Debt is a device for evading the burden of freedom.

Evidence

Do we really want to be free? Didn’t we invent God so we wouldn’t have to be free? Before God, we are all debtors: guilty (schuldig). But debt – guilt – destroys freedom. Today, politicians appeal to high debt rates to explain that their freedom to act is massively restricted. Free from debt – that is, wholly free – we would truly have to act. Perhaps we run up debts perpetually so we won’t need to do so – that is, so we won’t need to be free, or responsible. Don’t our debts prove that we don’t have the power to be free? Could it be that Capital is a new God, making us guilty and debt-ridden again? Walter Benjamin held that capitalism is a religion. As he put it, capitalism represents the ‘first case of a cult that creates guilt, not atonement’ (der erste Fall eines nicht entsühnenden, sondern verschuldenden Kultus). Since there is no possibility of relieving debt and guilt, the state of unfreedom perpetuates itself: ‘A vast sense of guilt that is unable to find relief seizes on the cult, not to atone for this guilt but to make it universal.’ — Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics, 30

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Inverts the commonsense reading of guilt as an obstacle to freedom: debt becomes a refuge from the demand to act freely. The God/debt/guilt/freedom etymology chain resists compression.
• XREF: connects to: Perpetual debt serves to escape the burden of freedom — Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New…, 30; Debt operates as a capture of the debtor’s future time. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1666; Finance wields power by forcing agency to express itself as debt — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 264 (+4 more)

Related

• Perpetual debt serves to escape the burden of freedom (similarity 0.93)
• The economy structurally requires debt that it then moralises as individual failing. (similarity 0.84)
• Debt operates as a capture of the debtor’s future time. (similarity 0.80)
• Debt functions as a mechanism extending working life indefinitely (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Perpetual debt serves to escape the burden of freedom #corroborates (0.95) — Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics, 30
• Finance wields power by forcing agency to express itself as debt #expands (0.82) — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 264
• Debt and finance work biopolitically to produce compliant self-financing subjectivities #expands (0.80) — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 90
• Power creates freedom, not the other way around. #contradicts (0.80) — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 273
• Finance operates as a disciplinary mechanism that mobilizes debt to exploit labor. #expands (0.75) — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 58
• Debt operates as a capture of the debtor’s future time. #complicates (0.72) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1666
• Radical debt politics requires expanding debt into a concept of shared social bonds. #responds-to (0.70) — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 237