TURMEL: David Graeber's DEBT: The First 5,000 Years Chap05
ISBN: 978-1-61219-129-4
https://www.amazon.com/Debt-Updated-Expanded-First-Years/dp/1612194192/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8
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DG: Chapter Five
A BRIEF TREATISE ON THE MORAL GROUNDS OF ECONOMIC RELATIONS
P89: TO TELL THE HISTORY of debt, then, is also necessarily to
reconstruct how the language of the marketplace has come to
pervade every aspect of human life
Anthropology has shown us just how different and numerous are
the ways in which humans have been known to organize
themselves. But it also reveals some remarkable commonalities
- fundamental moral principles that appear to exist everywhere
and that will always tend to be invoked wherever people
transfer objects back and forth or argue about what other
people owe them.
P90: To really understand what debt is, then, it will be
necessary to understand how it's different from other sorts of
obligation that human beings might have to one another which,
in turn, means mapping out what those other sorts of
obligation actually are. Doing so, however, poses peculiar
challenges. Contemporary social theory - economic anthropology
included- offers surprisingly little help in this regard.
There's a vast anthropological literature on gifts, for
instance, starting with the French anthropologist Marcel
Mauss's essay "The Gift" in 1924, as well as on "gift
economies" that operate on completely different principles
than market economies - but in the end, almost all this
literature concentrates on the exchange of gifts, assuming
that whenever one gives a gift, this act incurs a debt, and
the recipient must eventually reciprocate in kind.
those branches of social theory that make the greatest
claims to "scientific status" - "rational choice theory," for
instance - start from the same assumptions about human
psychology that economists do: that human beings are best
viewed as self-interested actors calculating how to get the
best terms possible out of any situation, the most profit or
pleasure or happiness for the least sacrifice or investment -
curious, considering experimental psychologists have
demonstrated over and over again that these assumptions simply
aren't true.2
P91: From early on, there were those who wished to create a
theory of social interaction grounded in a more generous view
of human nature - insisting that moral life comes down to
something more than mutual advantage, that it is motivated
above all by a sense of justice.
The key term here became "reciprocity," the sense of equity,
balance, fairness, and symmetry, embodied in our image of
justice as a set of scales. Economic transactions were just
one variant of the principle of balanced exchange - and one
that had a notorious tendency to go awry. But if one examines
matters closely, one finds that all human relations are based
on some variation on reciprocity.
Levi-Strauss, who became a kind of intellectual god in
anthropology, made the extraordinary argument that human life
could be imagined as consisting of three spheres: language
(which consisted of the exchange of words), kinship (which
consisted of the exchange of women), and economics (which
consisted of the exchange of things). All three, he insisted,
were governed by the same fundamental law of reciprocity.3
3. Homans 1958, also Blau 1964; Levi-Strauss 1963:296. In
anthropology, the first to propose reciprocity as a universal
principle was Richard Thurnwald (1916), but it was made famous
by Malinowski (1922).
JCT: Yes, it would seem that attempted reciprocation is the
gist of civilization.
DG: But can all justice really be reduced to reciprocity? It's
easy enough to come up with forms of reciprocity that don't
seem particularly just. "Do unto others as you would wish
others to do unto you" might seem like an excellent foundation
for a system of ethics, but for most of us, "an eye for an
eye" does not evoke justice so much as vindictive brutality.4
4. One reason no known law code has ever been known to enforce
the principle; the penalty was always there to be commuted to
something else.
JCT: If you consider the Lord's Prayer, it would seem that not
only was it "do" but mainly "lend unto others as you would
have them lend unto you." He, after all, was a debt-fighter.
When was the last time you saw someone take a whip to the
money-lenders? Of course, 3 days later, the King was on a
Cross.
P92: The Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood begins a recent
book on debt with a similar paradox:
Nature Writer Ernest Thompson Seton had an odd bill
presented to him on his twenty-first birthday. It was a
record kept by his father of all the expenses connected
with young Ernest's childhood and youth, including the fee
charged by the doctor for delivering him. Even more oddly,
Ernest is said to have paid it. I used to think that Mr.
