The Gift: Chapter 7 - Usury
Added 2025-09-01 15:58:36 +0000 UTCevery page of this chapter made me angrier! °❀⋆.ೃ࿔*:･
꧁⎝ 𓆩༺✧༻𓆪 ⎠꧂
I don't mean to be arrogantly critical of history through a single perspective, but just watching the concept of usury go from forbidden for moral purposes, to tribally used against enemies, to embarrassingly individualistic and psychological, was just hard to experience.
As a protestant, it was also painful to watch how the post Reformation church align itself with the interests of capitalism to such a compromising degree the exact way the Catholic church aligned itself with the Roman empire before it. Ls tacked on to Christianity all the way.
Some of this shit just straight demonic:
"the motive is brotherly love, namely that God's enemies may be weakened, and so return to him..." - Bernardino of Siena
The relentless trasnformation of commons into private property, the victim blaming perversion of faith into an excuse to say Fuck The Poor (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻.
All buttoned by the single relieving voice of reason dying shortly after granting relief:
Contribution Creates Membership
There is a bit of a puzzle in building communities online and irl today. Often someone who isn't particularly well socialized or fulfilled will show up in a community and take up a lot of space. Their eager participation can sometimes exercise outsized influence on the dynamic of the community, and their constant availability and eager giving also creates a sense of entitlement. If they are rebuked, or otherwise don't get the thing they were looking for, they feel personally betrayed, because they were so committed.
This happens constantly in churches, online spaces, bloody everywhere to be honest.
A connection I was making but did not quite complete for the Kiki video on mutual aid was the idea that Contribution Creates Membership. That is, the meaning of belonging to a community is whether or not you contribute towards it's purpose. So you are a member of a church if you attend it, and you become a deeper kind of member as you volunteer to maintain its functions, or apply for a job or make friends within it. You are contributing value to the space, and that itself means you are part of it.
But this only means you are an equal potential recipient / donor of gifts alongside anyone else. You aren't guaranteed it. You must contribute disinterestedly. Without promise of gain.
If you are a member, that means you give freely happily without expectation of transactional compensation. Perhaps big giving means some sort of big gift will make its way back to you, but you cant say what form this will take.
In addition to this, the integrity and essence of the group is defined by their values, their priorities, their purpose. That is: What They Consider A Gift. That is, you have to give on their terms and accept that gift cycle. That's part of what it means to become part of a culture.
So it's very self sacrificial. It means changing to fit into something, and it means letting go of what you may expect to recieve.
In one sense the reemergence of ancient usury bespeaks a decline in faith. Gift exchange is connected to faith because both are disinterested. Faith does not look out. No one by himself controls the cycle of gifts he participates in; each, instead, surrenders to the spirit of the gift in order for ti to move. Therefore, the person who gives is a person willing to abandon control. If this were not so, if the donor calculated his return, the gft would be pulled out of the whole and into the personal ego, where it loses its power. We say that a man gives faithfully when he participates disinterestedly in a circulation he does not control but which nonetheless supports his life.
If contribution creates membership, it means that to genuinely include someone in a community means to give them a role. To give them power. If your community is based on simply serving a class of people, they aren't members of your community. Servers in restaurants are part of a culture divided from the customers, as are actors and audiences.
This divide is okay, but it does mean drawing a line. This is why it isn't "kind" to tell someone they don't NEED to provide any value, or contribute, or do anything at all, because they are down on their luck and deserving of inclusion via charity. Like the early protestants inadvertantly reveal, charity isn't actually treating someone like a human with dignity. It's not including them. It's enforcing the predetermined dynamic.
Heavy long chapter. We'll keep pressing through next Sunday.
