https://scottsantens.substack.com/p/the-primordial-credit-argument-for
"Every time I drop a bag of garbage down the chute in my building, I think
about debt.
Not the kind you pay back in monthly installments. Not the kind that shows up
on a credit report. I mean the kind you can never repay no matter how long you
live or how hard you work. The debt of being alive at all.
Someone built that chute. Someone engineered the pipes that carry water to my
faucet and the sewers that carry it away. Someone built the truck that takes
the garbage somewhere I will never see, and someone built the road the truck
drives on, and someone refined the diesel, and someone before them figured out
that crude oil was useful for anything at all. The chain goes back to people
whose names I will never know. Every time I drop that bag, I am the beneficiary
of thousands of years of accumulated effort. I did almost none of that work. I
will never be able to do enough work to repay it.
This is the idea David Graeber surfaces in
Debt: The First 5,000 Years,
drawing on the French anthropologist Philippe Rospabe. Long before money was a
medium of exchange or a unit of account, it was something stranger.
It was an
acknowledgment that you owed something you could never give back.
Rospabe studied “primitive money” — the cattle, shells, brass rods, and copper
bracelets used in marriage payments across societies on every inhabited
continent. The conventional reading was that these were
bridewealth: a man’s
family paid the bride’s family to compensate them for the loss of her labor.
Rospabe argued the opposite. The payment was not compensation. Nothing of that
scale could ever be compensation. A woman who joined a new family and bore
children for that family handed over something even a large quantity of goods
could never match. The payment was instead, in Graeber’s phrasing, “not to
settle a debt, but as a kind of acknowledgment that there exists a debt that
cannot be settled.”
Money, Graeber wrote, summarizing Rospabe, “begins, as Rospabe himself puts it,
‘as a substitute for life.’” One might call it a life-debt. “Money is first and
foremost an acknowledgment that one owes something much more valuable than
money.”
Read that sentence again.
Money is first and foremost an acknowledgment that
one owes something much more valuable than money.
This is what unconditional basic income actually is. Not a welfare program. Not
a stimulus. Not a transfer. UBI is a society asking for something so uniquely
valuable that payment of any sort would be impossible — and offering, in
return, the smallest possible gesture of recognition.
UBI is lifewealth. Not
paid to settle a debt, but paid to acknowledge a debt that cannot be settled."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
