Being in debt is so commonplace – in fact it’s the norm – that many people probably don’t consider the impact it has on our mind state and thought process.

Asking someone what it feels like to be in debt – for many – is like asking what it feels like to live indoors or to eat breakfast or to have a hot shower at night. Debt is so pervasive and everpresent – it’s the water that we’re swimming in – that we rarely stop to consider what it would feel like to NOT be in debt.

Most would recognise that the feeling of being indebted is not a particularly pleasant one. If your friend has hosted you for dinner five times and you have yet to host them once, you may have some twinge of uncomfortable obligation. If a Hare Krishna or charity hawker on the street gives you a small ‘gift’, you may feel like it would be rude to not give them a minute of time to chat, and so on.

While we may be consciously aware of those small social ‘debts’, large scale debts issued by institutions may seem to be just “the way things are” – they they are just facts of life, inherent to the world we are born into.

When everyone you know works 9-to-5, Monday to Friday, it doesn’t feel so weird for you to be getting up every morning and doing the same. Likewise if all your friends are locked into 30 year debt contracts just so they can live indoors, it too can feel ‘normal’.

Despite the warnings of ancient wisdom, most of us (75% of households according to a study in Australia in 2020) have taken on debt of some kind, and – I would argue – are being impacted psychologically as a result, both consciously and subconsciously. But how?

The relative perceptive of value

You’ve probably heard of studies showing that people are much more sensitive to price variability on smaller items than on larger purchases. For example, a ten per-cent saving on a hundred dollar pair of shoes – ie. ten dollars – seems like it’s worth walking down the street for, but people would not do the same to save $10 on a $20,000 car. Why not? $10 is $10, right? Apparently not.

Similarly, people are much more open to paying (objectively) larger sums for things when they are ‘addons’ to an already substantial purchase. For example, it would seem crazy to spend $500 or $1,000 for a few pieces of plastic, unless they are cupholder upgrades to a car purchase which already runs $30,000. You get the idea.

Along these same lines, there is a certain insidious effect that arises from being committed to a long term (arguably life-time length) debt relationship. To appreciate this, we will first need to explore the contrary.

Note: please excuse the apparent childish simplicity of the following examples, but I feel like it’s necessary for logical completeness.

The independent plumber

Let’s take a (simplified) hypothetical example of a man – Peter Plumber – who earns $500 a day as an independent plumber. If he goes out and plumbs, he earns $500 that day. If instead he sits around at home reading a book, he earns $0. Whatever amount of money he accumulates over time (minus what he spends on living expenses) is what sits in his bank account.

If Peter day-to-day earns more than he spends, then his ‘savings’ will gradually increase. If he knows it costs him $5,000 a month to survive, and he can see $60,000 sitting in his account, he can have some satisfaction in knowing that he can probably sit around for close to a year before he needs to rush out and unblock some peoples’ toilets.

Conversely, he can look at that $60,000 and weigh up whether he might want to spend some of those funds on a holiday or a second-hand car or some other substantial purchase. Mentally, he is comparing the satisfaction or utility he may get from those purchases, versus the effort he spent in acquiring those funds in the first place – and the effort that will be required to re-acquire those funds in the future to replace his financial ‘safety cushion’.

He may like the idea of buying a car to cruise around on the weekend, but prefer to take a 6 month sabbatical from his work and travel the world, for example.

Let’s now compare this with the thought process of a mortgage-holder.

The employee mortgagor

Note: For our counter-example I am going to conflate two things which ARE separate, but that DO tend to go together: that of being an employee (rather than an independent contractor) and that of having a mortgage (rather than renting). Commonly speaking, it’s more difficult for independent business owners to obtain mortgages (a topic for another time) and often they choose not to in the first place, since their income may be less consistent or reliable.

That said, let’s now take Eddie Employee, a man who has a permanent position at a plumbing company, earning a salary to work at head-office sending out independent plumbers like Peter to jobs. Eddie earns a fixed annual salary (paid into his bank account every month) and he works a standard 9-to-5 40-hour week.

As long as Eddie does his job sufficiently, he gets his paycheck every month like clockwork. If he seems to be doing a good job – and the business is doing okay – he can also probably expect a payrise or promotion every now and again.

This apparent predictability means Eddie can make longer term arrangements like leasing a car or getting a mortgage, because he can (somewhat) assume that he will have a certain amount of money showing up every month to cover these on-going payments.

The flipside of this ‘security’ is that Eddie loses a degree of freedom in deciding how much work he wants to do on an ongoing basis. There will be certain terms of his employment contract which determine how many days of leave he can have every year, and he will need to get the timing of that leave ‘approved’ by a superior beforehand. Of course, Eddie can always quit (probably after a month’s notice) but there is a certain gamble associated with that – what if he loses this job and can’t get anything comparable? Remember – he has monthly expenses he needs to hit, no matter what, or else bad things happen.

Where am I going with all of this?

Money as freedom ‘credits’

As mentioned previously: for Peter, $500 is a day’s work. For Eddie, however, even if he ALSO effectively earns $500 a day (ie. 20 work days = $10,000 a month) the money does not have the same practical application in the context of freedom.

While Peter can take a month off or decide to take less jobs that month, Eddie does not have that flexibility. He is essentially locked into a dynamic with two choices: you obey your boss, or you quit. When looking at older legal dictionaries, the term ’employee’ is defined as the equivalent of ‘servant’, but for operating on ships – just as ‘master’ is the land-based equivalent of the nautical ’employer’.