Comments
it's been a while since I read this and somehow I've still got the word 'usuary' rattling around in my head. I want to move on to the next chapters about art and god but first I need to pay my participation dues and revisit this chapter before my memory of it depreciates even more. there's definitely some book club effect of these ideas coloring my perception, seeing the world through usury-tinted glasses until moving on to the next chapter and seeing it all as poetry. around the time I was reading this andrewism came out with a video on debt that felt like an audio-visual counterpart to this. I'm wishing again that I took some notes then but what I remember sticking with me is how debt establishes an imbalance of status between people, which structures relationships and maintains power dynamics. the laws of status, class, and obligation are written through these terms. interlocking hierarchies of debts and status determine who owes who what, and how promises are made and kept. it's everywhere. how can I know if you'll keep your word? what's your sense of honor? we are bound to each other, kept in check by a series of debts and obligations. trade offs and promises. agreements and expectations. mortgages, cars, the divorce settlement... Hyde traces how many of the norms we live by came to be through the protestant reformation, the echoes of how the church evolved to contend with these questions. this is the dark side of gift. the schism that set the terms we now live by. It became apparent how the normalization of usury and its justification as righteous and inevitable has shaped the values I grew up around. it isn't considered wrong in many cases to split the bill, ask for what you think you deserve, even charge a friend as you might charge a stranger. you can go back on your word if you have a good enough excuse. a mom can ask her daughter for a loan back. you aren't necessarily expected to offer food or drink if someone comes to visit. things that would be considered vulgar and shameful in other parts of the world go unassumed. the sense of community I had growing up was based mostly on spacial proximity and group associations, things that often change and didn't last. friendships that come and go, emotional investments gone bankrupt. everyone is responsible for determining for themselves who is friend or cordial stranger, the inner and outer circles diffused and obscured. -degrees of reciprocity- it's a question of how far out of ourselves we can extend faithfully. with the individualizing of faith comes too the personalizing of risk and responsibility. the doubt, the guilt, the anxiety- to each their own. the borders of ones heart are dichotomized and thats where the moral decisions are made, not at the edge of some cohesive village. -universal brotherhood, universal alienation- in one of the previous threads I remember someone trying to challenge the maxim that community works best in smaller groups, up to about a hundred people. I instinctively agree with the original idea if only because I've seen it play out too many times, and I thought Hyde's quote of Benjamin Nelson seemed to summarize it nicely: "it is a tragedy of moral history that the expansion of the area of moral community has ordinarily been gained through the sacrifice of the intensity of the moral bond." I think one of the core societal divisions is the rural/city divide. how you treat your neighbors depends on how many neighbors you have, and it shapes how you think about people in general. inevitable as it may be, it sometimes seems like the move to cities has disrupted all the traditional structures of social life. the village is vital. I think it's possible to thrive in a city if you can recreate the village through community, but otherwise it can be so alienating and cruel to human dignity. even so, you have to wall your heart off to a certain extent to the constant mass of strangers and needy if you want to keep yourself intact, to avoid becoming the "sentimental fool with a bleeding heart", a "feeling that can no longer find its form" in this century. on the other hand, I made sacrifices, made the move, and I've got my little village now but there's hardly anyone left. the kindergarden closed down some years ago and it's a predictable pattern from there. the church bells toll all winter long and more necrologs are pasted outside the doors. the fountains fill with water tainted from fertilizer. with the city right next door and europe at your fingertips, why stay? why stay in poverty, why stay behind when the others have left? -a scarcity of grace- in my CISV days we would sometimes run certain games with the kids to simulate an experience for the sake of discussion, and this reminded me of two of them. red card/blue card is basically a gamified prisoners dilemna situation- each group is told their goal is to get a positive number of points and they must secretly vote each round with a red or blue card. if each group plays a blue card everyone gets points, but if only one group plays a red card they get points and the other teams lose points. if multiple groups play a red card everyone loses points. the other game is rich & poor, where a minority of kids are designated "rich" and given preferential treatment, like a fancy breakfast of pastries and nutella while the rest of the kids get plain toast. what is amazing to witness is how consistently these games play out across different groups and contexts- no one ever wins red card/blue card because all the groups have negative points at the end. the rich kids delight in showing off their nutella to the less fortunate and rarely volunteer to give up their benefits. some of the kids leap to hoard and fight over the toast as soon as the concepts of scarcity and poverty are introduced even though there's enough for everyone- or at least, there could have been. but since there isn't, how does one act? be righteous, or go hungry? play the game to survive or to thrive? the greedy mindset of scarcity spreads like wildfire unrestrained. does more for some mean less for others? I think- it depends on if you act like it. we believe what we know to be true; what we experience, where we orient ourselves towards. bad faith begets bad outcomes which comes back to affirm that faith. if you believe in and look for the worst or the best in people, you will find it. different truths can be real and lived and seemingly contradictory. the way your beliefs are enacted shapes what becomes.
