[An essay about David Graeber’s book Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2012) and the political economy of George Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire fantasy. (Spoiler alert: I discuss events in Ice and Fire through the fourth book, Feast of Crows.)]
Money and Love
When I was a little boy our family would get up at 5:30 in the morning to drive from San Diego to Disneyland (or Knott’s Berry Farm if money was tight) to be there when it opened. My parents would give me and my brothers (one older, one younger) some small sum of money to buy junk food and junk stuff. My brothers would spend all their money and beg for more but I always saved half. Always. It was the beginning of my college fund. Why? I did not want to be in debt to anyone, and certainly not to my parents who could use my need for money to coerce me into yet more chores (we had plenty) or use it as proof of my lack of responsibility. Monetary debt was for me a source of oppression.
Yet, at the same time, I knew I would always be in debt to my wonderful parents because of the love, support and freedom they gave me. Even as a little tyke I was told to think for myself, to do the right thing, and to make a life that made me happy, not live to fulfill anyone else’s expectations.
I did not understand the difference between the debt I hated and the debt of love until now. David Graeber’s anthropological analysis of the history of debt puts this distinction between monetary debt and “human debt” (as he calls it) at the center of a brilliant analysis of the origins of our present precarious political economy.
Much of Graeber’s book is showing that the mainstream story of how our current economic system originated is a fantasy. It turns out that money wasn’t invented to make barter more efficient, as most economists claim, it was invented to keep track of war debts and slave costs. But despite the evidence, economists insist on telling us instead that it is all about efficiency. This deception goes back to the grandfather of the free market, Adam Smith, who tailored his facts on several key issues to fit his prejudices, as Graeber points out,
Smith simply imagined the role of consumer credit in his own day, just as he had his account of the origins of money. This allowed him to ignore the role of both benevolence and malevolence in economic affairs; both the ethos of mutual aid that forms the necessary foundation of anything that would look like a free market (that is, one which is not simply created and maintained by the state), and the violence and sheer vindictiveness that had actually gone into creating the competitive, self-interested markets that he was using as his model.
The market is older and different than capitalism, and community (mutuality) is older, and greater, than both. For most of our history, and for most of us now, living is about doing work, making things or serving people, to make money to buy the things we need and those we want. In econ-speak, commodity-money-commodity: C-M-C. But one small group of people in our society thrives by doing the opposite, using money to buy commodities (including bets on debts that magically turn a promise of payment into a thing as well) to make more money: M-C-M.
Technically these are capitalists. They make money by having money. It is no coincidence that they also make the rules for finance in the world, they make most of the political rules, and they are incredibly rich. Their whole existence also depends on debt, but a special kind of monetary debt that does not have to be repaid. Why? Because there are different rules about the debts (human and monetary) of rulers. Kings and Bankers only suffer financial ruin when all is ruined. It is their system.
And it is not a nice one. It maintains enough weapons to obliterate humanity; it mines nature’s vitality for quick profits and is polluting the planet so heavily it is changing the climate; it has wealth for all to live well but most of it goes to the top 1% while a billion people go to bed hungry every night and millions die needlessly every year. And at its heart, it depends on a number of unpleasant processes to turn all human interactions into accounts payable. In Graeber’s words,
Any system that reduces the world to numbers can only be held in place by weapons, whether these are swords and clubs, or nowadays, “smart bombs” from unmanned drones. It can also only operate by continually converting love into debt.
This form of social organization has brought us to a precipice. Disaster looms in many directions, and almost always it can be traced to this system of profit and power. Weapons of mass destruction are a decision. The massive pollution that is causing global climate change is not inevitable, it is an economic externality, a cost displaced onto society by those who profit from it. Our current social organization (mass consumerism, elite profit) makes our reproductive success (7 billion and counting!) and extraordinary inventiveness a threat to our very survival. The long human summer of success is coming to an end amid the mass extinction of many other creatures and deadly stress on the living biosphere of the planet.
Winter is Coming!
Why is this acceptable to most people? Because we have a tendency to believe inevitable what we have before us. It is so hard to step back mentally and recognize that our current culture is “made up.” Made up by history—by the billions of prejudices, decisions and impulses humans have followed in the last 50,000 years. Our culture is invented, but it is a natural system, because invent is what humans do. Bees make honey, beavers make lakes, humans make cultures. Natural selection shaped the specifics of the hive and dam making of the bees and beavers, but our talent is more general. We learn, we talk, we write. We can make many things; we can imagine many worlds.