This is why full-time positions are referred to as ‘permanent’ – that is traditionally what they were. You took a job as a servant for someone, with the expectation that you would continue to work for them indefinitely. This is why there are BENEFITS associated with those positions, which do not extend to ‘contractor’ roles – the master is obligated to take care of his life-time servants.

Getting back on track, we can see how Eddie – by virtue of the nature of his situation – has essentially committed to the long-term servitude of his employer. Any decision Eddie makes ultimately needs to fit within the confines of the terms of the contract he has with his employer, unless he wants to branch-swing to another employer (who will likely have similar terms) or just quit and somehow try to cobble together enough cash to cover his monthly expenses.

Realistically then, given that Eddie has committed to a 30 year mortgage for a house, he is in for the long haul and has to play ball every month for the forseeable future. So, relatively speaking then, what does $500 really mean to Eddie?

Money as something else

If – practically speaking – Eddie can’t use that $500 to buy units of freedom (ie. days that he doesn’t need to go to work) what CAN he do with it?

Firstly, he can spend the money to enhance the days that he does NOT have to go to work – ie. weekends and pre-approved holidays. If he has $10,000 in savings, and he has 20 days of holiday leave per year, he can spend $500 a day living it up over the course of that trip, before coming back to the office on day 21.

Conversely, Eddie can spend those savings on items that he can enjoy WHILE at the office (clothing, jewelry, mobile phones, gadgetry) or during his downtime (large television, gym membership, yoga sessions, and so on).

You may be thinking, so what?

Well, there is another somewhat insidious aspect to Eddie’s situation, and it connects to the broader concept of debt itself.

$500 as a percentage of $1,000,000

If Eddie has a 30-year mortgage for $1,000,000, he has essentially committed to full-time employment – presumably doing the same job (or similar) that he is doing now – for the next 30 years.

Knowing that he is on the hook for a million dollars, his day-to-day decision making is no longer about WHAT he should do with his life (that is already effectively decided) but rather WHAT he should spend his money on, and what he should do with his spare time (evenings/weekends/holidays).

Remember that once you owe a million dollars, the banks make it very easy to INCREASE and tack on more debt to that existing million. This is known as the ‘smart’ way to borrow, since the interest rates are lower than credit cards or personal loans.

From Eddie’s point of view, then, if he wants a new car for $50,000 – what would be the point of scraping and saving for two years like Peter would need to do, when he could just get it now and tack the 50k onto the 1 million dollar mortgage? $1,050,000 is only 5% more than he owes now, and who cares if it takes him 31 years to pay it off instead of 30, he’ll be an old man anyway. At least he can enjoy that new car smell, and blast through a few amber lights while driving into the office that he has no choice but to go to.

Likewise if Eddie wants a new playstation, a road bike, a rolex, or whatever. It’s all miniscule compared to the scale of the debt, and he has to keep going to work indefinitely (30 years+) anyway, so might as well get some enjoyment in the cracks where he can.

Multiply this by 30 million

The obvious result of this (on a population-wide scale) is an economy made up of millions of people who are all locked into a life-path with minimal deviation, where their only real freedom of movement is through consumption. This consumption – their respite from their work – ironically increasing the debt load that is the source of their predicament in the first place.

In England in 1910 only 10% of people ‘owned’ their own homes (as opposed to renting), in 2024 it was 50% (down from a peak in the 1990s of 69%).

As we all know, nobody consumes like those who are unsatisfied with their life situation, so this has the (unintended?) flow-on effect of boosting economic activity and consumption. The mass-adoption of mortgages also creates a climate of across-the-board social compliance. If the powers-that-purport-to-be say that everyone needs to get an injection to go into the office, an people need to go to the office to get their paycheck to pay their mortgage and not default on their home… then most people are going to comply with that ‘mandate’.

Since banks penalise people for trying to pay their mortgages off faster (I wonder why that is) most people, then, will go through their life, with their behaviour, decision-making and thought processes subtly shaped by a debt burden that they never particularly thought twice about taking on.

Obviously the advertising industry leverages this dynamic continuously – doctors were used to encourage people to smoke Camel cigarettes, just as doctors today are used to sell people on neverending Covid boosters, daily amphetamines, and all manner of other lethal poisons. Since we are culturally trained through government-mandated education and 360 degree media to associate doctors with intelligence, the credulous masses perceive taking the advice of doctors (aka trusting the science) to be the ‘smart’ option.

“Smart people trust experts” is the subtext flowing underneath mainstream narratives across all mediums, along with the corollary: “stupid people think they know better than experts”. Unfortunately these ‘experts’ are in fact locked into obeying special interest groups through their educational debt and obligations to licensing bodies, living in constant fear of losing their job, prestige, and defaulting on their mortgage. Deciding to ‘trust’ someone who is contractually not allowed to tell you the truth is akin to trusting the answers coming from someone with a literal gun to their head. “Is everything okay?” (nods) “Okay cool…”

Back to our theme: you will notice that hypnotists routinely tell their audiences that SMART people are actually MORE easily HYPNOTISED than a person of average intelligence. Is that really true? Or is it perhaps the case that people are more COMPLIANT if they think that complying is a mark of sophistication and likely to earn them prestige and social credit?

