Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth (15 page)

The American Revolution was another revolt that came about as the result of a tax perceived as unjust — imposed this time to pay for a war that had already taken place. The war was the Seven Years’ War between England and France, and it included the capture of Quebec in 1759. Had Quebec not fallen, there wouldn’t have been any American Revolution, as the colonists of that time couldn’t have afforded their own standing army to defend themselves against the French. Once New France was in the hands of the British, however, the American colonists were free to revolt, which they promptly did. You remember what they said on that occasion: “No taxation without representation.” Yes, it was a tax war.

To get back at England for their bad taste in having won the Seven Years’ War, the absolute monarchy of France supported the American revolutionaries, thus endorsing a model of anti-monarchist action, which was reckless of them. Also they spent too much money supporting the Americans, so they upped the taxes on their already threadbare population. There was a protest movement, featuring — among others — some non-aristocratic people known as the
sans culottes
. I used to think this meant they were so poor that they didn’t have any pants, but in fact it meant they didn’t have any knee breeches — these being the fashion choice of the aristocracy. Such sartorial distinctions became very important during the ensuing French Revolution of 1789, as they do during all revolutions. After the fall of the Bastille there were massive peasant uprisings and burnings of the chateaux of all those with
culottes
, and the tax and debt records were again among the first things to be destroyed.

This pattern is not a thing of the past. Burma in 1930, Vietnam — also in 1930 — and the Philippines in 1935 all saw anti-colonial rebellions focused on harsh taxes imposed by imperialist powers who were using the funds for the Machiavellian goals of gaining, expanding, and consolidating their own power. We think of the Hungarian uprising of 1956 as being some sort of spontaneous blow struck for democracy, but in fact it, too, was driven on by harsh taxation that can be traced to the U.S.S.R., which was involved in the Cold War arms race at the time. In all of these, one of the primary goals of the rebels was to destroy the tax and debt records. This was a very graphic way of wiping the slate clean.

If you’re a king, prince, tyrant, or democratic government and you want to do some war waging but don’t want to inspire a tax revolt by grinding the peasants too small, you can get hold of the money in other ways, such as borrowing it. There are three sources for such non-tax loans: (1) your own subjects, to whom you can sell war bonds; (2) the moneylenders within your own country; ( 3) the governments or financial institutions of other countries. If you borrow too much from other countries, you’ll sooner or later find yourself constrained in your sphere of power-expanding-and-consolidating action, because if that other country doesn’t like what you’re doing they can pull their financial support as lenders. But then, you can always threaten to default on your already-large loans and they will be stuck with a deficit. So it’s still a case of debtor and creditor joined at the hip.

(I need not whisper, “America and China at the present moment.” But I’ll whisper it anyway, adding simply: as Machiavelli said, it’s terrible policy for a leader to plunge his country severely into debt. It results in a loss of power and influence — often the very things that the leader waged the expensive war to gain. Looting and pillaging are all very well, but do the math first. Just remember: total loot-and-pillage profit, minus the time it takes, multiplied by cost-per-war-minute, equals either the red or the black. If it’s the red, take Mr. Micawber’s advice and don’t do it.)

However, if the moneylenders are not some other country but are situated within your own kingdom, and you’ve borrowed what you feel is too much money from them, you can play a very dirty trick. This dirty trick has indeed been played, and quite often. It’s called “Kill the Creditors.” (Please don’t try this at your local bank.)

Consider, for instance, the sad fate of the Knights Templar. They were a religious order of fighting knights who’d amassed a great store of capital through gifts given to them by the pious, as well as through various treasures they’d acquired during the Crusades, and they acted as Europe’s major moneylenders — to kings as well as to others — for more than two centuries. It was unlawful for Christians to charge “usury” for the use of money, but it wasn’t unlawful for them to charge “rent” for the use of land, so the Templars charged so-called “rent” for the use of money, which you paid at the same time you got the loan, rather than after you’d used it. But you still had to pay the principal amount back at the stipulated time. This could be a problem for those who’d borrowed the money, as it still is today.

