Debt: The First 5000 Years - autonomous learning

HONOR AND DEGRADATION 209
lifted from a somewhat marginal practice to become the very essence of
politics. As endless epics, sagas, and eddas attest, heroes become heroes
by making others small. In Ireland and Wales, we can observe how this
very ability to degrade others, to remove unique human beings from
their hearths and families and thus render them anonymous units of
accounting-the Irish slave-girl currency, the Welsh washerwomen-is
itself the highest expression of honor.
In heroic societies, the role of violence is not hidden-it's glorified.
Often, it can form the basis of one's most intimate relations. In the
Iliad, Achilles sees nothing shameful in his relation with his slave-girl,
Briseis, whose husband and brothers he killed; he refers to her as his
"prize of honor," but almost in the very same breath, he also insists
that, just any decent man must love and care for his household dependents,
"so I from my heart loved this one, even though I won her with
my spear." 127
That such relations of intimacy can often develop between men of
honor and those they have stripped of their dignity, history can well attest.
After all, the annihilation of any possibility of equality also eliminates
any question of debt, of any relation other than power. It allows
a certain clarity. This is presumably why emperors and kings have such
a notorious tendency to surround themselves with slaves or eunuchs.
There is something more here, though. If one looks across the expanse
of history, one cannot help but notice a curious sense of identification
between the most exalted and the most degraded; particularly,
between emperors and kings, and slaves. Many kings surround themselves
with slaves, appoint slave ministers-there have even been, as
with the Mamluks in Egypt, actual dynasties of slaves. Kings surround
themselves with slaves for the same reason that they surround themselves
with eunuchs: because the slaves and criminals have no families
or friends, no possibility of other loyalties-or at least that, in principle,
they shouldn't. But in a way, kings should really be like that too.
As many an African proverb emphasizes: a proper king has no relatives
either, or at least, he acts as if he does not.m In other words, the king
and slave are mirror images, in that unlike normal human beings who
are defined by their commitments to others, they are defined only by
relations of power. They are as close to perfectly isolated, alienated
beings as one can possibly become.
At this point we can finally see what's really at stake in our peculiar
habit of defining ourselves simultaneously as master and slave,
reduplicating the most brutal aspects of the ancient household in our
very concept of ourselves, as masters of our freedoms, or as owners
of our very selves. It is the only way that we can imagine ourselves as