Zala’s Reviews > Debt: The First 5,000 Years > Status Update
Zala
is 2% done
”The very fact that we don't know what debt is, the very flexibility of the concept, is the basis of its power. If history shows anything, it is that there's no better way to justify relations founded on violence, to make such relations seem moral, than by reframing them in the language of debt - above all, because it immediately makes it seem that it's the victim who is doing something wrong.”
— Sep 30, 2026 03:15PM
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Zala’s Previous Updates
Zala
is 17% done
”Faced with the potential for complete social breakdown, Sumerian and later Babylonian kings periodically announced general amnesties[…] Such decrees would typically declare all outstanding consumer debt null and void (commercial debts were not affected), return all land to its original owners, and allow all debt-peons to return to their families.”
— Sep 30, 2026 08:01PM
Zala
is 15% done
”Human nature does not drive us to ‘truck and barter.’ Rather, it ensures that we are always creating symbols—such as money itself. This is how we come to see ourselves in a cosmos surrounded by invisible forces; as in debt to the universe.”
— Sep 30, 2026 07:38PM
Zala
is 12% done
”To be able to guarantee all of them, Henry would have to be almost unimaginably rich.
All this would be much less of a problem, however, if Henry were, say, Henry II, King of England, Duke of Normandy, Lord of Ireland, and Count of Anjou.”
lol
— Sep 30, 2026 07:06PM
All this would be much less of a problem, however, if Henry were, say, Henry II, King of England, Duke of Normandy, Lord of Ireland, and Count of Anjou.”
lol
Zala
is 9% done
”Barter is what you do with those to whom you are not bound by ties hospitality (or kinship, or much of anything else)”
— Sep 30, 2026 04:40PM
Zala
is 8% done
”But by mid-century, Lewis Henry Morgan's descriptions of the Six Nations of the Iroquois, among others, were widely published—and they made clear that the main economic institution among the Iroquois nations were longhouses wherein most goods were stockpiled and then allocated by women's councils, and no one ever traded arrowheads for slabs of meat. Economists simply ignored this information.”
— Sep 30, 2026 04:39PM
Zala
is 3% done
As the great classicist Moses Finley often liked to say, in the ancient world, all revolutionary movements had one single program: "Cancel the debts and redistribute the land."
— Sep 30, 2026 03:22PM
Zala
is starting
“As far as we were concerned," I told her, "thirty years of money flowing from the poorest countries to the richest was quite enough."
"But," she objected, as if this were self-evident, “they’d borrowed the money! Surely one has to pay one’s debts.”
ho boy
— Sep 30, 2026 03:13PM
"But," she objected, as if this were self-evident, “they’d borrowed the money! Surely one has to pay one’s debts.”
ho boy