The Morality of Debt

Weekly Research Report for July 23, 2014

Prepared by:

Joe BrewerCulture Designer

Change Strategist for Humanity T 206.914.8927 joe@culture2inc.com http://www.changestrategistforhumanity.com

Focus of this Report -- Exploring the “Cycles of Debt”At the heart of our critique of the current system is the observation that morality is used to make those who suffer from global inequality complicit in maintaining the status quo. We are taught that it is wrong to take from others without giving back something of equal or greater value in return.

This simple notion of situational ethics is the prison that keeps billions of people locked in cycles of debt—a self-induced oppression that each of us places ourselves in every time we accept the “common sense” of debt morality.

In this weekly report, I want to explore the morality of debt to inform how we approach the World Bank, IMF, international trade agreements, and the role of the nation state in setting up and maintaining exploitative systems of financial power. The approach we will take is to treat the sentiment that repaying debts is a moral good as a meme that has “won” in the battlefield of ideas.

The memetic strategy I propose we take is to (a) deconstruct the semantic frames around debt morality in order to (b) better understand how the psychology of self-critique keeps us locked into systems of oppression and then (c) discover ways to break the cycle of social norms that perpetuate this condition among oppressed people around the world.

Unpacking the Metaphors of Morality1

The frame semantics of morality are all grounded in the bodily experience. The feelings we have when we are doing well are among the core building blocks for morality—constituted in the conceptual metaphor Well-Being Is Wealth. In other words, the way we all make sense of goodness or badness (and the reason every moral system has the same options for its internal logic) is that every human body is wired to feel good when we are well and to feel bad when we are not well.

This suite of experiences gets expressed in the form of well-being as something we value having. Thus well-being is a form of wealth, THE most fundamental form of wealth that any human can acquire!

Other metaphors for morality include:

✦ Morality is the strength to resist forces of evil

The Morality of Debt Weekly Research Report for July 23, 2014

1 The insights in this section come from a reading of Philosophy in the Flesh by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. I cre-ated a book review for it here: http://www.changestrategistforhumanity.com/book-review-of-philosophy-in-the-flesh-by-george-lakoff-and-mark-johnson/

✦ Morality is parental authority to be followed by self-discipline✦ Morality is following the “natural order” of things✦ Morality is containment that avoids lurking into behaviors that are “off limits”✦ Morality is empathy and nurturance of self and others✦ Morality is purity that cannot be contaminated

These metaphors activate different emotions. Strength evokes confidence and positive self-worth. Authority activates fear and avoidance of pain, as well as the pleasure that comes when someone we admire approves of us. Empathy evokes compassion and feelings of affection. Purity brings forth the emotions of disgust and anger when something we hold sacred has been violated.

All of the different ways we make sense of morality have both an “understood” component (the logic that makes sense to us) and a “felt” component (the emotional wiring that gets activated when we live it out in our lives). Together these understood and felt components drive social behavior in powerful ways.

The morality of debt has the following basic logic:

(1) Well-Being Is Wealth. Therefore (2) Goodness Is A Form of Currency to be exchanged. Morality is understood as (3) an Accounting System where goodness is exchanged. A corollary of this is (4) that Badness is Negative Currency. The exchange of goodness and badness is (5) a system of Moral Accounting.

This moral accounting system maps debt to the imbalance in the books where goodness has been given and now an equal or greater amount must be returned. Note how this way of thinking explains all forms of moral transgression:

1. Reciprocation is when I do something good for you and now you owe me something good in return.

2. Retribution is when I do something bad to you and now something bad has to happen to me for everything to rebalance.

3. Revenge is when I do something bad to you and so you are entitled to do something bad to me.

4. Restitution is when I do something bad and now must give something good to equal it out.5. Altruism is when I do something good for you (thus you are “in my debt”) and then I cancel

the debt.

The moral accounting system has emotions that arise with it, mostly having to do with fairness and justice. We experience debt as being out of right relationship. Thus we are motivated to “right the wrong” of being in debt to another person. This is part of the way our brains are wired that enables us to live in the profoundly moral world of human social interactions. We seek acceptance

The Morality of Debt Weekly Research Report for July 23, 2014

and approval in our relationships. And we feel good or bad depending on how those relationships are at any point in time.

