Debt: The First 5000 Years - autonomous learning

114 DEBT
friends, and feudal lords when dealing with small children . It is very
hard to imagine a society where people wouldn't be both.
The obvious question is: If we are all ordinarily moving back and
forth between completely different systems of moral accounting, why
hasn't anybody noticed this Why, instead, do we continually feel the
need to reframe everything in terms of reciprocity
Here we must return to the fact that reciprocity is our main way of
imagining justice. In particular, it is what we fall back on when we're
thinking in the abstract, and especially when we're trying to create an
idealized picture of society. I've already given examples of this sort of
thing. Iroquois communities were based on an ethos that required everyone
to be attentive to the needs of several different sorts of people:
their friends, their families, members of their matrilineal clans, even
friendly strangers in situations of hardship. It was when they had to
think about society in the abstract that they started to emphasize the
two sides of the village, each of which had to bury the other's dead.
It was a way of imagining communism through reciprocity. Similarly,
feudalism was a notoriously messy and complicated business, but whenever
Medieval thinkers generalized about it, they reduced all its ranks
and orders into one simple formula in which each order contributed its
share: "Some pray, some fight, still others work. "45 Even hierarchy was
seen as ultimately reciprocal, despite this formula having nothing to
do with the real relations between priests, knights, and peasants really
operated on the ground. Anthropologists are familiar with the phenomenon:
it's only when people who have never had occasion to really
think about their society or culture as a whole, who probably weren't
even aware they were living inside something other people considered
a "society" or a "culture," are asked to explain how everything works
that they say things like "this is how we repay our mothers for the pain
of having raised us," or puzzle over conceptual diagrams in which clan
A gives their women in marriage to clan B who gives theirs to clan C,
who gives theirs back to A again, but which never seem to quite correspond
to what real people actually do.46 When trying to imagine a
just society, it's hard not to evoke images of balance and symmetry, of
elegant geometries where everything balances out.
The idea that there is something called "the market" is not so very
different. Economists will often admit this, if you ask them in the right
way. Markets aren't real. They are mathematical models, created by
imagining a self-contained world where everyone has exactly the same
motivation and the same knowledge and is engaging in the same selfinterested
calculating exchange. Economists are aware that reality is
always more complicated; but they are also aware that to come up with