Debt: Promises and Institutions

You think our debt problems are bad, look at Dubai. Whereas we have a whole complicated maze of bankruptcy laws and annoying debt collectors, Dubai has prisons and active fleeing.

Apparently, Dubai considers it somebody’s responsibility to do what they said they were going to do. In one sense, this should be a no-brainer; it’s the (ideological) foundation of all of our laws and economy: the idea of contract law.

As Nietzsche says (GM II): “Let’s position ourselves, by contrast, at the end of this immense process, in the place where the tree at last yields its fruit, where society and the morality of custom finally bring to light the end for which they were simply the means: then we find, as the ripest fruit on that tree, the sovereign individual, something which resembles only itself, which has broken loose again from the morality of custom, the autonomous individual beyond morality (for ‘autonomous’ and ‘moral’ are mutually exclusive terms), in short, the human being who possesses his own independent and enduring will, who is entitled to make promises—and in him a consciousness quivering in every muscle, proud of what has finally been achieved and has become a living embodiment in him, a real consciousness of power and freedom, a feeling of completion for human beings generally.”

Sounds great. Though Nietzsche troubles the waters with his exposition of the bloody history behind it. But the idea of monetary debt illustrates the intersections of the personal with the social. Nietzsche recognizes that it is precisely the predictability of ourselves which causes us to be able to make promises and projections into the future. However, he fails to place this in the proper realm of social organization. In the case of an economic crisis, that predictability, those implicit social “laws,” break down. And that reveals that the supreme individualist ability to make promises, bind yourself in contracts, was never anything but a socially constructed regularity.

Which is my main point here: to the extent that the ability to make promises is related to our idea of truth—as logos and nomos—to this extent, we can see that truth itself (or rather our current version of it) is a social institution. Because we have abstracted human will and instituted it in contract law, we have promises, truth, and natural law. When these institutional abstractions fail, when promises cannot be kept because other promises cannot be kept because other promises cannot be kept—here we see that the entire idea of a promise is not merely that it will not but that it can not be broken; the entire idea of abstracted social institutions is not just that we should obey the law but that we will; that the prescriptive depends on the descriptive depends on the prescriptive, and that this is Natural Law.

There is a slippery slope in contracts and words and promises. The instant one is made, it demands everything, that everything be promised, regulated, regular. Here the supreme act of individualism, of choice, of will, cancels itself in a social abstracted institution where nobody promises everything to no one, and we must obey.