9 Escape Debt

A year ago I didn’t have cent to my name. Now I owe $2 million.

Mark Twain

Banks are evil. This might strike you as a glib oversimplification of the problem of money and debt but, not so long ago, this was literally true. From the early medieval age and right up to 1500 and beyond, lending money at interest, or usury, was strictly off the agenda for anyone who was serious about his or her salvation. It was a sin, it was proscribed, it was evil.

The reason for the outlawing of usury was that time was a gift from God and therefore it could not be bought or sold. Christ, in St Luke’s Gospel, says, ‘Lend, hoping for nothing again’ (6.35). Usury also went against Christian teaching because it involved the exploitation of a neighbour who had fallen on hard times, which is what lending money is all about. It was also seen as a lazy way to make money, since all you had to do to make a profit was to wait. Usury was not real work; it created nothing and it caused misery. Medieval churches abound with carvings of ‘moneybags’ money-lenders.

As a measure of how much things have changed, we should look at the story of Father O’Callaghan, the idealistic priest who tried to bring back the old laws against usury in the early nineteenth century, that great era of capitalist expansion. Of course, he got nowhere, as his ideas were completely unsuited to the avaricious ethic of the time. His first act, in 1819, after he became enlightened on this issue, was to refuse to absolve a corn-dealer on his deathbed until he had repaid all the interest he had made from his debtors. This practice was in keeping with medieval custom: according to Jacques Le Goff, ‘moneybags’ moneylenders, on their deathbeds, would pay back everyone they had ripped off for fear of going to hell. I suppose, in those days, at least it was easy to find a single accountable individual: in today’s era of ‘I’m only doing my job,’ no one takes responsibility for anything.

Well, the corn-dealer repented and the money was paid back. But, following complaints from other usurers – or businessmen busy men, busybodies – in the area, O’Callaghan was reined in by his local bishop and finally disallowed from saying Mass. The poor, outcast O’Callaghan, who had simply made a statement which in 1200 would have been as uncontroversial as saying, ‘Black is black,’ roamed the world in search of more orthodox Catholics with whom to hook up. In this search he failed, and even the Vatican became fed up with him. William Cobbett, though, published O’Callaghan’s book on usury, as it fitted in with his own sense that the modern industrial system actually enslaved rather than liberated people, with the ad line: ‘It ought to be read by every man, and especially every young man, in the kingdom.’

Banking – credit notes and the like – was invented by the great Medici family in Florence in the thirteenth century. Somehow, they combined usury with being holy, probably because they were the Pope’s bankers. The head of the family, Cosimo de’Medici, used to go for long walks with his priest to discuss the issues. He made up for his usury by lavishing huge sums on building projects and art. Big government debt came with war. When monarchies wanted to raise money for wars, they would borrow from a wealthy family like the Barings. The Barings would charge them interest on these loans, and so the country went into permanent debt. According to Cobbett, it was Henry VIII who started this system. In those days, though, the banks were relatively insignificant, as they merely had a hold on the government or the monarchy; now, these monstrous concerns own all our money. And that, of course, is in addition to our income taxes, which also go back to the banks as contributions to the interest on government loans which pay for past or future wars.

Today’s banks make the most unbelievably enormous profits: HSBC declared profits of £10 billion in 2005. This puts a family like the Medicis on the scale of a corner shop by comparison. Truly, usury has been very profitable when practised on a highly organized, global scale. The banks tell us they are working selflessly for the benefit of their shareholders and their customers, thereby promoting themselves almost as charitable institutions, but of course this pretence of benevolence immediately crumbles when you find out that the people who are running the company are also the biggest shareholders in it and therefore have the keenest interest in its profitability. The men at the top of these firms are earning obscene amounts of money by enslaving the rest of us. It should be of some comfort to us that they are all going straight to hell, though of course it would be far more satisfying to see them suffer on this earth.

In the meantime, what can we do to free ourselves from this trap? How do we escape the bondage of debt? The point about usury is important, because it reveals the bankers in their true light, as venal and profit-centred rather than in any way paternalistic. It shows that the medievals were essentially anti-capitalist. As Jacques Le Goff writes in his study of the subject, Your Money or Your Life:

The medieval usurer found himself in a strange situation. Within a history of the longue durée (a history of the deeply rooted and slowly changing), the usurer is the precursor of capitalism, an economic system that, despite its injustices and failings, is part of the West’s trajectory of progress. But from all contemporary points of view, in his own day this was a man in disgrace.