For me, looking at a world imagined by another person can make the social construction of our own more understandable. It frees me from the spell of this is how it must be. George Martin’s fantasy Ice and Fire has taught me almost as much about the importance of debt as Graeber’s careful scholarship.
House Lannister
In Martin’s world, House Lannister is a dominant force on the island kingdom of Westerlos. While some of its most important members are efficiently evil, Lord Tywin especially, or incompetently evil, his daughter Cersi (the Queen Regent), others are more complicated, especially Cersi’s twin Jamie, and their little (in more ways than one) brother, Tyrion the Imp. The Lion is Lannister’s symbol and their official slogan is “Hear Me Roar.” But that isn’t their real motto. As everyone in Westerlos knows, it is “Lannisters Always Pay Their Debts.”
They mainly mean promises of money or power, but there is one human debt they always pay as well: treachery. Their world of debt revolves around deals with allies, payoffs to followers, and the destruction to their enemies. This is a good reputation to have in a violent world. Lord Tywin makes the most of this as he schemes to capture the Iron Throne of Westerlos for House Lannister. He carries out the most horrible massacres and sacrileges with an ice cold pragmatism, but he thinks he has honor. In reality, he is in love with violence and the debts he feels he is owed. Graeber again,
On the one hand, men who live by violence, whether soldiers or gangsters, are almost invariably obsessed with honor, and assaults on honor are considered the most obvious justification for acts of violence. On the other, debt. We speak both of debts of honor, and honoring one’s debts; in fact the transition from one to the other provides the best clue of how debts emerge from obligations; even as the notion of honor seemed to echo a defiant insistence that financial debts are not really the most important ones; an echo, here, of arguments that, like those in the Vedas and the Bible, go back to the very dawn of the market itself. Even more disturbingly, since the notion of honor makes no sense without the possibility of degradation, reconstructing this history reveals how much our basic concepts, of freedom and morality took shape within institutions—notably, but not only, slavery—that we’d sooner not have to think about at all.
Lord Tywin’s fear of degradation is why he despises his dwarf son Tyrion, and why he organizes the mass rape of Tyrion’s lowborn first wife. And even though slavery is technically outlawed in Westerlos, House Lannister treats everyone else in the land as mere objects to be owned if possible, and manipulated if not, all for the chance of winning the Game of Thrones.
Take, for example, the beautiful Cersi Lannister-Baratheon. Queen Cersi was never what anyone would call a good person. She is incestuous, treacherous, self-centered and not real bright. In the beginning she had some family values: she loved her brother Jamie (well she went a bit too far in his case, and with her cousin too), obeyed her father, fought for her cubs, and always paid her debts. At least at first.
Over time, as her plots fail, her sense of entitlement turns everyone into a crude instrumentalist abstraction. She seduces a number of weak men to do her bidding. She institutes torture of the known innocent. Her bad judgments multiply her problems so eventually she finds herself more and more isolated. Her father and oldest son dead, her brother/lover and uncle estranged, her daughter hostage in the south and her regime massively in debt—financially to the lending houses on the mainland and with other obligations to dozens of minions and co-conspirators. Her life is falling apart. What is her reaction? Resentment. She feels that she is owed big time for all her sufferings. This is not uncommon. Despite the public discourse, it isn’t just poor or working people who sometimes feel resentment for their lot in life. Often it is the rich and powerful. Oh, how they suffer, our rich and powerful! We hear their whining all the time: “Welfare cheats…creeping socialism…unfair taxation of the job creators…We built it!” So unsurprisingly, on every step of Cersi’s descent into evil she asserts to herself that all she takes from others (money, lands, freedom, life) is only her due. She is owed!
How does she figure this? Because she is the Queen so no one is equal to her. Since she has no equal she can make no real contracts, because contracts require equivalency. Graeber points out that, “Exchange, then, implies formal equality—or at last, the potential for it. This is precisely why kings have such trouble with it.” But not just queens and kings. Everyone in the one percent feels above real obligation, because inevitably “…hierarchy operates by a principle that is the very opposite of reciprocity.”
Hierarchy is the problem. It is organized in many different ways—politically, economically, sexually, racially, ethnically, religiously—but it always comes down to class. And once one group has an advantage they leverage it. The rich do get richer and the poor poorer. This is happening right now in the United States. But inequality can’t increase forever. Eventually, the system is rebooted (jubilee, reform) or overthrown (collapse, revolution). During these transitions (crisis: danger and opportunity) the specifics of individual realities and choices become crucial.