Seton Senior was a jerk, but now I'm wondering.5
Most of us wouldn't wonder much. Such behavior seems
monstrous, inhuman. Certainly Seton found it so: he paid the
bill, but never spoke to his father again afterward.6
6. Seton's father, a failed shipping magnate turned
accountant, was, Seton later wrote, so cold and abusive that
his son spent much of his youth in the woods trying to avoid
him; after paying the debt- which incidentally came to
$537.50, a tidy but not insurmountable sum in 1881 - he
changed his name and spent much of the rest of his life trying
to develop more healthy child-rearing techniques.
And in a way, this is precisely why the presentation of
such a bill seems so outrageous. Squaring accounts means that
the two parties have the ability to walk away from each other.
By presenting it, his father suggested he'd just as soon have
nothing further to do with him. In other words, while most of
us can imagine what we owe to our parents as a kind of debt,
few of us can imagine being able to actually pay it - or even
that such a debt ever should be paid. Yet if it can't be paid,
in what sense is it a "debt" at all? And if it is not a debt,
what is it?
JCT: Yes, it seems harsh for the Daddy to keep track of what I
cost but that's what I want UNILETS to do! So I won't owe
daddy but will owe the Sugar Daddy bank. In my future world,
everyone will know what they've consumed and what they've
scored in production. The idea is only shocking in an era
without such detailed information available with computers. I
don't think an average son would walk away from a father who
said: "Son, it cost me this much to raise you, can you help me
back now that I'm old?" So I'd bet the cranky old man had
other deplorable manners. I'm only saying there is nothing
inherently wrong with keeping a tab of what I consumed and
produced.
P94: I will provide a rough-and-ready way to map out the main
possibilities, by proposing that there are three main moral
principles on which economic relations can be founded, all of
which occur in any human society, and which I will call
communism, hierarchy, and exchange.
Communism
I will define communism here as any human relationship that
operates on the principles of "from each according to their
abilities, to each according to their needs."
JCT: The weakness is that a more efficient worker gaining
nothing by his excellence inhibits maximum production.
P95: Starting, as I say, from the principle of "from each
according to their abilities, to each according to their
needs" allows us to look past the question of individual or
private ownership (which is often little more than formal
legality anyway) and at much more immediate and practical
questions of who has access to what sorts of things and under
what conditions.9
Whenever it is the operative principle, even if it's just two
people who are interacting, we can say we are in the presence
of a sort of communism. Almost everyone follows this principle
if they are collaborating on some common project.10
10. At least, unless there is some specific reason not to -
for instance, a hierarchical division of labor that says some
people get coffee and others do not.
P96: This is presumably also why in the immediate wake of
great disasters - a flood, a blackout, or an economic collapse
- people tend to behave the same way, reverting to a rough-
and-ready communism. However briefly, hierarchies and markets
and the like become luxuries that no one can afford. Anyone
who has lived through such a moment can speak to their
peculiar qualities, the way that strangers become sisters and
brothers and human society itself seems to be reborn.
P97: When we genuinely wish to break off amicable relations
with someone, we stop speaking to them entirely.
P98: I will call this "baseline communism": the understanding
that, unless people consider themselves enemies, if the need
is considered great enough, or the cost considered reasonable
enough, the principle of "from each according to their
abilities, to each according to their needs" will be assumed
to apply.
JCT: Of course, this should be the ethos in time of scarcity.
But what about times of abundance?
DG: A man or woman known to have anything extra in the way of
grain, tobacco, tools, or agricultural implements can be
expected to see their stockpiles disappear almost
immediately.14
The obligation to share food, and whatever else is considered
a basic necessity, tends to become the basis of everyday
morality in a society whose members see themselves as equals.
Early missionary accounts of native North Americans almost
invariably include awestruck remarks on generosity in times of
famine, often to total strangers.16
16. A typical example: "if a cabin of hungry people meets
another whose provisions are not entirely exhausted, the
latter share with the newcomers the little which remains to
them without waiting to be asked, although they expose
themselves thereby to the same danger of perishing as those
whom they help..." Lafitau 1974 Volume II:61.
At the same time,
On returning from their fishing, their hunting, and their
trading, they exchange many gifts; if they have thus
obtained something unusually good, even if they have
bought it, or if it has been given to them, they make a
feast to the whole village with it. Their hospitality
towards all sorts of strangers is remarkable.17
The more elaborate the feast, the more likely one is to see
some combination of free sharing of some things (for instance,
food and drink) and careful distribution of others: say, prize
meat, whether from game or sacrifice, which is often parceled
out according to very elaborate protocols or equally elaborate
gift exchange.
