Fine thoughts.

Fine voice.

Thank you for both!

In the animal world it is for each young generation to live fully with what they have and are according to their present needs and abilities. I would prefer to go to CG Jung here who constantly refers to the burden placed by adults onto children who must as they mature struggle with the unlived lives of their parents. Or, to put it another way, adults, including parents, project what is unknown and unlived or repressed or feared in themselves onto the *Other*, some of whom are strangers, some of whom are the other sex, and most are their own children.

The sins of this projection last “even unto the seventh generation” as the old testament says. The unlived and feared realities are woven into family, social, behavioural, environmental and spiritual truths over time. They become unconquerable mountains for future generations to to try to eat or to climb. Massive garbage dumps, mountains of gold, sweets or fears.

The result of that projection is that we as children are born enslaved to the blindnesses of many generations. Read Alice Millar’s account of how the Swiss managed their inheritance on the backs of their children. However, like all animals, Nature’s obligation in me is to know myself and the whole world as best I can, so that I can put an end to the cycles of ignorance, family feuds, retributions, secret desires, and unfulfilled dreams that have been passed on generation after generation in my own backyard. I have no natural past debt to pay to nature or to the older generation. Each new birth is Nature’s great attempt to live out a new distinct path, a new understanding of the worlds.

Children’s obligation to Nature and to their parents when they become adults should be a forward one, not backward. There are religious thinkers too, who suggest that we have the sense of sin and debt backwards. Some Christians suggest that Jesus, being a person with no sin, and therefore no human couldn’t therefore be accused of dying to pay any old personal or familial debts as other criminals and even Adam had been so accused.

That this act of sacrifice of the sheep forever wiped away the cultural idea of our need to uphold the immensely powerful ancient concept of “old debt” to the earth and to God (failed human nature so full of sin that death was the required single answer to human life). That Death shouldn’t be a punishment for life, but one of its natures. The cultural result of that new idea for human civilization was revolutionary for a while – that human beings in society with no exception (slave, freeman, woman, child, stranger) should now be free of having to live under debt to God, to religion, to other human beings, or to parents. That our new obligation, as expressed by Paul, was to take up our inherited lives (our own unique crosses) and not avoid suffering them in order to untangle old ideas and behaviors.

But of course, what was in that for those who wanted Power, the ones who wanted an Empire, the husbands who wanted to rule their own castles, the mothers who wanted to own their own children? Nothing whatsoever. And so Rome won. The men won. The Mothers won. And children lost.

The final problem is that we now are the inheritors of such screwed up relationships to our earth, to our children, and to our institutions, that we will not be able to untangle our way back to good relationships of our natural selves to everything else- technology, knowledge, the earth – very easily.

What’s your point? Do you want to return to some primitive medieval existence where we never make or use anything that can’t be made by one person, and held in the hand?

Modern abstractions, lacking concrete reality can buy real food, houses, cars, and PC’s. It’s not just debt, but money itself, that’s simply an abstraction. And “backing up” that money with something “real” like gold doesn’t help, since gold has no intrinsic value, either.

Anyway, at some level everything is an abstraction. You’re just a collection of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, etc, and it’s not the concrete reality of that matter that makes you, you; it’s the abstraction of the arrangement. Replace this or that hydrogen or carbon atom with another and you’d still be you. So let’s not get hung up on what’s concretely “real”, and not just conceptual or abstract, or you might be disappointed to see how little rigorously qualifies.

Furthermore, none of this leads inexorably into debt. My wife and I have been married for 23 years and in that whole time all we’ve had is a small mortgage – no car debt, no credit-card-debt, no home equity loans; no student loans, nothing.

Can you cite a source for this? I used to think the same thing but could never find a reliable source, and meanwhile Wikipedia says this:

“In law, the word real means relating to a thing (res/rei, thing, from O.Fr. reel, from L.L. realis “actual,” from Latin. res, “matter, thing”), as distinguished from a person. Thus the law broadly distinguishes between “real” property (land and anything affixed to it) and “personal” property (everything else, e.g., clothing, furniture, money). The conceptual difference was between immovable property, which would transfer title along with the land, and movable property, which a person would retain title to. The oldest use of the term “Real Estate” that has been preserved in historical records was in 1666.”

It isn’t my intention, nor am I qualified, to enter into a technical, religious, sociological, biological – not to mention physical – discussion of levers and/or economic leverage. I’m curious to know if anyone else noticed this and agrees the failure to discuss leveraging left a gaping hole in the discussion.

thanks, karl

- real; from French royale, from Latin regalis: royal, regal, from combining reg- (nominative rex), king, + adjective suffix -alis
- estate; from Latin status: condition, state

In spite of the name, real estate has no connection with the concept of reality. It derives instead from the feudal principle that in a monarchy, all land was considered the property of the king. Thus originally the term real estate was equivalent to “royal estate,” real originating from the French royale, as it was the French-speaking Normans who introduced feudalism to England in the 11th century and thus the English language; cognate to Spanish real.

My question is: on the one hand, debt is the unavoidable limitation of all human beings, on the other, might it be the only “game” we can play within the context of Western ideology of redemptive Christianity, and equally “redemptive” capitalism?