Debt, Credit, Interest, 2
Is it right to ask an interest? Thanks to you not only I did not starve, but I also produced more wheat that increased the food reserves of the community, so it may be right to share some of this with you whose willingness to help made it possible. As long as everyone receives in ratio to the effort put into it.
Because interest has a very dark side, too, and therefore it requires a very careful ethics scrutiny. As any quest for survival always involves some risk, the point is: whose risk? Charging whatever interest has been excommunicated repeatedly, and for good reasons. It may open the door to the separation of the lender from the endeavour, and in fact it gets excommunicated in favour of partnership, which by contrast means sharing the risk together with the fruit in full.
This separation has two stages. The first miseducates to separate yield from investment and risk, product from toil, effect from cause. As the risk does not cease to exist for being merely repelled by the creditor, the more risk the creditor repels, the more risk falls on the debtor, and it can cross the limit of viability. And the second stage of separation is that of the malicious intent: the lender can push this beyond that limit intentionally, so as to cause the borrower to go bankrupt and thus foreclose him.
Anyway, up to a given point we’re helping one another. So when do things change and help becomes betrayal? Debt/credit and interest are used to suppress when and to the degree the exchange gets unfair and results in more damage than benefit for the whole of the people involved. When one has to borrow one is in need, and thus easy prey to blackmail and extortion. There is a word for it: usury.
And to rob as much as possible, some suppressive people do not restrict themselves to exploit the existing need, no; they come to the point of artificially creating the need. It’s the very same swindle than that perpetrated with criminal protection and nicotine addiction: you damage people and force them in a lower degraded state, then you exploit their drive to regain the original state, selling them the cause of the disease as if it was its cure, selling them dearly a tiny bit of that which was their own in its entirety in the first place, while you ensure they never realize the truth but on the contrary remain sided with their torturers and fighting their rescuers. And, both as the grease and as the irony of adding insult to injury, the whole scheme will be topped with the oppressor posing as the authority, the benefactor, occasionally even the victim of the ungrateful “beneficiaries” who dare to bite the “helping” hand, should any victim ever dare to object to sheer suppression. Is there a worse example of betrayal disguised as help?