Solitary pleasures will always exist, but for most human
beings, the most pleasurable activities almost always involve
sharing something: music, food, liquor, drugs, gossip, drama,
beds. There is a certain communism of the senses at the root
of most things we consider fun.
The surest way to know that one is in the presence of
communistic relations is that not only are no accounts taken,
but it would be considered offensive, or simply bizarre, to
even consider doing so.
JCT: Sure, like in any family, no accounting would be
necessary. Everyone doing their best and everyone taking the
least. Not quite enjoying the abundance. But yet, In Jesus'
commune "The Poor," when you gave your money to "The Poor"
Treasurer, "Your abundance was at the present time a supply
for their want so that their abundance may later be a supply
for your want. Reciprocity of abundance. (Paul Corr II 8:14)
So that he who gathers much doesn't have too much and he who
gathers little doesn't have to little. But it's allowed that
he who gathered much could keep his much if he who gathered
little had enough. Capitalism is okay in a fair game. With
Jesus's LETS program doing the accounting. I say that because
the LETS with no usury feedback obeys his no-usury
differential equation: Do not lend your money at interest."
Thomas 95. So family no-accounting in times of scarcity is
fine but family accounting in times of abundance is too.
P100: First, we are not really dealing with reciprocity here -
or at best, only with reciprocity in the broadest sense.21
What is equal on both sides is the knowledge that the other
person would do the same for you, not that they necessarily
will.
JCT: "Should do the same for you...?" Knowing it's a duty
helps.
DG: The second point has to do with the famous "law of
hospitality." There is a peculiar tension between a common
stereotype of what are called "primitive societies" (people
lacking both states and markets) as societies in which anyone
not a member of the community is assumed to be an enemy, and
the frequent accounts of early European travelers awestruck by
the extraordinary generosity shown them by actual "savages."
Granted, there is a certain truth to both sides. Wherever a
stranger is a dangerous potential enemy, the normal way to
overcome the danger is by some dramatic gesture of generosity
whose very magnificence catapults them into that mutual
sociality that is the ground for all peaceful social
relations.
JCT: In discussions with LETS members, I try to focus on how
having a network of providers who will take your IOUs for
Hours owed is an "economic life-boat" (Australia Report 1991),
I keep hearing it being pushed as a system of "conviviality"
"sociability!" Nice to hear but making it less urgent to
spread the Word (software).
P101: those who have shared bread and salt must never harm one
another.
P102: Merchants often reduce prices for the needy. This is one
of the main reasons why shopkeepers in poor neighborhoods are
almost never of the same ethnic group as their customers; it
would be almost impossible for a merchant who grew up in the
neighborhood to make money, as they would be under constant
pressure to give financial breaks, or at least easy credit
terms, to their impoverished relatives and school chums. The
opposite is true as well.
JCT: Imagine if a merchant were smart enough to sign people up
to his store LETS timebank and when they ask for $10 credit,
he makes them sign an Hour IOU and list what they can do. How
long before he has a network of skills and goods to spend
those Hours on. Imagine if a merchant were smart enough to run
a LETS timebank and take time-credit instead of cash-credit.
DG: unless there is a complete absence of sociality, some
degree of communistic morality will almost inevitably enter
into the way people take accounts.24
24. This is of course one reason why the very rich like to
associate mainly with one another.
Exchange
Communism, then, is based neither in exchange nor in
reciprocity - except, as I have observed, in the sense that it
does involve mutual expectations and responsibilities. Even
here, it seems better to use another word ("mutuality"?) so as
to emphasize that exchange operates on entirely different
principles, that it's a fundamentally different kind of moral
logic. Exchange is all about equivalence.
JCT: More appropriately discussed in times of abundance
because, as shown, it doesn't matter in times of scarcity.
P103: Actually, there's something of a paradox here:
each side in each case is trying to outdo the other,..
On the other hand, as anthropologists have long pointed out,
when the exchange is of gifts, that is, the objects passing
back and forth are mainly considered interesting in how they
reflect on and rearrange relations between the people carrying
out the transaction, then insofar as competition enters in, it
is likely to work precisely the other way around - to become a
matter of contests of generosity, of people showing off who
can give more away.
JCT: The higher scorers getting credit for excellence.
DG: What marks commercial exchange is that it's "impersonal":
P104: Exchange allows us to cancel out our debts. It gives us
a way to call it even: hence, to end the relationship.