Since people fear being considered stupid, they tend to gravitate towards options that they feel are rubber-stamped by authority, in the hope that they will not be set aside from the group and criticised for their stupidity. Ironically their attempt to not APPEAR stupid actually leads them to taking a stupid action: ie. trusting the people who are deliberately abusing this mechanism.

‘Smart’ people (supposedly) do the ‘responsible’ thing and pay exhorbitant monthly rates for health insurance plans, which coincidentally narrow their range of healthcare options to three choices: surgery, radiation and pharmaceutical drugs. You can cut, you can burn, or you can poison – which would you prefer?

We are now being told that the SMART thing to do, is to embrace AI – that the SMART people who will BENEFIT from AI are those who learn how to use and become experts in incorporating these tools into their work and businesses. The tech billionaires who tell us this – we are told – are extremely smart and extremely rich (they got rich because they are so smart, presumably).

The character Elon Musk has been slow-dripping the idea that AI is going to replace everything and the only people who will stand a chance of survival are those who deliberately MERGE with this AI – by putting a chip in their head and allowing this foreign influence to effectively ‘co-pilot’ our own thoughts.

Does this sound like a smart idea? Have you ever looked at your phone or kindle automatically updating and force-installing an undesirable new feature despite you telling it not to, and thought – wouldn’t it be great if this technology was INSIDE my head, dictating my thoughts?

The REAL smart guys – so we hear – are embracing AGENTIC AI.. ie. AI that you entrust to go off and do things for you autonomously and unsupervised. You will note that this is a similar dynamic to trusting a real estate agent or an accountant or lawyer – it’s not that it is inherently a bad idea, but it is entirely contingent on that party having YOUR best interests at heart. Surprise surprise, this is not usually the case – though most people are too brainwashed to even see or understand how that may be the case.

Lawyers – as a general rule – prioritise their own wallets over their clients’ interests, doctors prioritise their financial incentives over their patients’ health, and accountants prioritise their own regulatory obligations to the government (their real client) over the ‘tax-avoision’ priorities of the people who are mandated to pay for these accountancy services – ie. you.

For anyone even remotely paying attention, it is clear that the primary attributes of SMART cities – a compressed grid covered in 5G towers, cameras, AI, digital currency and automation – are coincidentally the same things that would be necessary for a full-spectrum digital prison.

In fact, you can pretty much draw a direct line between anything that advertises itself as ‘SMART’… and the resulting reduction of human competency, self-reliance and personal freedom. If any of these initiatives and devices actually WERE in our interest, they wouldn’t need to tell you that you were clever for using them.

So what’s the catch? Well I was told by the partner of a high-level executive in an international bank that these expat packages are not merely designed to attract ‘top talent’, but are specifically engineered with one key goal in mind – to create leverage over their new hires.

You may be aware that international schools in key Asian international cities are prohibitively expensive – think $40,000 USD per child, per year, before debentures, capital levies and so on. One reason these schools are so expensive that is that the big banks and multinationals routinely pre-buy blocks of slots every year in order to distribute to the families of their expat employees.

The management technique, then, goes like this: HR brings a guy – let’s call him Ken – over from the US with his wife and kids. They get the local work visa approved, and they get Ken all settled into the big apartment – all covered under their housing allowance. A couple of months in, Ken’s wife is making friends at the yacht club, she’s got the domestic helper all trained up on the grocery shopping, and the kids are all in school. By the time 6 months have passed, his wife has a healthy social calendar, the kids friends’ parents are also her friends, and most importantly: the kids have stopped complaining incessantly about going back home, because they’ve finally started to make some good friends at school. This is when Ken’s boss first asks him to come into the office on a Saturday.

As soon as this happens, Ken intuitively knows he’s screwed. He knows this isn’t a one-off.. it’s not a favour to a mate.. he’s getting punked out in the prison shower.

What’s he going to say – no? If he loses this job, he knows there’s no way he’s going to be able to find a replacement position with that kind of salary and benefit package. Will his wife want to run back home to the US with their tails between their legs? They’ve just spent the last half a year humble-bragging on facebook about how lucky they are to have a domestic helper and a personal driver in this tropical paradise.

It is possible that if he really hustles, Ken may be able to find some kind of replacement role at another firm with a workable salary, but there would need to be serious cutbacks. He may be able to convince the wife to move into a smaller apartment, he could let go of his driver, sell his car, give up his yacht club membership, cut down on the restaurants and start riding the subway.

A cost-saving measure he likely will NOT be able to pull off, is convincing his wife to get his kids – now that they’ve all finally settled into a foreign country and made some friends – to leave their hyper-expensive international school, and transfer to a cheap local one where they won’t even be able to speak the language.

Every other perk and luxury, he could theoretically decide to ditch. Ultimately these things are really just luxuries for him, and – practically speaking – not worth the cost. The ‘cost’ of course, being the burden of 24/7 slavery to upper management who have full knowledge that they have you directly in their pocket.

The genius of the package’s complimentary ‘high-end’ schooling, is that the school slots are not HIS perk to give up. Ken’s dilemma, then, is to either rip the kids out of school and create a domestic nightmare for himself, or to be financially destroyed trying to pay the absurd ‘market rates’ for kids’ schooling which – ironically – he used to get for ‘free’.

For these reasons, when Ken’s boss casually asks him on Friday morning if he minds coming in on Saturday – he already has a pretty good idea what that answer is going to be.

