https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=gYc3pi01TH0
One of the things that characterizes our society is the abundance of credit. The reliance on credit. And for a few months now, I’ve been telling you that I was going to make a video on credit and I haven’t done it yet because when I try to wrap my head around it, you know, I always hit these walls where I’m not capable of encompassing the entire concept of credit and its effect on us. So I decided that I will try to maybe deal with certain aspects of credit and talk about it in several videos maybe as I flesh this out for myself as well. And so the first video that I’m doing now, this idea of credit is going to be related to the manner in which credit seems to be accelerating time. And so hopefully we’ll be able to find some insight there. This is Jonathan Pajot. Welcome to the symbolic world. Before I start, I want to remind everybody that as you know, I am still in this chaotic flood period of my life. I am having decided to emphasize the videos and the Patreon because it has become, let’s say, the main way in which I’m able to support my family. And so every month now for until further notice, I’m going to put out a Patreon only video. Last month it was about Jack and the Beanstalk and this month it is about the Princess and the Pee. And strangely enough, you will notice that there’s a relationship between those two stories. So if you’re interested in seeing those videos, please sign up on my Patreon, on my website or on Subscribestar. So here we go with credit. Now the importance of credit in terms of time and noticing the effect of credit on time can be understood when we look at the notion of sacrifice and the relationship between credit and sacrifice. One of the ways that Jordan Peterson has framed the notion of sacrifice, I feel it has been very useful in helping us understand sacrifice in a broader sense and also the way that we use the notion of sacrifice today, is the idea that sacrificing something, not always, but often in ancient sacrifice, you sacrifice something now. You sacrifice some precious thing, the best calf, the best sheep or whatever. You sacrifice a percentage of your crop, of whatever it is that you have, in the notion that what it’s going to do is going to provide something for the future. That is, you’re making a deal with God in the Jewish world, in another world. You’re making a deal with the gods that you’re giving them something and then they will provide for you in the future some form of stability, some form of blessing, something which will come later. The manner in which Jordan has framed it in terms of the modern world today is that we still do that today. We have this idea that we can sacrifice something, that I can sacrifice part of my salary, that I can sacrifice some benefit that I have right now in a deal with the future. That is, looking towards the future, I am willing to put something aside today, sacrifice something today, so that I will get something in the future. You can see that even with your own children. That is, when you have children, you sacrifice yourself for your children because you believe in their potential, in what they will bring to the world, to their own lives and to yourself in the future. What’s interesting about credit is understanding it that way. When we borrow money, we are doing something which could be considered like the opposite of sacrifice. So if sacrifice is taking something I have today, sacrificing it in order to receive more for the future, you could call it a kind of investment, you could say, in the future. Credit is the opposite. Credit is borrowing from the future. You take something from the future and you bring it to you today. In the ancient world, there was an interesting symbolic relationship that was happening because what you would do is in Europe and within Judaism and within Christianity, it was immoral to borrow with interest or to lend with interest within your community. In order for you to have access to something like credit, you had to borrow from the outside. That, of course, is the opportunities that were there for the Jews in the Middle Ages and during the early modern period and also the downfall, the difficulty that they faced, was that the Christians would be borrowing from the foreigner. Now, you can see how there’s a relationship between that, between the notion of borrowing from the future. If you imagine a space, a space that has its own identity, its own center, its own cohesion, and the outside of that space is not, is potentiality, you could call it. And it is, it’s chaos, it’s potentiality, but it’s also the foreigner. And so you can imagine that that’s where you get your future potential is from the outside. Either you can imagine it as a empire that’s getting bigger or you can imagine it as a trade with the outside in order to increase your possibilities. Now, so borrowing from the foreigner was also symbolically related to the notion of borrowing from the future. And so you borrow from the future and you bring it into the present so that you can have something now that is actually should have, you should have gotten from the future, that you haven’t saved up for, that you haven’t kept money for yourself right now. And so then what it does is it creates a sense that you now need to accelerate your work here today in order to pay off the loan and also in order to pay off the interest on the loan. So the interest on the loan is a fascinating thing because it’s a kind of living thing. It’s a kind of monster which exists on the edge. And if you make a deal with it, it will grow. It’s like you take from the future and the side effect of that is this monster of interest, which gets bigger if you don’t attend to it. Now, one of the things that happened at the end of the Middle Ages, which is very fascinating, is that the rule for usury, which is this notion that you are not allowed to lend with interest, at least not in most circumstances, there are always exceptions to these types of rules, but you are not allowed to lend in a manner which was to bring you back interest, that law started to go away. And there’s a famous instances of Martin Luther approving the possibility of lending with interest and certain of the reformers accepting the credit and interest within the community. Now, as this happened, there’s something about when you would deal with the foreigner and you borrow from the foreigner, you’re always aware of the difficulty that you’re facing because if you borrow from someone who’s not part of your group, you are making yourself indebted to them. You are giving them power. You’re giving power to the future, but you’re also giving power to the potentiality that’s outside you. You’re giving power to some foreign force that’s on the margin of your world. And so you have to always be careful not to give too much power to the outside because if you give