Debt: The First 5000 Years - autonomous learning

66 DEBT
"society." It's this debt to society that we project onto the gods. It's this
same debt that then gets taken up by kings and national governments.
What makes the concept of society so deceptive is that we assume
the world is organized into a series of compact, modular units called
"societies," and that all people know which one they're in. Historically,
this is very rarely the case. Imagine I am a Christian Armenia!)
merchant living under the reign of Genghis Khan. What is "society"
for me Is it the city where I grew up, the society of international
merchants (with its own elaborate codes of conduct) within which I
conduct my daily affairs, other speakers of Armenian, Christendom (or
maybe just Orthodox Christendom), or the inhabitants of the Mongol
empire itself, which stretched from the Mediterranean to Korea Historically,
kingdoms and empires have rarely been the most important
reference points in peoples' lives. Kingdoms rise and fall; they also
strengthen and weaken; governments may make their presence known
in people's lives quite sporadically, and many people in history were
never entirely clear whose government they were actually in. Even until
quite recently, many of the world's inhabitants were never even quite
sure what country they were supposed to be in, or why it should matter.
My mother, who was born a Jew in Poland, once told me a joke
from her childhood:
There was a small town located along the frontier between
Russia and Poland; no one was ever quite sure to which it
belonged. One day an official treaty was signed and not long
after, surveyors arrived to draw a border. Some villagers approached
them where they had set up their equipment on a
nearby hill.
"So where are we, Russia or Poland"
"According to our calculations, your village now begins exactly
thirty-seven meters into Poland. "
The villagers immediately began dancing for joy.
"Why" the surveyors asked. "What difference does it
make"
"Don't you know what this means" they replied. "It means
we'll never have to endure another one of those terrible Russian
winters! "
However, if we are born with an infinite debt to all those people
who made our existence possible, but there is no natural unit called
"society"-then who or what exactly do we really owe it to Everyone
Everything Some people or things more than others And how do we