Debt

Debt and credit are the two sides of one unbalanced interaction, and the word predator fixes which side is which. The party who took the energy carries the debt, and the party it was taken from carries the credit, so the debt belongs to whoever benefited rather than to whoever is being pursued for payment. That inversion is most of the work the definition does, since the ordinary arrangement points the other way. Guilt is the awareness of anima debt, which is what links the whole apparatus of sin, atonement and forgiveness to a transfer of energy. Debt requires forgiveness or a balancing of the interaction, and Marsh said we speak of forgiving debt because debt is the original sin. Her history runs from there. In early endogroups every bad experience was read as somebody's debt incurred through disrespect or another unbalanced interaction, the debt was treated as owed by the whole group, and negative images were required to absorb the resulting guilt. The need to repay spiritual debt created the first economy and the basis for the first hierarchical governance. Nothing about the structure has changed since. Debt bondage to industrialists and billionaires has replaced the bonds that once held families and nations together, and a state now enforces a shared debt that people are expected to contribute to or face the consequences.

David Graeber's history of debt made the case that credit long preceded coinage and that the moral force of debt has always exceeded its economic content, and Nietzsche had already traced guilt to the German Schuld, which carries both meanings. Anthropology of the gift after Marcel Mauss studies obligation created by giving. Economics treats debt as a contract to be honoured, which is the position all of these are arguing against. Marsh goes further than any of them on direction. Graeber shows that debt is moral rather than merely financial, and Marsh reverses who holds it, so that the person conventionally identified as the debtor is in her account often the creditor and the moral weight has been placed on the wrong party.