So, the ordinary man in the street can feel morally superior to the bankers. The ‘we look after you’ self-advertising of banks is simply that: advertising, a marketing trick, a seduction technique. They are interested in maximum profits, and that is that. So you should never, ever feel guilty for having an overdraft; they merely use this guilt in order to make you feel you deserve it when they whack on a load of super-usurious charges, those admin fees and extra charges they steal from you without asking. These are on top of the interest they are already charging! They are the ones who should be feeling guilty – very guilty. I wonder what the thirteenth-century monks would have to say about their shenanigans? Well, we know. The thirteenth-century monk Thomas of Cobham wrote, ‘It is clear that the usurer cannot be considered a sincere penitent unless he has returned everything that he has extorted through the sin of usury.’

Truly, the bankers are double- and triple-damned! The amazing thing is that we, the servile masses, act as though we are grateful when they grant us an overdraft! We tug our forelocks and say, ‘Oh, thank you, kind sir! You’re ever so munificent!’ Well, there is in fact some debate in banking circles as to whether the various super-usurious overdraft charges and the rest are actually legally enforceable. Certainly, if you complain to your bank, as I did the other day about £130 worth of overdraft charges, they will often refund them. They are simply trying to get away with as much as they can and, although the odds seem stacked, because they are powerful and we are small, it is possible to stand up for yourself.

The other thing to get straight in our heads is that banks love you to be in debt. They adore it; they make so much money out of it. They trade in your debt; debts are sold on to investment funds and the like. That is why we are constantly encouraged to be reckless in our spending and put that dream holiday or car or new TV on the credit card. That is why the usurers spend so much money advertising their ‘financial services’ – and there’s a euphemism for usury if ever I heard one – on the television. They batter you with these ads, and a lot of them are on kids’ TV, with the effect that five-year-olds are going into the kitchen and saying to their mum and dad: ‘Have you considered Ocean Finance? They’re really nice people.’ And, in fact, any ad for spending money, and most ads do encourage the spending of money, is a free ad for a bank, because the more you spend, the more they make. The latest thing is that evil supermarkets are also getting in on the usury business, offering loans, bank accounts and all the rest of the sorry range of so-called ‘financial services’.

So, the very fact that we are daily actively, constantly and quite scandalously encouraged, nay, brainwashed, to get into debt by the culture all around us should in itself remove any guilt we feel about being in debt. You’re supposed to be in debt! Debt makes the world go round.

But, yes, being in debt can feel like wearing boots of lead. It puts a mighty obstacle between our selves and our dreams. It is a bondage. It ties us down. We make debt-repayment a priority and postpone the thing it is that we really want to do. Therefore, we end up staying in our slave-jobs. ‘I hate my job and would love to quit,’ people say, ‘but I owe five grand to the bank, so I can’t.’ In this respect, debt has been compared by many to a modern form of indentured labour. You get into debt, and then you are stuck in a job you hate in order to pay off the debt. This helps the system, as it means that most of us are more or less kept quiet and toiling. Debt also causes huge anxiety, health problems and breakdowns. Witness the recent rise of debt-counselling services.

The medievals were right: usury is bad. Why did we not listen?

Well, in my own experience, quitting your job is actually the only way to pay off that debt. The higher your wages, the bigger your debt. By a strange paradoxical process, working in a job seems to increase your debt rather than decrease it, as any wage slave will tell you. I have friends earning twice or ten times as much as I do, but they are in debt because they spend so much money. If you live and work at home, then you don’t spend in the same way. Indeed, rat-race evacuees who used to go on John Seymour’s smallholding courses referred to themselves as DFKs, which stands for Debt-Free Killers (the ‘Killers’ bit refers to all the slugs and snails they were wiping out). It is only by exiting the system that you gradually get rid of debt. Staying in the system, i.e. remaining dependent on it, will tend to increase debt, while freedom and self-sufficiency will allow you to snap your fingers at it. Again, I advise looking at the Permaculture magazine, as there is a lot of advice within its pages on how to get out of debt as part of the journey towards self-reliance.