He noted that this was the first time in the last 25 years – since he was 5 years old – that he had not been actively studying and preparing for some kind of exam. Of course he will have no shortage of future hoops to jump through, in order to maintain his medical status, licensing, and insurance, but that’s for another article.

This mild yet persistent mental torture which he has experienced over this last quarter century is only a slightly more extreme version of something that we all deal with in our modern civilised, industrialised society – that is, from a young age we are brainwashed into unknowing compliance through an on-going decades-long near-relentless process known as ‘testing’.

While school is sold to us broadly as ‘learning’ – and while we may walk away with some practical skills like writing and basic arithmetic – it is this procedure of regular examination which serves and the primary driver of behaviour and compliance throughout the schooling process.

Testing = Training

Just as a dog is given instructions, and then either rewarded or punished based on its response and compliance, so too is the student in our modern schooling system – all the way from kindergarten to university, through to masters degrees and beyond.

Instead of a dog treat, students get colourful stickers, praise from adults, status over peers, approval from parents, and ultimately access to ‘better’ universities and therefore (theoretically) access to higher-status, better-paid and more rewarding jobs… all in the corporate world of course.

Testing is the on-going mechanism used to extract compliance – and ensure that the Government-issued curriculum being pushed in the classroom is mentally retained and obeyed, rather than ignored and immediately forgotten as useless or irrelevant information.

But aren’t tests merit-based? Aren’t they a record of your performance, ability, preparation, aptitude, accuracy and correctness? Well, maybe.

What’s wrong with rewarding the ‘correct’ answer?

In some cases – setting aside implied fundamental biases for now – this can be legitimate. Two plus two, according to the agreed-upon rules of our mathematical system is four, and answers of ‘four’ should ordinarily be rewarded.

Unfortunately, even with such a seemingly clear-cut example, this is not always the case. As ‘Common Core’ mathematics is implemented in US schools, other aspects such as ‘group cohesion’ are factored into account when assigning marks. For example, if three students are assigned to calculate 2+2, and one boy writes ‘4’, while the other two write ‘5’, the former can be marked down for not ‘co-operating’ properly with his group mates.

Outside of mathematics, things get even trickier.

If the curriculum says Columbus first discovered America, then that’s the ‘answer’. Any other answer is not correct, regardless of the truth or ‘reality’ of the situation. If the curriculum this year says that men can fall pregnant – for example – and you say that they can’t, then that’s a zero for you… and maybe a free session with a mental health counsellor. Now, repeat this exercise ad nauseam for any single point of contention in biology, history, geography, culture, public policy, economic theory and so on.

Given this, exams are only really an aptitude test in the sense that they test the student’s ability – and willingness – to accurately repeat what was previously told to them by an authority figure as ‘the answer’. The most faithful regurgitation performed gets the most ticks, the most points, and ultimately the most ‘opportunities’ to rise up through the education system. This leads to more exams and tests in other institutions, where they can further prove their ability to comply, in evermore sophisticated ways.

Professional regurgitators

Consider the reams of information that a medical student needs to retain over the course of their years of study – drug names, drug protocols, ‘safe’ dosages, medical procedures, hospital policies, and so on. A medical student who can regularly process, retain and appropriately regurgitate such a quantity of information over such a long period – especially while dealing with chronic sleep deprivation – is especially suited to working in a hospital setting where the institution specifically wants tireless and compliant operators.

The hospital doesn’t value cowboys and rule-breaking renegades ‘who get results’, despite what television shows may suggest. What hospitals do want, are technicians who will reliably conform to exact procedures and specified ‘standards of care’. These ‘standards of care’, it just so happens, are laid out by pharmaceutical company donors and are – just coincidentally – also required by the policies of all large insurance companies.

A short tangent on insurance

This practical reality is that doctors are covered by their insurance policies as long as they slavishly follow these pharmaceutical-company devised protocols (ie. ‘standards of care’), regardless of how many people happen to die on their watch. The riskiest thing a doctor can do professionally, then, is deviate from those protocols, even if their behaviour was intended to – and even literally results in – saving a patient’s life.

As a generalised illustrative example: if a protocol dictated that a certain drug should be administered at a certain frequency and at a certain dosage – even if the doctor suspected that the drug was indeed killing that patient – they could safely (legally speaking) continue to administer the drug to a patient until death, without fear of financial penalty. If the same doctor instead had a pang of conscience and decided to stop administering the drug – even if that action directly resulted in the patient surviving – that doctor could now be personally liable for medical injuries that patient had suffered thus far.

These are perverse incentives indeed, and contribute to reinforcing the entrained mindset and behaviour of these thoroughly ‘tested’ professionals.

It’s spreading!

This dynamic of procedural control of course applies to all sorts of key industries throughout modern society – affecting the roles that just so happen to be so well paid and desirable as to be almost universally encouraged by conservatively-aspirational parents. Accountants, lawyers, engineers, finance and so on. In this way, large numbers of people in key functional roles are conditioned to behave very consistently without needing to be reminded – precisely because they are the ones who got into those positions, by successfully demonstrating a high level of capability to obey.

So what’s the problem? Isn’t this a good thing? Don’t we want our accountants and airline pilots and skyscraper engineers to be following the rules? Doesn’t that make us… safer?

The down-side

Where was this army of exam-acing scientists and experts while all these poisonous and dangerous products were being developed, tested and foisted on the public? Oh.. that’s right.. they were obeying. And why wouldn’t they? That strategy of blind obedience had already served them so well so far. Obeying had paid for cars, houses, holidays and even private school educations for their virtuoso children to follow in their acquiescent footsteps.

