Perpetual debt serves to escape 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. … 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: The confluence of Nietzschean genealogy (escaping freedom via guilt), debt economics, and Benjamin’s reading of capitalism as a guilt-producing cult is genuinely paradigm-producing rather than a routine essay move.
• XREF: Connects Benjamin’s capitalism-as-religion thesis with the Frankfurt School treatment of religion and exchange; and to Nietzsche’s idea that debt/guilt underwrites the moral order in On the Genealogy of Morality. — connects to: Unlimited self-optimization becomes a new coercion producing depression and burnout; Debt has historically served to capture and fix people within political bonds — Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, 133; Freedom requires a perpetual renewal of self-choice without any support — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1147 (+8 more)

Related

• Debt is a device for evading the burden of freedom. (similarity 0.93)
• The economy structurally requires debt that it then moralises as individual failing. (similarity 0.81)

Broader Connections

• Debt has historically served to capture and fix people within political bonds #expands (0.85) — Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, 133
• Freedom requires a perpetual renewal of self-choice without any support #expands (0.80) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1147
• Debt and finance work biopolitically to produce compliant self-financing subjectivities #expands (0.80) — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 90
• Financialization captures and encloses human creative capacity through debt #expands (0.78) — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 390
• Absolute freedom makes one’s every choice perpetually fragile and invertible #corroborates (0.78)
• Individual resistance is reabsorbed into speculation through personal debts and savings #complicates (0.75) — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 544
• The past is kept in suspense by the perpetual expectation that freedom generates. #corroborates (0.75)
• Manusmriti codified differential interest rates that institutionalized perpetual debt servitude #exemplifies (0.75) — Ambedkar, B R, Annihilation of Caste_ The Annotated…, 60
• Modern individual freedom simultaneously produces isolation and readiness for new bondage #complicates (0.72) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1127