Debt: The First 5000 Years - autonomous learning

68 DEBT
Set out this way, though, the argument begins to undermine its
very premise. These are nothing like commercial debts. After all, one
might repay one's parents by having children, but one is not generally
thought to have repaid one's creditors if one lends the cash to
someone else.58
Myself, I wonder: Couldn't that really be the point Perhaps what
the authors of the Brahmanas were really demonstrating was that, in
the final analysis, our relation with the cosmos is ultimately nothing like
a commercial transaction, nor could it be. That is because commercial
transactions imply both equality and separation. These examples are
all about overcoming separation: you are free from your debt to your
ancestors when you become an ancestor; you are free from your debt
to the sages when you become a sage, you are free from your debt to
humanity when you act with humanity. All the more so if one is speaking
of the universe. If you cannot bargain with the gods because they
already have everything, then you certainly cannot bargain with the
universe, because the universe is everything-and that everything necessarily
includes yourself. One could in fact interpret this list as a subtle
way of saying that the only way of "freeing oneself" from the debt was
not literally repaying debts, but rather showing that these debts do
not exist because one is not in fact separate to begin with, and hence
that the very notion of canceling the debt, and achieving a separate,
autonomous existence, was ridiculous from the start. Or even that the
very presumption of positing oneself as separate from humanity or the
cosmos, so much so that one can enter into one-to-one dealings with
it, is itself the crime that can be answered only by death. Our guilt is
not due to the fact that we cannot repay our debt to the universe. Our
guilt is our presumption in thinking of ourselves as being in any sense
an equivalent to Everything Else that Exists or Has Ever Existed, so as
to be able to conceive of such a debt in the first place.59
Or let us look at the other side of the equation. Even if it is possible
to imagine ourselves as standing in a position of absolute debt to
the cosmos, or to humanity, the next question becomes: Who exactly
has a right to speak for the cosmos, or humanity, to tell us how that
debt must be repaid If there's anything more preposterous than claiming
to stand apart from the entire universe so as to enter into negotiations
with it, it is claiming to speak for the other side.
If one were looking for the ethos for an individualistic society such
as our own, one way to do it might well be to say: we all owe an infinite
debt to humanity, society, nature, or the cosmos (however one prefers
to frame it), but no one else could possibly tell us how we are to pay it.
This at least would be intellectually consistent. If so, it would actually