The other option is not to care. The apparently enslaving nature of debt is in itself a myth. It will only enslave us if we allow it to do so. The subject of debt is frequently discussed on the Idler’s web forum, where contributors will say: ‘I’d love to live the idle life, but I’ve got this enormous debt.’ I like in particular the rejoinder of Idler contributor Sarah Janes, who says: ‘I don’t think about my debt.’ Similarly, the great eighteenth-century radical and free spirit John Wilkes was constantly in debt, but he never allowed the debt to come between him and the things he wanted to do. He did not allow the debt to become a disabling ‘if only’ in his mind. This is not to deny the very real effects of high levels of debt on our mental and physical health. I know what it’s like, because I’ve been there, head in hands at the kitchen table, backs of envelopes and a calculator in front of me. But understanding that money really is mind-forg’d will help us to remove the manacles. We ourselves are complicit in the creation of the debt-and-money myth. Cease to believe in it, and it will no longer have any power over us. That’s the first step.

You’re very unlikely to be cast into the streets. One Idler reader became so worried about her debt that she went to her local Citizens Advice Bureau. They arranged with her creditors for her to pay back the trifling sum of £2 per month. Eighteen months later, out of laziness, she stopped making the payments. Since then, two years have passed, and she has not been hassled for the money. What an inspiring story! Presumably her creditors finally gave up and wrote the debt off.

To understand the essentially fictional nature of debt, it helps to understand the essentially fictional nature of money itself. For money, as the banker-turned-writer Edward Chancellor has argued, does not exist. It is not money, he says, but credit that makes the world go round. Credit, that strange quality that determines how much money you could borrow if you wanted to. Your credit is bound up with notions of your moral worth or other people’s confidence in you. Damien Hirst’s mother tells the story of when Hirst was starting out as an artist. He needed an overdraft, asked the bank for one and was flatly refused. But when he went back to the bank accompanied by his massively confident old Etonian art dealer Jay Jopling and let him do all the talking, the loan was granted.

It is credit, not cash, that makes wealth: apparently, rich people are often simply more spectacularly in debt than the rest of us. Debt, therefore, is not to be feared. When I look at my bank balances on the computer, the nature of money becomes clearer. Just numbers on a screen. How can those numbers affect my mental health unless I allow them to do so? My credit is the bank’s debt and vice versa. It doesn’t really matter.

The strange, elusive, flighty nature of debt was expressed superbly by Daniel Defoe, who attempted an explanation in his ‘An Essay upon Public Credit’ (1710):

I am to speak of what all People are busie about, but not one in Forty understands … If a Man goes about to explain it by Words, he rather struggles to lose himself in the Wood, than bring others out of it. It is best describ’d by it self; ’tis like the Wind that blows where it lists, we hear the sound thereof, but hardly know whence it comes, or whither it goes.

Like the Soul in the Body, it acts all Substance, yet is it self Immaterial; it gives Motion, yet it self cannot be said to Exist, it creates Forms, yet has itself no Form, it is neither Quantity or Quality; it has no Whereness, or Whenness, Scite, or Habit. If I should say it is the essential Shadow of something that is Not; should I not Puzzle the thing rather than Explain it, and leave you and my self more in the Dark than we were before.

Again, the notion of credit is seen as completely formless, a sort of vapour that exists only in the mind, or by common delusion. Making solid, real things at home is an effective way of escaping from reflection on the impossibly abstract nature of money. To free yourself from the cycle of work-spend-debt-work, simply stop consuming and start creating. The money system has created an internal division inside all of us between the producer and the consumer. Every day, in the business world, the ordinary people of the country are referred to as ‘consumers’, which is in itself a terribly avaricious word. Think of the other meaning of ‘consumption’, a deadly disease of romantic poets, which consumed the body until it expired, having been sapped, drained, used up, emptied out. To be a consumer is to drain the world, to eat it, to stuff it into our faces, to wither it, to dry up its resources, to mine it of all its bounty; in short, to kill it. But being a creator or a producer, that is the very opposite.