The problem with these learned intellectuals, then, is that at no point during the process of their development, were the fundamental presumptions of their ‘knowledge’, ever properly questioned.

And why would they be? As we all know, there are no smiley-face-stickers or 98% exam scores or scholarships or internships or medical residencies or corner desk promotions getting handed out to the people who question the foundational premises of the gravy train that everyone around them is riding on.

And even if they wanted to.. when would these people have the time? Any precious bandwidth spent trying to research alternative theories, interpretations or realities… is time that could otherwise be spent memorising the ‘correct’ answer… an answer that could be relied on to lead to social approval, money, apartments, boats and so on. Large institutions aren’t in the business of handing out rewards – financial or otherwise – to people who prove them wrong.

As a result, we exist today in a world managed by millions of obedient administrators, their belief systems predictably moulded by a hierarchical network of ‘credible’ institutions.

The ideas which fill their minds do not arise from an organic ‘peer-reviewed’ process, but rather originate from a tiny number of compromised men, of which the recipients will likely barely even know the names.

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. …We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.

Edward L. Bernays, Propaganda

But how is this possible?

‘Educational’ leverage

The printing press – along with the enforcement dimension of testing – allows for the written words of a few, to be foisted on the many.

As is standard practice through medical education: a single medical reference textbook which is studied by millions may be written by only a couple of dozen doctors, with the writing of each chapter attributed to just two names: a pair of supposed subject matter ‘experts’ in their particular narrow field. That is presuming that those doctors even wrote those chapters themselves in the first place, and didn’t have the material provided to them by a publishing agency working on behalf of a pharmaceutical company, along with a fee for their ‘participation’.

To see how this same principle of leverage works in the entertainment (ie. propaganda) world: we can start with a single book – seemingly written by one man, which tells the supposed origin story of Mark Zuckerberg. This book then gets adapted into a screenplay by a famous screenwriter, then produced as a hit film by an A-list director, which is then watched and ultimately believed by… millions. And why wouldn’t they? The movie is based on a book, isn’t it? And it’s a ‘true story’, right?

And there we have, the broadly accepted ‘canonical’ version of the Zuckerberg story, created through movie magic.

Mass consensus

In this way – with sufficient funds and control over institutions of education – a perceived mass consensus of ‘truth’ can be engineered on essentially any topic.

From here – with the ‘correct answers’ having now been established across the board – the mechanism of mass testing can apply its immense and universal pressure on students to take up and absorb these ideas – if only ‘temporarily’ and for the purposes of passing a test.

Over time then, we see the generation of millions of predictably-behaving automatons who aren’t even aware of – let alone interested in questioning – the limitations and boundaries of their own understanding.

And why would they be? These people are very successful and earn good money, because – in their own minds – they ‘work hard’, they are ‘capable’, and they ‘are smart’.

Do you think a millionaire doctor would like to sit down and listen to ideas coming from a man or woman who did not go through the traumatic near-decade-long process which they had to endure, in order to attain their current expert status?

Do you think they’d be interested to look at results or entertain evidence which demonstrated that the practices that they make a living from, are useless or perhaps even harmful?

Ancient wisdom

Of course, this system of hierarchical hypnotic mind-control is nothing new. Kings, emperors and dynasties going back into antiquity have known that longevity of power required a systematically trained hierarchy of subordinates who wouldn’t even think to change the game or make a run for the throne.

We know these people as ‘eunuchs’, and non-aristocratic parents were only too happy to have their childrens’ genitals removed in order for them to rise up the ranks and perhaps one day achieve some kind of servantile job in the court or palace. Imagine the kind of bragging a poverty-stricken parent could do, knowing that their neutered offspring was working in close proximity to royalty.

Today, our system is much more humane. It’s considered a mark of social progress for a population to be so well-trained that brutalism no longer required. When muslim countries successfully eradicate the practice of theft – such that the hands of pick-pockets no longer need to be lopped off with a sword, that marks a level of sophistication for their governance. It demonstrates that the carrot and stick has already been embedded – subliminally – in the minds of the populace.

Likewise, when millions of lawyers, doctors, accountants and engineers can spend entire multi-decade careers not even considering the falsehood of their state-trained presumptions – our control system too, can celebrate a job well-done.

Today, we don’t have literal eunuchs walking around corporate boardrooms, municipal governments and hospital advisory boards – we have mental eunuchs. Though they may not consciously recognise what they are – which is actually an added benefit – the successful among them do know intuitively what their behaviours and opinions should be, without needing to be reminded.

The best servant is one who knows exactly what its master wants without needing to be told, and just as the ancient monarchs the world over knew only too well, eunuchs make fabulous administrators.

That said, the voices of ‘concensus reality’ will confidently inform you that there are many reasons why ‘smart’ debt – used responsibly – is actually a good idea, and you should totally use it. In fact, you’d be kind of stupid not to.

‘Good’ debt

The idea of ‘good’ debt is that by paying a premium (ie. interest) you are able to take advantage of an available ‘investment’ of some kind now and ultimately profit more than whatever it ends up costing you in interest.

For example:

Student debt

Education debt we are told is okay, because it’s an investment in yourself, and your future earning potential. The average student loan debt in the US in 2021 was $37,338 for federal loans, or $54,931 for private. Of course these numbers are much higher for certain career paths.