Consider Tyrion the Imp. He is witty, very romantic, self-depreciating, charming in every way. He even seems to have a real sense of honor. For I don’t agree with Graeber that all honor is part of the degradation dynamic described above. Even though I agree that the roots of the system of honor writ large are in degradation and the ownership of women and men, I would argue that there is another source for honor in accepting our human debts. Being a dwarf has helped Tyrion understand this other code that isn’t part of a patriarchal-warrior world and isn’t just for men. This kind of honor means putting the public good ahead of yourself, keeping your word and caring deeply for others. Tyrion has this honor: he loses his nose saving the capitol from sack, he does keep his word, and he loves perhaps too easily. But then again, he kills his father. It was a debt, you see. A human debt, which really can’t be paid fully but one must try.
As for monetary debt, Tyrion is a master of the Game of Thrones, the struggle for power. But he plays it to bring stability to the realm and to defend the capital city, King’s Landing, from rape and massacre. As Graeber shows in his book, money was not invented to make barter more efficient, it was invented to make slavery and war more efficient. He calls it the “military-coinage-slavery” complex.
Tyrion stands out in House Lannister because he is usually trying to “do the right thing.” But he is not alone, his brother seems to be developing a conscience as he grows older. But Jamie Lannister seems to be taking a different path to a richer sense of what paying one’s debts entails.
At first glance, incredibly handsome and an unnaturally adept warrior, Jamie could be the poster boy of hypocritical honor. He is known as The Kingslayer because he slaughtered King Aegon Targaryen, who he was sworn to protect. But, you have to admit, King Aegon was mad and needed killing. Still, Jamie is also a loyal instrument of his father, Lord Tywin, and is the lover of his own twin sister, Cersi. Yet, he seems to really honor his father and love his sister. However, he tries to kill young Brandon Stark because he saw the siblings together. But still…. Well, I could go on. For every act of good there is usually an evil one to balance it, at least in the beginning. But as the story progresses Jamie does seem to do more good and less evil
He risks all to keep some promises he has made to enemies of House Lannister. He stays loyal to his little brother Tyrion. It is true he is far from perfect. He murders a cousin to set up his escape from captivity. He doesn’t go out of his way to do the right thing, it is just that more and more he tries to keep his word.
Still, he is a long way from practicing honor as Lord Eddard Stark does. Eddard Stark is perhaps too honorable. He always plays fair, he warns his enemies when he discovers damaging information (such as the Cersi-Jamie romance), and ends up with his head cut off. But his real problem isn’t that he is honorable, he just doesn’t realize how treacherous others can be. One can have the honor of the Starks—keeping one’s personal promises, meeting one’s human obligations, fighting fair—and not be naïve.
Paying Our Debts
Elizabeth Warren, now running for Senator in Massachusetts, seems both honorable and realistic, according to Jeffrey Toobin’s recent New Yorker profile. It is significant that she made debt the object of her academic research. Along with Teresa Sullivan and Jay Westbook, she wrote As We Forgive Our Debtors (1989) and later The Fragile Middle Class (2000). They analyze the history of debt in the US, especially how the right of bankruptcy supplies a crucial safety valve for the pressure that inevitably grows through the spread of debt and therefore inequality. Without the relief of bankruptcy everyone in the middle and working classes are at risk of losing everything. In the US the right to personal bankruptcy was severely restricted in 2005,uu with the backing of Democrats as well as Republicans. Toobin quotes Warren on one of the major supporters of the bill: “Senators like Joe Biden should not be allowed to sell out women in the morning and be heralded as their friend in the evening.”
Toobin also draws on Neil Barofsky’s book Bailout to tell how during the battle for the new consumer agency that Warren designed, she kept criticizing Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner even though he controlled who would become its first director, a position she wanted. Barofsky called it “a remarkably principled act, the exact opposite of what any other person in Washington angling for a high-profile job would have done.”
Why is such an act of principle remarkable in Washington, D.C. these days? It is exactly the kind of thing my father and uncle, both managers in government, would have done. But as I’ve grown older I’ve come to see that acts of honesty, let alone honor, are not encouraged in bureaucracies. It is a problem with the moral basis of our society. Graeber also considers this crucial, and asks,
How is it that moral obligations between people come to be thought of as debts, and as a result, end up justifying behavior that would otherwise seem utterly immoral?
His book is an attempt to answer his own question. At one point, he explains how an early stage of this process happened in ancient India:
Thus was the market economy, born of war, gradually taken over by the government. Rather than stifle the spread of currency, the process seems to have doubled and even tripled it; the military logic was extended to the entire economy, the government systematically setting up its granaries, workshops, trading houses, warehouses, and jails staffed by salaried officials, and all selling products on the market so as to collect the pieces of silver paid off to the soldiers and officials and put them back into the royal treasuries again. The result was a monetization of daily life unlike anything India was to see for another two thousand years.