P105: in the Tiv community, all such gifts did have to be
returned. It would be entirely inappropriate to simply accept
three eggs from a neighbor and never bring anything back. One
did not have to bring back eggs, but one should bring
something back of approximately the same value. One could even
bring money - there was nothing inappropriate in that -
provided one did so at a discreet interval and above all, that
one did not bring the exact cost of the eggs. It had to be
either a bit more or a bit less. To bring back nothing at all
would be to cast oneself as an exploiter or a parasite. To
bring back an exact equivalent would be to suggest that one no
longer wishes to have anything to do with the neighbor.
JCT: Fascinating how in-head tabs kept everything going.
DG: things can easily slip into games of one-upmanship - and
hence obsession, humiliation, rage... or, as we'll soon see,
even worse. In some societies, these games are formalized, but
it's important to stress that such games only really develop
between people or groups who perceive themselves to be more or
less equivalent in status.29
P108: Within communities, there is almost always a reluctance,
as the Tiv example so nicely illustrates, to allow things to
cancel out - one reason that if there is money in common
usage, people will often either refuse to use it with friends
or relatives (which in a village society includes pretty much
everyone) or alternately, like the Malagasy villagers in
Chapter Three, use it in radically different ways.
P109: Hierarchy
Exchange, then, implies formal equality - or, at least, the
potential for it.
religious traditions often insist that the only true charity
is anonymous - in other words, not meant to place the
recipient in one's debt.
JCT: And as long as the debt is interest-free, who cares? But
when the Treasurer of The Poor bought a slave out of debt, you
can bet everyone prayed he'd be a productive member of the
sect to gain more abundance with which to buy others out of
debt. I'd bet no one asked the Treasurer if Freddy who got
redeemed 2 years ago had scored back what it had cost yet.
DG: Actually, one popular theory of the origins of the state,
nomadic raiders eventually systematize their relations with
sedentary villagers; pillage turns into tribute, rape turns
into the "right of the first night" or the carrying off of
likely candidates as recruits for the royal harem. Conquest,
untrammeled force, becomes systematized, and thus framed not
as a predatory relation but as a moral one, with the lords
providing protection, and the villagers, their sustenance.
JCT: Bingo! In all my historical and archaeological readings,
I've come to the conclusion that history was gang warfare over
the protection rackets. Bigger gangs wanted smaller gangs
paying them protection, not Pharaoh! Bigger Kings wanted
smaller Kings paying them the protection. So every now and
then, the Hittite King would take the full army and march
around getting cities to surrender and promise them the
protection money. Then Pharaoh would come with a huge army and
get them to surrender and promise the protection to him. And
once in a while, both big armies met. But all history was a
protection racket, benign if the ruler ran his own chips, and
genocidal if he let the banksters suck the people into mort-
gage death-gambles.
P110: the problem of giving gifts to kings, or to any
superior: there is always the danger that it will be treated
as a precedent, added to the web of custom, and therefore
considered obligatory thereafter.
P111: In other words, any gift to a feudal superior,
"especially if repeated three or four times," was likely to be
treated as a precedent and added to the web of custom.
P113: In much of Papua New Guinea, social life centers on "big
men," charismatic individuals who spend much of their time
coaxing, cajoling, and manipulating in order to acquire masses
of wealth to give away again at some great feast. One could,
in practice, pass from here to, say, an Amazonian or
indigenous North American chief. Unlike big men, their role is
more formalized; but actually such chiefs have no power to
compel anyone to do anything they don't want to (hence North
American Indian chiefs' famous skill at oratory and powers of
persuasion). As a result, they tended to give away far more
than they received. Observers often remarked that in terms of
personal possessions, a village chief was often the poorest
man in the village, such was the pressure on him for constant
supply of largesse.
Indeed, one could judge how egalitarian a society really was
by exactly this: whether those ostensibly in positions of
authority are merely conduits for redistribution, or able to
use their positions to accumulate riches.
Jct: Not only "those in authority" accumulating riches but
everyone with abundance accumulating riches at the expense of
the debtors.