As of 2023, the average law student graduates with $165,000 in student loan debt, with the average medical school graduate owing $250,990.

I mean in just a few years you’ll be raking it in and chewing through those debts up in no time, right?

Mortgages

As with educational debt, you will be told (coincidentally by real estate agents) that buying a house with a mortgage is really an investment in your future. It is your home, it’s where you live, it’s something you can leave to your kids and so on.

Blatant appeals to emotion aside, they will say that you need somewhere to live anyway, right? You might as well have somewhere stable, that you can decorate the way you like and improve your overall quality of life throughout your working days.

Also, with the housing market continuing to boom, down the track this cosy little place will be worth megabucks.

“Thanks real estate agent”, that all seems to make a lot of sense.

Business loans

So you’ve got a great business idea – but to execute it properly you need time off from your job and capital to set it up properly. If you sit around for five years saving up you’ll miss the market and lose your chance. Likewise, if you don’t have the capital to grow quick enough you may find competitors overtake you, dominate the market and leave you by the wayside.

If you borrow wisely and manage your business well, the interest you paid will be a pittance in comparison to the money generated by your new commercial mega-empire. A few short years later you buy a super yacht and live happily ever after…

Now I’d be remiss here if I didn’t address some of the potential downsides of debt, that you may or may not have considered.

Leverage: a double-edged sword

Of course “this is how rich people get rich” is the prevailing wisdom: they borrow to invest in something, then use the equity in that to borrow for another thing and so on and so on.

Sounds good in theory – if a house (for example) is expected to rise in value from 1m to 2m over 10 years, why not own two of them? Why not ten?

This is all fine if housing prices keep going up and interest rates don’t, but as soon as those numbers drift out of your favour, you’re in big trouble. Instead of owing a million dollars, you may find yourself owing an order of magnitude more, and now you can’t even service the interest payments let alone make a dent in the principals. Even if you try to sell everything and cut your losses, you might be so ‘upside-down’ on these properties that you end up way in the red.

This is when ‘rich guys’ end up begging and pleading with banks for extensions – which funnily enough banks don’t want to provide – since they would rather collect the hard assets, even at a massive discount. Some deeper research into the true nature of mortgages will reveal why that is the case.

So sure, you can use debt to ‘leverage’ your ability to make a bunch of quick money – or you might find yourself owing more than you can pay back in many lifetimes, and climbing over the 10th floor railing of a shopping center to hurl yourself down onto the food court. It’s no coincidence that many of those atriums have nets now.

You spend more

One aspect of using debt is that – generally speaking – people tend to spend more.

Even if you know consciously you’re on the hook to pay the money back later (with interest) somehow it just feels ‘easier’ to spend when the money is magically transmitting from a swipe or tap of a card, rather than as crisp cash in your wallet transmuting into a wad of receipts.

But it isn’t just credit cards, there are other psychological factors at play:

Layaway

We’re all familiar with the idea of white goods and furniture stores offering items on ‘layaway’ or ‘financing’. Obviously they don’t do this for fun, and these options (which they push heavily) translate into increased sales, not to mention additional profit on the financing component.

Likewise there are more and more ‘layaway’ type brokers popping up in recent years – such as ‘Pay in 4’ from Paypal and ‘Afterpay’ – which are allowing this approach to be used on smaller ticket items. Participating retail stores will sell you a $100 dress in 4x $25 payments a month apart, often with no interest – as long as you make the payments on time. Again, the stores participate in this because it results in substantially more sales – ie. people buying stuff that they would otherwise not have bought.

Add-on pricing

This is the principle whereby you are naturally less judicious about additional costs when they are viewed in comparison to a large price. For example – you are more likely to pay $1000 for a cupholder upgrade on a $50,000 new car, than you would if you were to go and buy that cupholder setup as some third party item in a separate transaction. In the context of the bigger transaction (the car), that cupholder is only a measly 2% of the total and so it is naturally minimised in your mind.

Likewise you might decide to take a bus instead of a taxi to save $20, but would you put that effort into negotiating for a $20 discount on buying a new television? Probably not.

Adding ‘time’

Similarly, once you have committed to a substantial mortgage, you start to look at spending a little differently.

Psychologically, if you’re already going to be paying this thing off for the next 30 years, why not just throw a new car on it and do an extra year or two of payments? By then you’ll be 60 anyway – might as well enjoy yourself a bit more now, right?

Of course, if you had to save and pay hard cash for that vehicle you’d probably think pretty carefully about whether you really needed it, whether there were cheaper options and so on, but since it’s just being slapped into the bill of your future self – who cares?

Interest gets crazy

To keep this brief I’ll throw around some basic numbers for a mortgage in 2023.

The current median housing price in Sydney, Australia (as of July 2023) is $1.46 million Australian dollars. The average variable mortgage interest rate is 6.74%.

Now that current rate may go up or may go down, but since we saw 17% interest rates in 1990 I’m not going to rule out that it could go higher from here.

Anyway, for argument’s sake let’s say the interest rate stays steady, over a 30 year mortgage the monthly repayments are $9,460, resulting in a total repayment of $3,405,539 – ie. more than double the principal.

That means over the course of the mortgage the total interest paid will be $1,945,539. Ie. 57% of the payments will be paying off interest only.

And that’s assuming that interest rates don’t go up from here. What if they do?

What if the economy ‘slows down‘?

What if the government starts raising taxes?

What if utility companies start bumping rates?