In 1307, Philip the Fourth of France found he owed a cumbersome lot of money to the Templars. With the aid of the Pope and of torture, he accused them — falsely — of heretical and sacrilegious activities and had them rounded up and burned at the stake. As if by magic, his debts disappeared. (So did the vast wealth of the Templars, which has never been adequately accounted for since.)

Philip was basing his behaviour on a pre-existing and popular “Kill the Creditors” model, which might be called “Kill the Jewish Creditors.” It was against the Christian religion at that time to charge interest for loans, but it wasn’t against the Jewish religion for Jews to charge interest to non-Jews; and since in most countries where they lived Jews were forbidden to be landholders — land being considered the real source of wealth — they were forced into the profession of moneylending, for which they were then resented and despised. But the money they made by moneylending was in return frequently taxed by the kings. So a handy but dangerously symbiotic relationship came into being: the Jews made money by lending money, and the kings made money by taxing the money the Jews made. The borrowers might be the kings themselves, or they might be the nobles — nobles who, in true Machiavellian fashion, were trying to build up their own power and influence in order to become kings, or possibly king-makers, or king-breakers — in any case, something farther up the ladder; and climbing that ladder cost money. Which they often borrowed from the Jews.

This mix of money, kings, nobles, and Jews was volatile, and resulted in numerous outbreaks of “Kill the Jewish Creditors,” driven on by an ever-ready and convenient anti-Semitism. I’ll confine my examples to England, though there are many other such stories from all over Europe. For instance: at York, in 1190, a group of noblemen who owed a lot of money to Jewish moneylenders got up a mob and went after the Jewish population. The same device was used as for the Templars, namely, accusations of a religious nature. The Jews had been under the protection of Richard the First, but he’d gone off to the Crusades. There was a massacre, and you can predict what happened next: the records of the debts were burned. But Richard had depended on the Jews to finance — guess what — his war effort; so he was annoyed. He instituted a system of duplicate records, and then proceeded to tax the Jews even more than he had before.

In the thirteenth century, things got even worse for the Jews in England, with massacres at frequent intervals; in addition to which, various unsustainable taxes were levied on them by the king. Understandably, they asked to leave England in 1255, but Henry the Third refused this request, because the Jews were a convenient source of revenue for him; so convenient, indeed, that he declared them royal property, as if they were parks. But successive legal changes that restricted their activities even further — barring them from moneylending but not opening up much else — rendered them poor, and in 1290 they were expelled from England, which thus became the first country to do such a thing.

Lest you think that this pattern has occurred only in connection with Jewish moneylenders and the Knights Templar, let me remind you of Idi Amin’s expulsion of the East Indians from Uganda in 1972 — the East Indians were highly represented in the banking business — and of the treatment of the ethnic Chinese in Vietnam in the 1970s, including their expulsion. Whenever you have an out-group to whom an in-group owes a lot of money, “Kill the Creditors” remains an available though morally repugnant way of cancelling your debts. Note: you need not resort to murder as such. If you make people run away very fast, they’ll leave all their stuff behind, and then you can grab it. And burn the debt records: that goes without saying.

You’ll notice I got through this part without mentioning the Nazis. The point being that I didn’t have to. For they have not been alone.

NOW WE ARE
entering the shadowiest location in our tour of the shadow side of debt. Yes: we are approaching the Land of Revenge, the place where money can’t buy you out of a debt of honour. At this point I’d like to go back to the primate sense of fairness with which I began this book. You’ll recall that the monkeys in the experiment I described were quite happy to trade pebbles for slices of cucumber until one monkey was given a more cherished grape instead, whereupon most of the monkeys stopped trading. There’s also an experiment in which two monkeys were able to obtain a coveted food item by pulling together on a rope — neither one being able to accomplish this task solo. But the food was then available to only one of them. If this one refused to share, the second monkey would in future retaliate by refusing to pull on the rope. He preferred to punish the selfish monkey rather than take a chance at getting some food himself.

