Debt: The First 5000 Years - autonomous learning

326 DEBT
Part II:
The World of Credit and the World of Interest
Of all the beings that have existence
only in the minds of men, nothing is
more fa ntastical and nice than Credit;
it is never to be fo rced; it hangs upon
opinion; it depends upon our passions
of hope and fear; it comes many times
unsought-for, and often goes away
without reason; and once lost, it is
hardly to be quite recovered.
-Charles Davenant, 1696
He that has lost his credit is dead to
the world.
-English and German Proverb
The peasants' visions of communistic brotherhood did not come out
of nowhere. They were rooted in real daily experience: of the maintenance
of common fields and forests, of everyday cooperation and
neighborly solidarity. It is out of such homely experience of everyday
communism that grand mythic visions are always built.38 Obviously,
rural communities were also divided, squabbling places, since communities
always are-but insofar as they are communities at all, they
are necessarily founded on a ground of mutual aid. The same, incidentally,
can be said of members of the aristocracy, who might have
fought endlessly over love, land, honor, and religion, but nonetheless
still cooperated remarkably well with one another when it really mattered
(most of all, when their position as aristocrats was threatened);
just as the merchants and bankers, much as they competed with one
another, managed to close ranks when it really mattered. This is what
I refer to as the "communism of the rich," and it is a powerful force in
human history.39
The same, as we've seen repeatedly, applies to credit. There are
always different standards for those one considers friends or neighbors.
The inexorable nature of interest-bearing debt, and the alternately savage
and calculating behavior of those enslaved to it, are typical above
all of dealings between strangers: it's unlikely that Casimir felt much
more kinship with his peasants than Cortes did with the Aztecs (in