These feelings are what compel people to perpetuate the financial debt system. We equate financial debt with moral debt and experience ourselves as being bad in our relationships when we haven’t yet paid off our debts. A clever trick considering that much of the world’s debt is illegitimate!

The Psychology of System JustificationAll of this leads to the work of psychologist Jon Jost, whose research team has developed system justification theory to explain why oppressed people participate in the perpetuation of unjust situations. This is no small topic, and so I cannot go into all of the details here. For now I want to focus on two key points:

1. Systems of oppression only exist because people participate in them—both the privileged and the oppressed have a key role to play.

2. The psychological mechanisms involved are many and so there is no “silver bullet” for bringing all forms of oppression to an end.

The first point is a sobering reminder that the poor and disenfranchised are inadvertently co-creators of the struggles they find themselves in. Often with a sense of agency removed, it is their own feelings of powerlessness that can make them feel like they are to blame for their circumstances in life.

One version of this comes in the form of an ingroup/outgroup divide, where the ingroup is those who are oppressed and the outgroup is those who are privileged by the system of oppression. Among the findings from system justification theory is the role of self-identity. What are the social stereotypes that members of the ingroup have for themselves? How are they different from the stereotypes they have for members of the outgroup?

I was intrigued to discover from my reading of Jost’s work that a common psychological mechanism for justifying oppressive systems takes the form of ingroup members having a negative stereotype for themselves and a positive, aspirational stereotype for the privileged outgroup. Both negative and positive stereotypes are unrealistic, expressions of value judgments that may not be factually correct.

A classic example of this is the “wannabe gangsta” stereotype among urban black youth. Young men in particular have been prone to see themselves as uneducated (therefore assumed to be stupid), prone to violence (assumed to lack emotional abilities required to be in good relationships), and incapable of making a better life for themselves. This is combined with the aspirational stereotype of a “rags to riches” story where they imagine being showered with gold, fast cars, and

The Morality of Debt Weekly Research Report for July 23, 2014

hot women if they can break into the wealthy class. This combination of aspirational and negative stereotypes feeds reckless behavior and the mistreatment of others, recreating the circumstances in their daily lives that the larger system of oppression originally placed over them.

This destructive pattern of psychological self-hatred has kept many disenfranchised people from seeing how they act out stories that perpetuate their plight. There is a lot more going on than this, of course. Yet already we can see how the framing of self-identities can shape the outcomes of unfair social systems. And sadly, those who are harmed the most are unwary participants in the creation of the systems that do them harm.

Applying These Insights to Our CampaignsOne thing that jumps out right away is the importance of perception in the creation of social realities. The more we think and feel that bad things happen to us “because we deserve them”, the more bad things will continue to happen to us. With the morality of debt there is a need to disrupt the logic of moral accounting by reframing the key relationships.

For starters, we can move from one kind of moral exchange to another. Restitution is very different from retribution! We can start to ask who is in debt to whom? and what is needed to balance the moral books? This is all about questioning the moral legitimacy of debt. If the poor are “strapped with debt” their freedom has been taken away. If an elite group “architects a debt system” they are building prisons and populating them with those who are made poor by its daily operations.

Whether we are targeting the World Bank for enabling corporate land grabs or the tax havens that enable criminals to hide their loot, the structures of debt have been shrouded in a false legitimacy that can only be undone by removing the justifications for oppression.

These observations beg several questions:

1. How do people frame their understandings of financial debt now? What are we really up against? The devil is in the details and we will need to uncover them in future research.

2. What are the most powerful stories we can tell that challenge the legitimacy of debt relationships? Are the stories we are telling now enough to get the job done?

3. What are all of the psychological mechanisms currently at play that prompt people to justify systems of oppression with respect to debt? How can we disrupt them and break the cultural dynamics of cyclic debt?

These are topics we will need to explore in the weeks and months ahead.

Onward,

Joe

The Morality of Debt Weekly Research Report for July 23, 2014