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Is there a relationship in early cultures between debt and guilt?

 The link between monetary debt and sin is found in the Rigveda, or in the Bible, but in one way or

another, we find the idea expressed in all mythological traditions: the life created by divinity

implies a debt to supernatural powers, or, in terms of mythopoetics, a permanent debt to the group,

to which the lives of its individuals literally belong.

Sin is going against the will of the group, and not recognizing subordination to authority. The debt

is paid with one's life, either a miserable existence as a slave or by losing it all at once in a ritual public execution. Monetary myths are fundamental to the exchanges that constitute the city, and the

city, as it extends beyond its borders, has to universalize the concept of debt to include new client-

citizens, either as slaves or as relatively free men. Behind the idea of debt, we find the centrality of

the social emotion of solidarity, but its complex elaborations entail the mixture of the different

“wills to power” of the subgroups that make up the city. Social solidarity in cold societies is a

particularization of the natural solidarity between all living beings that make up the anima mundi,

the symbolic principle with which the human being began to give meaning to existence. However,

in stratified societies, the principle is replaced by that of civilizing divinities, who give the

principles of agriculture and law, synthesized in the figure of the King-God, to whom mortals have

the eternal debt of its creation. Debt is the economic narrative, perfectly translatable into basic

emotional terms, that produce the narratives of primitive determination that deal with guilt.

Debt-guilt becomes the fundamental narrative bond of identity, a narrative of domination that unites

as well as energizes the actions of the group. The difference between the will of the King-God (and

the castes representing him) and that of the citizen, who is born within a civilized structure of

complex symbolic order, is conditioned by this initial situation. In exchange for shelter and

sustenance, the city collects its debt by limiting access to the benefits of labor synergy, and above

all, through exploitation. The lower castes always owe something to the higher ones. It is an

immaterial and metaphysical debt that is always paid with subordination and life, which is the

property of the community, that is, the patrimony of the King-God The legitimation of the city's

action outside its borders is based on its debt-guilt structure: the civilized city carries the order of

the true God, and such order implies a debt contracted by the civilized, which is valued in energy, in

resources, which, with the appropriate accounts, are equivalent to money. But mythological

construction is a sine qua non for the civilizing debt process to work, a transcendental narrative that

has to be complemented by economic narratives of work and money.

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