The Astonishing Way

No Debts, No Masters...

“Owe no one anything.”

These four words seem to me something hypnotic. How to take them? It sounds, possibly, like a kind of fighting talk. In a world that will try, in continuous creeping movements, to take power over me, by placing me in its debt, I am to refuse. I owe no one anything. It's a godlike vision of a person. Unobliged to anyone or anything. It’s a radical statement in a world where debt is the social fabric. In reality I owe money in numerous directions. But not only money. I owe time. I owe attention and favours and emotional energies and so on. The world is held together by multitudes of power relations in which each are indebted to so many others.

Power has a way of exerting itself over, and placing everything it can under itself. To be born into the wrong sort of time and place and body will put a person into debt from the start. It's also true that those who are inclined, or who have learned, to take up less space find themselves apparently owing something to those who happily take up more. 

This vision, of owing no one anything, could go badly. It could easily sound like some awful self help mantra. I like the way the words feel on me as I walk through the world, owing no one anything. But I fear I might just be saying something uselessly to myself, against patterns and circumstances I can't actually escape. I could easily fall into an embattled posture, defending myself against the subtle creep of patronage and obligation. I could become an angry belligerent fool. I know this well. Here is something that might be poisonous, alienating and isolating, if taken carelessly.

Or might mean something a little less like fighting talk and more like stoic responsibility. I am to fulfill my obligations, pay my taxes, give to Caesar what is Caesar's without drama or bitterness or attachment, in order to be free of the sorrows that looming debts tend to spawn.

There is something creaturely about owing no one anything. By this I mean that we humans are marked out from other creatures, by debt. I don't think other creatures keep debts. Debt is a creature of our own making. The belief in a sort of messianic jubilee—the final dawning of a time when there are no debts, and no one owes anyone anything—in this sense, awaits our return to a creaturely state; a healing of our peculiar human miscreations.

“owe no one anything,” it says, “except to love one another.” and it continues, “for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law.”

The second part of the saying is as astonishing to me as the first. To live each day owing no one anything would be an extraordinary way to live, and a brave and fierce mantle to wear. On the other hand, to accept a debt of love to all requires perhaps even more fierce bravery, because it resolves to remain relationally vulnerable. It's the absolute refusal of all weighted power relations, in favour of steadfast kindness in all things.

There is a world that exists alongside the world. Running under an order held together by power relations of debt and obligation, is a river: a web of relations that thrive on mutuality and freely chosen reciprocity. A world held together by relationships good enough to trust. Love is the law that destroys all law, the debt that collapses all debt.