Halley
2025-10-03 16:19:51 +0000 UTC"I am not fond of arguments that depend upon declaring something 'natural' or 'unnatural'; they tend not only to cut off debate but to assume a division between man and nature. Usury may be justly hated, but since men invented it, we must either accept it as a part of nature or say that men are not." (pg. 147) This is very similar to the argument that John Dewey opens with in Experience & Nature. He is hesitant to accept that nature is a thing to be studied instead of something which we experience daily. I haven't finished the book because it requires at least a full year of contemplation in a sensory deprivation tank in order to comprehend the first chapter, but so far it has argued in favor of a similar outlook on nature. Things are not "unnatural" just because people made them. Usury was not made so much as discovered as a natural human process. If gift economies are introduced to market economies, then usury is the natural born offspring of that union. Trade should increase a thing, but the market requires distance and finality. A gift increases in the abstract, and there is no guarantee of when or how it will return. A market likes the increase, but needs more strict terms, so usury is born out of convenience. My brain tells me that giving something up should make it more because that's just how it was. Money is something, so if I give up money, I should get more - usury in its natural habitat. I hate it just as much as Hyde, but he's right about the need to accept it. Treating it as unnatural is just trimming the leaves off the weed. This chapter is the search for the root, and it's not the kind of weed you can pull out single-handed. "Therefore, the person who gives is a person willing to abandon control." (pg. 166-167) Individualism seems to be one of the many threads rooting the weed of usury in place, so it can't be something we pull out alone. Working alone is just pouring fertilizer on top. We have to give up control to a community and accept that if we want to get rid of usury, that comes with some hard decisions. Do you really believe in universal brotherhood when the chips are down? Or do we have to draw our lines in the sand - pick an in group and an out group to be enforced by usury? The church had a chance a long time ago to make these decisions. It is the great disappointment of this chapter that the church chose to draw their lines in the sand. "Many people, when they try to love all mankind, feel a rising contempt for their neighbors." (pg. 169) This was the church's struggle. Universal brotherhood becomes such a large goal that if a few people need usury just to get through the day then so be it. We have bigger fish to fry. I spoke a few chapters prior of a fear that if the circle of egos grows too large, a community will crumble under its weight. This is what that fear was trying to voice - that when a group of people becomes sufficiently inclusive enough, the members cease to be people and become abstract participants. To love your neighbor is to treat them as a dear friend. It feels like it should require a level of intimacy which is impossible to grant to everyone if only because there isn't enough time in the day, but it's the Good Samaritan all over again. When people say World Peace and Love All Mankind, it's easy to get lost in such a high concept. It's not about waiting until the conditions are right to suddenly end every single war and all inequality in one fell swoop. It's about treating the next person you see with love and kindness. It's about taking the time to reach out in the small ways to that random person you pass by on the street. The Good Samaritan didn't end world hunger by being kind to some guy in the desert, but he made one man's world a better place. The church failed to remember that, and it signed off on treating all men as equally deserving of being removed from the community. We're all free game for usury now. You don't fix that by calling it unnatural. You don't fix it at all. Giving is abandoning control. You just treat the next person you see with kindness and let the increase slowly pull the weed from the dirt.
Chandler Sterling
2025-09-21 01:53:17 +0000 UTC