You know the feeling. Everyone knows it. Could it be that the revenge module is very ancient and thus deeply embedded in us? Some cultures encourage its expression more than others do, but it seems to be omnipresent. Simply telling people they ought not to feel vengeful because it isn’t nice will not usually work.

“Economic man” is a creature beloved of economists, who like to believe we’re motivated purely by economic considerations. If that were true, the world would be not necessarily a better but a very different place. Money — like the monkeys’ pebbles — is simply a medium of exchange. It can be changed into all sorts of other things, including lives. Sometimes it’s been used as payment for a death you may have caused — of a cow, a horse, or a person. Sometimes it’s been used to pay for a death you may want caused, and sometimes to keep a death from happening — in these last two cases we refer to it as “blood money.” But sometimes these money equations just won’t suffice: only the blood will do.

In Charles Dickens’s novel about the French Revolution,
A Tale of Two Cities,
the much-wronged Madame Defarge spends the time leading up to the Terror keeping a knitted record of all those whose heads must fall once the storm breaks. As her husband says, “It would be easier for the weakest poltroon that lives, to erase himself from existence, than to erase one letter of his name or crimes from the knitted register of Madame Defarge.” Her knitting recalls the Greek Fates — those three sisters who spun out men’s destinies, then snipped off their threads — but it’s also a sinister version of the debt records we’ve been talking about; and when the guillotine is up and running, Madame Defarge goes to all the executions and counts the heads, and unknits the names of the victims, because their “forfeit” has been paid in blood.

Beside Madame Defarge sits another of the knitting women, whose nickname is “The Vengeance.” She’s a stand-in for the presiding deities of the Revolution, who are our old acquaintances the goddess Nemesis — or Retribution — and the red-eyed, relentless Furies. When the more balanced goddess, Justice, with her blindfold and her scales loses control, these more ancient and more bloodthirsty goddesses come rampaging in.

I’ll pause here to consider the word “revenge,” which, according to the
Oxford English Dictionary
, is derived from the Latin
revindicare
. And
revindicare
is derived from
vindicare
, which means to justify or rescue or liberate or emancipate, as in liberating a slave. Thus, to revenge yourself upon someone is to reliberate yourself, because before doing the revenge, you aren’t free. What holds you in thrall? Your obsession with your own hatred of the other: your own vengefulness. You feel that you can’t shake free of it except through the act of revenge. The score that needs to be settled is a psychic score, and the kind of debt that can’t be paid with money is a psychic debt. It’s a wound to the soul.

Revengers and those they wish to kill or punish are like creditors and debtors. They come in pairs. They’re joined at the hip. And it’s just a short step from here to the Jungian theory of the Shadow.

In narratives involving irrational and obsessive hatred, especially of some person or group one doesn’t really know very well, such hatred — say the Jungians — is the mark of a person who has not come to terms with his or her own Shadow. The Shadow is our dark side, the repository of everything in us we’re ashamed of and would rather not acknowledge, and also of those qualities we profess to despise but would in fact like to possess. If we haven’t acknowledged those things about ourselves, we’re likely to project them onto somebody else or some other group, and to develop an irrational hatred toward that person or group. In fiction, the Shadow often appears as an actual double or twin or replicant, as in Poe’s story “William Wilson” or Oscar Wilde’s
The Picture of Dorian
Gray
. Such twin figures abound in literature, and also in film, and even in television series — as I recall, Data, the android in
Star Trek: The Next Generation
, was once supplied with a malevolent Shadow figure. All those “evil twin” plots, the Jungians would say, are about the Shadow.

WHICH OF COURSE
has a bearing on stories about revenge, where Shadows run rampant. Who knows why Character A feels such an extreme loathing toward Character B? The Shadow knows, and until Character A knows too, and acknowledges the Shadow as a creature of his own making, he won’t be free of it.