We should aim to produce some of the things we consume. A simple and enjoyable tip, which I have mentioned before and will return to again, is to grow some of your own vegetables and fruit. In doing this, the split between producer and consumer is removed and we become whole again. I think this is what accounts for the very great and deep pleasure one feels when pulling up one’s own carrots or radishes from the ground. It feels like something we are meant to be doing. It is an act of radical integration. I am planning to start a magazine for the anarchic gardener, which will be called The Radish. In it, we will combine practical advice on growing organic vegetables with the development of a radical political philosophy. We will be radical in all senses of the word, as, of course, ‘radish’ comes from the Latin ‘radix’, meaning ‘root’.

Above all, to be free of debt, we need to abandon our fear of poverty. I don’t advocate true pauperism, in other words, being homeless and starving. But genteel poverty, having enough for needs and the bare necessities but limiting yourself when it comes to wants and desires, is a laudable state. Going back again to the Middle Ages, it is clear that being poor was actually considered to be a worthy thing. The poor were an important part of society. After all, Jesus and the Apostles were poor, and the mendicant orders sought to copy the apostolic life. The Catholic academic George O’Brien, in his 1923 essay ‘The Economic Effects of the Reformation’, points to the example of the wandering holy men:

… even begging was dignified by the example of the mendicant friars. Europe was thickly covered with institutions for the relief of every variety of poverty and suffering, and the resources of the monastic establishments were supplemented by private alms, the giving of which was imposed as a strict duty on the owners of property. The Reformation, by its attack on the ecclesiastical foundations, deprived the poor of the former of these modes of relief, and greatly diminished the latter by its insistence on the doctrine of justification by faith alone.

Poor people were welcomed because, for one thing, they offered the opportunity for others to give alms, which was a religious and social requirement in the Middle Ages. Charity was at the centre of the quest for salvation. Also, as we mentioned earlier, to cease striving after gain was to put all your faith in Providence. People didn’t feel pity for the poor, the poor were almost looked up to: it was as valid in the eyes of God to be poor as to be rich, perhaps even better. Saints made a virtue out of their poverty. Today, we make the horrible mistake of assuming that the poor want to be rich. We pity the poor and the homeless, and we assume that they want to enjoy the unholy race for gain, to become bourgeois themselves. Maybe, just maybe, they don’t. And perhaps so-called ‘poor’ countries around the world don’t want to join the bourgeois system either.

As O’Brien goes on to say:

The most regrettable result of the change from the medieval to the modern system of poor relief is that it has rendered the receipt of relief despicable, and that poverty has come in modern times to be looked on as a disgrace. The desire of the reformers to put an end to mendicancy, and to ensure that, as far as possible, the Biblical injunction that none should eat but those who worked should be applied literally, led them to impute a certain degree of moral disapprobation to the receipt of alms except by the sick and disabled, and the poor laws of the reformed countries tended to take on a degree of harshness towards the poor, which was happily absent in Catholic days.

Today, though, the charitable impulse has been co-opted by giant companies which exploit the poorer people with bloated job-creation schemes. Charity is good but, under capitalism, our instinctive charitable nature is exploited. Working for a charity is today a career option for people who want to earn a lot of money while simultaneously displaying to the world that they are compassionate people. Aid and debt relief tend to come with strings attached; he who pays the piper calls the tune. Western countries offer debt relief to African countries, but only if they Westernize themselves, which is generally a shorthand for allowing the exploiters to go in and replace a self-sufficient rural economy with an urban, wage-dependent, industrial one. The satirical magazine Whitestones has written a pastiche of Live Aid’s ‘Feed the World’ called ‘Milk the World’ which includes the line ‘Money down the drain, Swiss banks overflow.’ Today, charity can simply be a way of opening up new foreign markets for export. And institutional charity can wreck local businesses and difference. In Zambia, for example, home fashion industries have been completely destroyed because Oxfam have brought in cheap second-hand clothes from the UK.

Debt appears to be an enslaver, but once you realize it doesn’t truly exist, you can be free from it, because how can you be enslaved by the product of someone else’s imagination? Snap your fingers at the usurers. Why should you care about them? They are damned anyway! Sneer at their threatening letters, laugh at their puny figures on screens, chortle at their boring lives and at the damnation that awaits them!

CUT UP YOUR CREDIT CARD