DG: The latter seems most likely in aristocratic societies
that add another element: war and plunder. After all, just
about anyone who comes into a very large amount of wealth will
ultimately give at least part of it away - often in grandiose
and spectacular ways to large numbers of people. The more of
one's wealth that is obtained by plunder or extortion, the
more spectacular and self-aggrandizing will be the forms in
which it's given away.44
And what is true of warrior aristocracies is all the more true
of ancient states, where rulers almost invariably represented
themselves as the protectors of the helpless, supporters of
widows and orphans, and champions of the poor. The genealogy
of the modern redistributive state - with its notorious
tendency to foster identity politics - can be traced back not
to any sort of "primitive communism" but ultimately to
violence and war.
Shifting between Modalities
I should underline again that we are not talking about
different types of society here (as we've seen, the very idea
that we've ever been organized into discrete "societies" is
dubious) but moral principles that always coexist everywhere.
We are all communists with our closest friends, and feudal
lords when dealing with small children. It is very hard to
imagine a society where people wouldn't be both.
P115: since we live in a market system, everything (except
government interference) is based on principles of justice:
that our economic system is one vast network of reciprocal
relations in which, in the end, the accounts balance and all
debts are paid.
JCT: Orthodoxy not taking account of the growth of debt, not
of the money, making such balance impossible.
DG: No one expects the patron to provide so much help that it
threatens to undermine the underlying inequality.47
47. Actually, there are hierarchical relations that are
explicitly self-subverting: the one between teacher and
student, for example, since if the teacher is successful in
passing her knowledge to the student, there is no further
basis for inequality.
JCT: No such hesitation in an interest-free world. When I
front my student my spare seeds, I'm hoping he's successful
enough not only to pay me back but to be there should I need
the loan myself next time. Is there any reason I, as a mentor,
would not want my farmer apprentice to excel beyond me? One of
them anyway? But with scarce money in the deal, not a chance.
Probably forced to ask for a cut.
DG: Genuinely egalitarian societies are keenly aware of this
and tend to develop elaborate safeguards around the dangers of
anyone - say, especially good hunters, in a hunting society -
rising too far above themselves, just as they tend to be
suspicious of anything that might make one member of the
society feel in genuine debt to another. A member who draws
attention to his own accomplishments will find himself the
object of mockery.
JCT: Loud-mouth braggart says he keeps scoring the most! Ha ha
ha. Unless he does. But if they don't like posting results...
P116: To thank someone suggests that he or she might not have
acted that way, and that therefore the choice to act this way
creates an obligation, a sense of debt - and hence,
inferiority.
P118: Competitive gift exchange, then, does not literally
render anyone slaves; it is simply an affair of honor. These
are people, however, for whom honor is everything.
The main reason that being unable to pay a debt, especially a
debt of honor, was such a crisis was because this was how
noblemen assembled their entourages. The law of hospitality in
the ancient world, for instance, insisted that any traveler
must be fed, given shelter, and treated as an honored guest -
but only for a certain length of time. If a guest did not go
away, he would eventually become a mere subordinate. The role
of such hangers-on has been largely neglected by students of
human history. In many periods - from imperial Rome to
medieval China - probably the most important relationships, at
least in towns and cities, were those of patronage. Anyone
rich and important would find himself surrounded by flunkies,
sycophants, perpetual dinner guests, and other sorts of
willing dependents. Drama and poetry of the time are full of
such characters.55 Similarly, for much of human history, being
respectable and middle-class meant spending one's mornings
going from door to door, paying one's respects to important
local patrons. To this day, informal patronage systems still
crop up, whenever relatively rich and powerful people feel the
need to assemble networks of supporters - a practice well
documented in many parts of the Mediterranean, the Middle
East, and Latin America. Such relationships seem to consist of
a slapdash mix of all three principles that I've been mapping
out over the course of this chapter; nevertheless, those
observing them insist on trying to cast them in the language
of exchange and debt.
JCT: It's always gangs fighting over protection.
P120: This means that there is no such thing as a genuinely
unpayable debt. If there was no conceivable way to salvage the
situation, we wouldn't be calling it a "debt." we call it a
"debt" because it can be paid, equality can be restored, even
if the cost may be death by lethal injection.
JCT: We call the impossible usury that cannot be paid "debt"
too.
P121: This is what makes situations of effectively unpayable
debt so difficult and so painful. Since creditor and debtor
are ultimately equals, if the debtor cannot do what it takes
to restore herself to equality, there is obviously something
wrong with her; it must be her fault.