What if the job market tightens up?

What if your boss starts demanding you give him daily massages during your lunch break? How much negotiating power do you have, realistically?

It’s almost like the mortgage system is a near perfect financial trap whereby people pour years of their working life into their ‘investment’ of a house – which they feel like they own – and so will put up with almost any level of financial abuse to keep possession of it, rather than walk away.

If only someone could have warned us…

The ancient key to slavery

“The rich rules over the poor, and the borrower is the slave of the lender.”

Proverbs 22:7

“Debt is the slavery of the free.”

Publilius Syrus, 85–43 BC

“Think what you do when you run in debt: You give to another power over your liberty.”

Benjamin Franklin, 1705-1790

“There are two ways to conquer and enslave a nation. One is by the sword. The other is by debt.”

John Adams, 1735-1826

I’m not sure about you, but I don’t see a whole lot of swords around here, and I feel kind of enslaved.

What were these guys all talking about? Doesn’t debt help us take advantage of opportunities and get rich?

Perhaps what they were talking was debt slavery or ‘peonage’. That sounds like an old fashioned word though, I’m sure that wouldn’t occur today…

‘Human trafficking’

Have you ever noticed that – when you delve in a little – the stories of people who have been ‘human trafficked’ are often very similar?

They aren’t bopped over the back of the head only to wake up on a farm and handed a shovel.

What almost always happens, is something like this:

1. They are offered a (comparatively) good job in a far away place.
2. They are offered flights/transportation/sometimes accomodation en route to the work location.
3. They arrive, and hand over their passport so paperwork can be drawn up.
4. They are told that the job is not what they expected. You’re not a masseur, you’re a prostitute. You’re not a project manager, you’re an online scammer, and so on.
5. They aren’t happy about it, and want to leave.
6. They are told that in order to leave they need to repay the debts incurred in transporting them out there.
7. They don’t have the money and don’t want the shame/embarrassment of asking family/friends for it.
8. They are then told the alternative is to do the job-they-don’t-want for X months to pay their debt.
9. They sign a contract to do said work.
10. At some point they realise this job really sucks, and either try to escape, or decide to contact an NGO to ask for help in negotiating (ie. financially) their release. And yes, nowadays these people usually have their cellphone and access to communication with family/the outside world the whole time.

So what just happened here? Do you notice a familiar pattern?

I’m not writing this to blame the victims of these schemes – they usually (but not always) come from extreme poverty and are desperate. I’m also not talking about kids. What I am doing is breaking down the primary mechanism that is being used to enslave adults.

Why would these human traffickers go to so much trouble to embroil their targets in debt, when they could just grab any random person off the street and threaten them with a stick?

Because the prison works far better when the walls are inside the slave’s mind. The victim’s own natural sense of duty and obligation compels them to stay, and even if they feel angry about being tricked, more than anything else – they blame themselves.

Sure the traffickers may often use the threat of violence and even sometimes employ it, but if it was their primary tool of leverage they would have to use it constantly. What would be the point? These operations usually operate in plain sight, dealing with NGOs on a daily basis and letting in government inspectors to check their foreign workers’ contracts. Their business is making money, not killing people and burying them in the back garden.

The penalty box

So to recap: rather than just grabbing a woman off the street and sticking her in a shipping container, they offer women an opportunity, then extend them services on credit, then unless they can settle the debt (they can’t) are told they need to work to pay back what they owe.

Not so fast though – there’s more. The debt slavery victim needs to pay rent for the pleasure of living in her work-prison. She needs to pay for her food. Oh and she didn’t make her bed? That’s another 50 bucks. She didn’t arrive to the client ‘showing’ on time? Another 50. She refused to go with a customer? 200 more. And so on.

Just a never-ending stream of expenses and penalties, to keep the victim permanently indebted and effectively enslaved. Sound familiar?

It calls to mind how mortgage lenders never seem to be worried about you increasing or extending your mortgage. Of course there are massive penalties for trying to pay it off sooner, but apparently they don’t mind if you keep throwing more items on the tab. Don’t they want their ‘money’ back?

The housing-price problem

So when you get a mortgage, what happens? I’ll give the sanitised version here, which will be sufficient for present purposes.

1. You apply for a mortgage and sign a promise to pay (aka a ‘promissory’ note).
2. The bank manager types numbers into a computer and hits enter.
3. The funds ‘appear’ in the seller’s account.
4. You move into your house and start paying the bank as per the agreement.

These days most of us know that all know that all currency is debt, nothing is connected to gold or silver, it’s all just made out of thin air at will by those with the power. So what’s the problem?

If you bought a house for a million dollars, by getting a mortgage, you effectively just added a million dollars to the money pool. No extra houses were created, no extra productivity was generated in the economy. All that happened was one guy took possession of another guy’s pile of bricks, and another million dollars is now floating around.

Okay okay so by getting a mortgage I’m directly contributing to inflation and making housing prices more and more expensive in general. But what am I gonna do, not get my own house now?

That sounds pretty boring…

Usury is sexy

Even using the word ‘usury’ makes you sound like some sort of puritanical Christian. Or a Muslim. They’re not supposed to charge or receive any interest on loans – although like Orthodox Jews who aren’t supposed to use electronic devices on Shabbat – some seem to be finding some ‘clever’ ways around it. Somehow these Muslim states too seem to be getting seduced by the wiles of Western ‘free money’ banking systems and abandoning their quaint, old-fashioned ways.

