One of Jesus' core principle was forgiveness, probably because spirituality which devolves into a game of reaching “perfection” cannot embody the kind of Love needed to navigate life and its inevitable messiness, which is to say that everyone falls out of integrity, and constantly punishing and policing one another won't lead to anything constructive in the long term.
Interestingly, Jesus was also undeniably 3 against charging interests on any loan whatsoever, which at the time was considered usury, whereas nowadays it is considered a pillar of the growth economy.
And I wonder to what extent we could say that debt embodies a sort of “anti-forgiveness”. Whereas forgiveness doesn't count the hurts of the past and merely listens to the good of the present moment, anti-forgiveness scrupulously keeps track of all of them via a system of quantification, and even punishes the other side more and more via interests.
It's even worse when you consider that the biggest forms of debt taken by the average person are for 1) education, in the USA at least, and 2) housing, which is essential for the latter, and in many ways unavoidable for the former. 4 As such, the modern system is essentially an anti-forgiveness machine, one in which people get indebted just to function within. No wonder then that so many feel unsafe, and constantly worrying about the future, when the very structure of the system incentivizes having to take out loans just to get what you need.
2 I am not denying that antropogenic climate change is a thing. It very much is, and anecdotally, my house got hit by a flood which can reasonably be attributed to climate change, considering that nothing as intense hit the area for more than 80 years. But just because something is a problem doesn't mean it is the single biggest problem of our system. As always, Darren Allen provides a very good big-picture overview, in his essay called The Collapse
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2025-02-09