A COMPREHENSIVE OVERVIEW OF HUMANITIES RELATIONSHIP WITH DEBT, AND WHY DEBT IS SO PREVALENT ACROSS HUMAN CIVILIZATION

Abstract

Debt has been a rare constant throughout recorded human history. There has almost always been a form of debt in human civilization. Debt has seemingly become a universal constant in the human story. Adam Smith once mentioned an invisible hand as a guiding force; I would parallel debt as a guiding force of human economics and behavior. This paper examines debt mechanisms throughout recorded history and explains why debt is so seemingly innate in human behavior. Innate in the sense that debt is preprogrammed into human behavior and that when humans are left unprompted, they utilize debt mechanisms in their societies. I seek to answer why so many vastly different civilizations independently utilize the same fundamental conceptions of debt? Part of the answer is that humans innately use systems of debt, whether it is through bartering, religion, or social debt mechanisms. Mark Twain famously said, "history never repeats, but it does often rhyme," and so too does debt seem to be a recurrence throughout human civilization. My analysis looked at various civilizations such as Sumer, Athens, Egypt, and Rome, and in all those civilizations I found and analyzed debt mechanisms that conceptually found their essence in the barter system and IOUs. In ancient Sumer they developed accounting tools like modern credit cards. In Athens Solon dealt with a national debt crisis while in Egypt I analyzed the innateness of ?the oath to the lord,? and its financial and religious context. I found that humans across time also perform massive amounts of debt forgiveness such as in the Neo-Assyrians. In the Vedas I found the oldest written religions belief on debt and guilt and how those ideas diffused across the globe to perhaps become innate to humanity over time. No matter where I looked, I always found debt mechanisms that resembled one another in some manner, and thus I concluded that debt is innate to humanity, because it is a foundational aspect of our very behavior.