Which brings us to the neo-capitalist system we have today, where the monetization of daily life has reached its greatest penetration by far.
The story of the origins of capitalism …is the story of how an economy of credit was converted into an economy of interest; of the gradual transformation of moral networks by the intrusion of the impersonal—and often vindictive—power of the state.
So to make the story quick and dirty: community (communism) to market to government to militarization to coin and slavery to a world where as Graeber puts it, “the ultimate end of human existence to be the accumulation of material wealth, with ideals like morality and justice being reframed as tools designed to satisfy the masses.”
This then, is the world we live in. Where a billion people go to bed hungry every night, where thousands of children die every day from dirty water. Where innocent girls in Pakistan are shot for writing about their desire for freedom and where other innocent girls are killed by drones sent to destroy those who would shoot little girls. But of course, none of this is done for the sake of little girls, or boys, or most women or men. It is part of our planet’s own Game of Thrones, where instead of kings and queens and other lords it is presidents and CEOs and the others of the one percent who contend for power and its rewards, and the rest of us who pay the price.
So we need to reform our concept of honor, strip it of its patriarchal forms and links to degradation. Honor needs to become a personal matter, about our own behavior; it is not about resentments or insults or the lust to dominate others—it is about doing the right thing. We need to accept the human debts we can never pay and restructure our culture to end the bad monetary debts that lead to hierarchical (collapsing) systems.
The real sin is to think you can, and should, pay all debts. After all “human debt” is another word for human interdependence. Graeber again:
To turn a favor (human debt) to money debt, people need to be turned into quantities…debt peonage, slavery, whatever… "This in turns leads to the great embarrassing fact that haunts all attempts to represent the market as the highest form of human freedom: that historically, impersonal, commercial markets originate in theft."
In its own way, the
Ice and Fire epic also reveals how the idea of debt is one of the central mechanisms of societal control. The two types of debt work together, as those in power turn our financial debts into moral debts that justify their domination while their financial debts are covered by the State. So, inevitably, the freedom from debt becomes also the freedom from oppression. Graeber notes that, in fact, the “first use of the word Freedom” was when King Enmetena of the ancient Kingdom of Lagash declared a debt amnesty in 2402 BC.
Freedom is still freedom from unfair debts, both financial and moral. This is certainly clear to the Greeks and Spanish now and it is becoming evident to North Americans as well. The successful student protests in Quebec is the first clear victory in this struggle. While Occupy has turned increasing attention to debt in all its forms. In Atlanta, Occupy has allied with police to try and save one retired detective's house and Bernal Heights Occupy of San Francisco has disrupted a number of foreclosure auctions (I was honored to attend one such protest) and directly confronted foreclosing banks (Deutsche Bank, Wells Fargo) successfully to keep their neighbors in their homes. Other Occupy groups are taking up the issue of debt, and, unsurprisingly, David Graeber has joined in calling for a focus on debt for explaining how our politics have gone so wrong and organizing to change them.
I learned a great deal, on reflection, from the Knott’s Berry Farm sanitized fantasy of the Old West and even more from Disneyland’s Brave New World. Learning the real history of the West, and learning about the real values of the Disney Corporation (control, money, Stepford customers), I am not that interested in visiting either place again. The land of Ice and Fire, on the other hand, is a place I certainly do want to go to again and again, because it is both illuminating and honest. Reading Martin’s novels through the lens of Graeber’s analysis in Debt reveals not just that Martin is a sophisticated and insightful writer, but more importantly just how arbitrary and profoundly corrupt our own society is. Writ large, into real suffering our world is just as horrible as the world of the Lannisters. George Martin will decide what happens in that world. We will decide what happens here. We need to pay our debt from the past forward, to the future. We need to step up.
I’ll leave the last word to Graeber. This passage beautifully evokes for me why debt is so important, as is revealed in the world of Ice and Fire and manifestly here on our living Earth:
What is a debt, anyway? A debt is just the perversion of a promise. It is a promise corrupted by both math and violence. If freedom (real freedom) is the ability to make friends, then it is also, necessarily, the ability to make real promises. What sorts of promises might genuinely free men and women make to one another? At this point we can’t even say. It’s more a question of how we can get to a place that will allow us to find out. And the first step in that journey, in turn, is to accept that in the largest scheme of things, just as no one has the right to tell us our true value, no one has the right to tell us what we truly owe.