Debt, Sin, and Exploration in the Marketplace of Signs
When considering economics and politics, it’s important to be cosmopolitan. The worse the box, the more vital it is to think outside of it. One alien angle from which to approach economics is theology — and alien theologies provide especially interesting angles.
Religious conceptions of sin have their origin in extrapolations of debt. As Graeber Notes:
In Athens […] [t]he language of money, debt, and finance provided powerful — and ultimately irresistible — ways to think about moral problems. Much as in Vedic India, people started talking about life as a debt to the gods, of obligation as debts, about literal debts of honor, of debt as sin and of vengeance as debt collection.
- David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, page 195
As slack is an escape from strict economic accounting of interpersonal debts, and since debt maps pretty well onto moral and ethical concerns, it’s natural to extend one’s idea of slack into all domains of interpersonal interaction. We can argue that the reason why parents do not, on their childrens’ 18th birthdays, present them with a bill for the cost of being born is that birth and childhood is a zone of slack. Likewise, an anecdote in Thinking Fast and…