too much power to the outside, at some point the tables will flip and you will become subject to the outside. You can understand that in terms of, like I always give you the image of, in terms of your own passions. You have these marginal things on your outside, these things that are pulling you. If you give too much power to that thing that’s pulling you away from your center, at some point things are going to flip and you will become like a slave to that thing which is outside you. And so the uneasy relationship between the Christians and the outsiders in the Middle Ages was a difficult one because it was always this uneasy thing. On the one hand we want to be able to borrow from the outside in order to increase our capacity to do things today, but we always have to be careful because if we do it too much, we become indebted to the outside and the outside starts to exercise power on us. Now, once that process was brought inside the community, that is that people could lend to themselves with interest, the problem seems to have gone away because all then that was left was this notion of the future, which is that as I borrow from someone with interest, then I am bringing something from the future into myself. And like I said, what that does is it accelerates time. You can see it if I just say something like you’re literally, literally, I should never use that word, you’re taking the future and you’re bringing it towards yourself. So you’re taking something that you don’t have, that you think that you’ll have enough for in the future by paying off the loan and you bring it towards yourself in order to have it now. And so you’re actually accelerating time by doing that. And what that makes it happen that you now have to be more productive now. So you have to grow faster and you have to put more effort into growth now in order to pay off the indebtedness that you had towards the future. So what’s fascinating to see is how that process, which started at the end of the Middle Ages, in the Reformation and in the early modern period, has grown and accelerated and has taken up more and more space to a point where our entire economy is based on credit. Our entire economy is based on interest. The fact that the government owes a certain amount with interest to those who have bought bonds or have invested in the country. And that’s actually what makes our money valuable is the fact that we have to pay back with interest those that have borrowed, those that have lent money to the government. And so you have this weird internal acceleration, which is necessarily going to happen. And what it does, obviously it causes necessary inflation as well. So the prices keep going up and we keep having to speed up the wheel in order to constantly deal with that problem. But the problem is growing and growing and growing. And it’s interesting to watch the monster grow. Now, one of the problems we have is that, for example, we over budget. We see that in Canada and all these countries. People will over budget in the idea that in the future we will be more productive than we are now. And so we borrow from the future. We saw the boomers did that to us, especially. They borrowed from the future in order to have all these pension plans and have all this stuff. And we obviously don’t have that. But the process is still ongoing because we’re borrowing from the future. We in the idea that we will be so much more productive later, but then that doesn’t totally happen. And we borrow more and more and more. And it’s extremely fascinating because at some point this interest keeps growing. So one of the things we’re seeing happen, let’s say in our countries, for example, is we are one of the things that we have to budget for. Let’s say in Canada and the US is the same. We have to budget in the year for the government spending on a certain amount, and we have to pay the interest on what we owe to ourselves, to other countries, to whatever. So we have to at least pay the interest on what we’re borrowing. And so it’s really interesting to watch. So the interest on this loan keeps growing and growing and growing. And so we have to budget more and we have to budget more and more of our budget in order to finance that loan. One of the things they do is they end up now budgeting more and more and more to account for the interest that is being borrowed. And at some point that’s going to catch up. That is, at some point the interest is going to get so big and is going to eat like a monster. It’s actually going to eat our budget to a point where it’s going to become untenable. What happens when half of the budget of a country is used to pay back the interest on the money that it owes? What happens when that gets even bigger and bigger and bigger? At some point there is a collapse. And sadly I have to say that this has been a kind of weird way in which, this is kind of horrible to say, but this has been a weird way in which the world has been able to avoid war. Which it has been to imagine growth by borrowing from the future. But at some point that balance is going to collapse. And the only thing left after that is going to be war. We’re going to see the inevitability of some countries who will want to stabilize their economy have to increase their power just like the ancient empires did. Not by borrowing from the future, but by taking from that which surrounds it. And it seems like at some point that will become an inevitable reality. Sadly, it’s sad that I have to say that, but we have to brace ourselves for that possibility. Because this borrowing from the future at some point is going to be a very difficult thing. Because this borrowing from the future at some point, this cycle of time, the serpent will come and eat its own tail. And then at that point everything breaks apart, but then everything starts again. Not always in a positive manner. So I hope that these little thoughts on credit and on interest were of interest to you. I will keep thinking about it. There are a lot of things I still need to think about. For example, the representation of the talents in the Bible, of God giving talents that need to be returned with more interest. The idea of in the Lord’s Prayer, how we say when we say forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. It can also be read as forget us our debts as we forgive our debtors. That is something that we need to understand. What is the relationship between credit and loan and interest and the spiritual life? That’s something that I still need to think about, especially because it has been so thought about only in moral terms or in legal terms. Alaa ala Luther and ala Nietzsche for example. I think there’s another way to conceive of it which would be useful to address. Once again guys, thank you for your support. I hope you enjoyed this video and I will see all of you soon. I have a Patreon and a Subscribestar. Thanks again and I will see you soon.