Debt: The First 5000 Years - autonomous learning

112 DEBT
have acted toward him in the past. To be an aristocrat is largely to
insist that in the past, others have treated you as an aristocrat (since
aristocrats don't really do anything in particular, most spend their time
simply existing in some sort of putatively superior state), and therefore
should continue to do so. Much of the art of being such a person is that
of treating oneself in such a manner that it conveys how you expect
others to treat you: in the case of actual kings, covering oneself with
gold so as to suggest that others do likewise. On the other end of the
scale, this is also how abuse becomes self-legitimating. As a former
student of mine, Sarah Stillman, pointed out: in the United States, if
a middle-class thirteen-year-old girl is kidnapped, raped, and killed,
it is considered an agonizing national crisis that everyone with a television
is expected to follow for several weeks. If a thirteen-year-old
girl is turned out as a child prostitute, raped systematically for years,
and ultimately killed, all this is considered unremarkable-really just
the sort of thing one can expect to end up happening to someone
like that.43
When objects of material wealth pass back and forth between superiors
and inferiors as gifts or payments, the key principle seems to
be that the sorts of things given on each side should be considered
fundamentally different in quality, their relative value impossible to
quantify-the result being that there is no way to even conceive of a
squaring of accounts. Even if Medieval writers insisted on imagining
society as a hierarchy in which priests pray for everyone, nobles fight
for everyone, and peasants feed everyone, it never even occurred to
anyone to establish how many prayers or how much military protection
was equivalent to a ton of wheat. Nor did anyone ever consider
making such a calculation. Neither is it that "lowly" sorts of people are
necessarily given lowly sorts of things and vice versa. Sometimes it is
quite the opposite. Until recently, just about any notable philosopher,
artist, poet, or musician was required to find a wealthy patron for
support. Famous works of poetry or philosophy are often prefacedoddly,
to the modern eye-with gushing, sycophantic praise for the
wisdom and virtue of some long-forgotten earl or count who provided
a meager stipend. The fact that the noble patron merely provided
room and board, or money, and that the client showed his gratitude
by painting the Mona Lisa, or composing the Toccata and Fugue in
D Minor, was in no way seen to compromise the assumption of the
noble's intrinsic superiority.
There is one great exception to this principle, and that is the phenomenon
of hierarchical redistribution. Here, though, rather than giving
back and forth the same sorts of things, they give back and forth