Free Debt by David Graeber Page B

measuring, of calculating. 7
    Smith, too, we will remember, saw the origins of language—and hence of human thought—as lying in our propensity to “exchange one thing for another,” in which he also saw the origins of the market. 8 The urge to trade, to compare values, is the very thing that makes us intelligent beings, and different from other animals. Society comes later—which means our ideas about responsibilities to other people first take shape in strictly commercial terms.
    Unlike with Smith, however, it never occurred to Nietzsche that you could have a world where all such transactions immediately cancel out. Any system of commercial accounting, he assumed, will produce creditors and debtors. In fact, he believed that it was from this very fact that human morality emerged. Note, he says, how the German word
schuld
means both “debt” and “guilt.” At first, to be in debt was simply to be guilty, and creditors delighted in punishing debtors unable to repay their loans by inflicting “all sorts of humiliation and torture on the body of the debtor, for instance, cutting as much flesh off as seemed appropriate for the debt.” 9 In fact, Nietzsche went so far as to insist that those original barbarian law codes that tabulated so much for a ruined eye, so much for a severed finger, were not originally meant to fix rates of monetary compensation for the loss of eyes and fingers, but to establish how much of the debtor’s body creditors were allowed to take! Needless to say, he doesn’t provide a scintilla of evidence for this (none exists). 10 But to ask for evidence would be to miss the point. We are dealing here not with a real historical argument but with a purely imaginative exercise.
    When humans did begin to form communities, Nietzsche continues, they necessarily began to imagine their relationship to the community in these terms. The tribe provides them with peace and security. They are therefore in its debt. Obeying its laws is a way of paying it back (“paying your debt to society” again). But this debt, he says, is also paid—here too—in sacrifice:
    Within the original tribal cooperatives—we’re talking about primeval times—the living generation always acknowledged a legal obligation to the previous generations, and especially to the earliest one which had founded the tribe […] Here the reigning conviction is that the tribe only
exists
at all only because of the sacrifices and achievements of its ancestors—and that people have to
pay them back
with sacrifices and achievements. In this people recognize a
debt
which keeps steadily growing because these ancestors in their continuing existence as powerful spirits do not stop giving the tribe new advantages and lending them their power. Do they do this for free? But there is no “for free” for those raw and “spiritually destitute” ages. What can people give back to them? Sacrifices (at first as nourishment understood very crudely), festivals, chapels, signs of honor, above all, obedience—for all customs, as work of one’s ancestors, are also their statutes and commands. Do people ever give them enough? This suspicion remains and grows. 11
    In other words, for Nietzsche, starting from Adam Smith’s assumptions about human nature means we must necessarily end up with something very much along the lines of primordial-debt theory. On the one hand, it is because of our feeling of debt to the ancestors that we obey the ancestral laws: this is why we feel that the community has the right to react “like an angry creditor” and punish us for our transgressions if we break them. In a larger sense, we develop a creeping feeling that we could never really pay back the ancestors, that no sacrifice (not even the sacrifice of our first-born) will ever truly redeem us. We are terrified of the ancestors, and the stronger and more powerful a community becomes, the more powerful they seem to be, until finally, “the ancestor is necessarily