_pod. We'd like to thank our audio editor, Aaron Morgan, our production assistant, Emilio and Samuel K. Smith for the original music. And to our listeners, thanks so much for overthinking with us.