If Muslims who pray 5 times a day can’t resist the allure of immediate financial gratification, how am I supposed to?

So I’m supposed to not have any debt? That’s like never drinking alcohol, never jerking off, never watching porn, or never having abortions. How am I supposed to have any fun?

I guess ultimately, it comes down to personal preference.

You will notice that the 13th amendment (to the United States Constitution) is quite specific:

The constitution outlawed slavery and INvoluntary servitude. Nothing is said about voluntary servitude.

That is a decision you will need to make for yourself.

We’d like to think that eventually we’ll break free of all this, but it seems like the digital AI surveillance prison is being built around us faster than we can save up our fiat currency fake-notes to buy our way out.

Or is that just me?

Of course some people buy into the narrative that these oppressive dynamics are organic, and that these restrictions are required for the proper functioning of modern society – that they keep everyone safe, and are at worst a ‘necessary evil’. For those people, I’m happy that you’re happy, and this article is not for you.

For everyone else, it appears to boil down to a single choice: do you

• a) suck it up and live in the system as a slave with air-conditioning privileges.. or

• b) walk away from everything, and try to survive in the forest with a pen knife and a solar powered flashlight you bought on amazon.

But is that really the choice?

I would reframe the decision in a different way: How much are you willing to be responsible for your own life, and how much would you rather hand over that responsibility to others?

Wait a second…

But aren’t we being forced? Aren’t they making us do most of this stuff? Isn’t it the law?

Coerced, maybe. Forced? No.

Consent is not the focus of this article, but for now I would ask you to consider one thing: how often you are ‘required’ (instructed) to sign documents? If your explicit contractual consent wasn’t required for the system to operate – for the sake of confirming your ‘agreement’ and off-loading liability from other parties – this would not be the case.

Food for thought. Anyway, moving on for now…

Here is your choice (metaphorically speaking):

OPTION A: Your own small sailing vessel.

Do you want to learn to sail, read maps, interpret the weather, navigate, tie ropes, catch fish, speak foreign languages and negotiate with complete strangers on the other side of the world? Are you willing to be responsible for repairing a diesel engine, storm tactics, refrigeration, carpentry, sewing sails, electrical wiring, emergency plumbing and the lives of everybody on board your vessel?

Because if you’re out on your own, you will be responsible for all of that, and there won’t be anybody around to help you if anything goes wrong. You will be at the mercy of the heat, the cold, the bugs, and whatever else the ocean throws at you.

The good part? You get to sail wherever the wind will take you. Beyond what is required to keep yourself and your crew alive, you have no schedule, no obligations, and nobody telling you what to do.

Sounds a bit tough? In that case let me introduce an alternative..

OPTION B: The cruise of a lifetime.

How would you like air conditioning, buffet-style dining, near-limitless water and electricity, live entertainment, and an attentive hospitality team on speed dial? There are activities for the kids and shopping for the wife, plus a bar and some gaming machines if you feel like a cheeky punt. You don’t need to worry about the weather – the captain and his crew have the engine, navigation, security and any other technical issues already taken care of.

So what’s the catch?

All you have to do, is put in 8-hours-a-day, 5-days-a-week (including a 1-hour lunch) watching a radar screen and some pressure gauges. It’s actually pretty easy – you’ve got air con and once you’ve gotten through a few reports you realise you can basically do them with your eyes closed.

Once 5pm hits, you can stroll down the corridor, put on your dining jacket and suck down a craft beer with crumbed fish and chips. This is the life!

Sure, you’re spending a good chunk of your life staring pointlessly at that radar screen, but there’s always new movies to see at the on-board cinema and we everyone gets to vote on the rotating menu items so that’s nice.

And then one day… there’s an announcement on the intercom.

“…because of some complex economic factors which we won’t go into, now everyone has to work 10 hours a day instead of 8.”

The management

Wow. That kind of sucks. I mean, you’ll still do it, but maybe you have an extra drink or two in the evenings to compensate yourself for the new workload.

Then a few months later there is talk of a 12 hour day.

And then an additional half-day on Saturday for certain special situations.

And then… everyone needs to get a chip in their arm to make sure they’re not taking too many bathroom breaks or eating too much shrimp at the buffet.

Hang on a second – this chip in the arm thing seems a little but much… but who do you complain to? Voting apparently doesn’t work – management doesn’t seem to care. People protest and sign petitions but everyone just gets told it’s mandatory.

What are you gonna do? Apply for a transfer to another cruise ship?

Unfortunately you discover that (bizarrely!) all the other cruise ships have adopted the same policies as your ship – and all around the same time. Some ‘crazy’ people even claim that if you really dig into it – all the ships are actually owned by the same people.

So what then? Jump off?

Good luck. Even if you randomly stumbled upon another boat, what skills do you have to offer? Why would they bother to keep you around?

So you quit fantasising, head back to your post and clock in for another day’s work.

I guess it’s not that bad. I mean, this isn’t slavery – those guys actually had to row.

A third option

What if there was some kind of happy medium here – something between solitary survival and pure dependent servitude?

What if we could all learn practical skills that we actually need, and then exchange specialty services, products and overflow produce with others?

What a crazy concept. Turns out this isn’t actually a new idea and it’s worked for many different groups of people and communities since.. forever.

Perhaps then, rather than appealing to our slave masters to grow a conscience, it’s time we focused our energies on making them irrelevant.