This connection becomes clear if we look at the etymology of
common words for "debt" in European languages. Many are
synonyms for "fault," "sin," or "guilt": just as a criminal
owes a debt to society, a debtor is always a sort of
criminal.59
59. For instance the word "should," in English, originally
derives from German schuld, meaning "guilt, fault, debt."
Benveniste provides similar examples from other Indo-European
languages (1963:58). East Asian languages such as Chinese and
Japanese rarely conflate the actual words, but a similar
identification of debt with sin, shame, guilt, and fault can
be easily documented (Malamoud 1988).
In ancient Crete, according to Plutarch, it was the custom for
those taking loans to pretend to snatch the money from the
lender's purse. Why, he wondered? Probably "so that, if they
default, they could be charged with violence and punished all
the more."60
This is why in so many periods of history insolvent debtors
could be jailed, or even - as in early Republican Rome-
executed.
JCT: When losing your mort-gage really got you morted.
DG: A debt, then, is just an exchange that has not been
brought to completion.
P122: It's precisely when the money changes hands, when the
debt is canceled, that equality is restored and both parties
can walk away and have nothing further to do with each other.
Debt is what happens in between: when the two parties cannot
yet walk away from each other, because they are not yet equal.
JCT: And getting more and more unequal with time.
DG: But it is carried out in the shadow of eventual equality.
JCT: In the shadow of impossible equality once usury gets
started.
DG: Because achieving that equality, however, destroys the
very reason for having a relationship, just about everything
interesting happens in between.61
P124: Sometimes, at the brink of a new historical era, some
prescient soul can see the full implications of what is
beginning to happen - sometimes in a way that later
generations can't.
JCT: Don't understand what I can explain now that won't be
understood later.
DG: Let me end with a text by such a person. In Paris,
sometime in the 1540s, Francois Rabelais - lapsed monk,
doctor, legal scholar - composed what was to become a famous
mock eulogy, which he inserted in the third book of his great
Gargantua and Pantagruel, and which came to be known as "In
Praise of Debt."
Rabelais places the encomium in the mouth of one Panurge, a
wandering scholar and man of extreme classical erudition who,
he observes, "knew sixty-three ways of making money - the most
honorable and most routine of which was stealing."65 The good-
natured giant Pantagruel adopts Panurge and even provides him
with a respectable income, but it bothers him that Panurge
continues to spend money like water and remains up to his ears
in debt. Wouldn't it be better, Pantagruel suggests, to be
able to pay his creditors?
Panurge responds with horror: "God forbid that I should ever
be out of debt!" Debt is, in fact, the very basis of his
philosophy:
Always owe somebody something, then he will be forever
praying God to grant you a good, long and blessed life.
Fearing to lose what you owe him, he will always be saying
good things about you in every sort of company; he will be
constantly acquiring new lenders for you, so that you can
borrow to pay him back, filling his ditch with other men's
spoil.66
66. Compare the Medieval Arab philosopher Ibn Miskaway: "The
creditor desires the well-being of the debtor in order to get
his money back rather than because of his love for him. The
debtor, on the other hand, does not take great interest in the
creditor." (in Hosseini 2003:36).
Above all else, they will always be praying that you come into
money. It's like those ancient slaves destined to be
sacrificed at their masters' funerals. When they wished their
master long life and good health, they genuinely meant it!
What's more, debt can make you into a kind of god, who can
make something (money, well-wishing creditors) out of
absolutely nothing.
P126: And what's more, if human beings owed nothing to one
another, life would "be no better than a dog - fight" - a mere
unruly brawl.
Amongst human beings none will save another; it will be no
good a man shouting Help! Fire! I'm drowning! Murder!
Nobody will come and help him. Why? Because he has lent
nothing: and no one owes him anything. No one has anything
to lose by his fire, his shipwreck, his fall, or his
death. He has lent nothing. And: he would lend nothing
either hereafter. In short, Faith, Hope and Charity would
be banished from this world.
JCT: "he has lent nothing" or "he has borrowed nothing?"
Pantagruel will have none of it. His own feelings on the
matter, he says, can be summed up with one line from the
Apostle Paul: "Owe no man anything, save mutual love and
affection."67 Then, in an appropriately biblical gesture, he
declares, "From your past debts I shall free you."
"What can I do but thank you?" Panurge replies.
JCT: I'm not going to free Panurge from debt. I'm going to let
him and the sick and the retards use all the credit they need
as long as their efforts to put some back are also on display.
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