About what? Eh?

It’s something you deal with every single day. Everyone you know deals with it. The whole planet is affected by it, and billions of people have it interfere with their lives, mostly in a very negative way. It’s all around you wherever you go but you don’t know it by that name. It is used to enslave people, virtually controls all the markets of the world and is the foundation for entire industries. In some countries it is illegal and punishable by death. It requires no work but is incredibly lucrative. In ours it’s considered the cornerstone of our economy and something that gives you all your hopes and dreams.

Usury is the practice of charging fees for loaning money. Interest, in layman’s terms. Those who loan you money and charge you interest practice usury, or are usurers. Many people will tell you that usury refers to charging excessive interest, but the origin of the word is clear. Banks practice usury, as do finance companies, credit card providers, mortgage lenders and organised criminal loan sharks. They are all usurers. Laws in the UK and USA that govern interest-charging are called usury laws.

The reason it came to mind for me is that i somehow managed to find 20mins to rest this week and had a pen and paper in my hand making notes about my personal mission statement. One of the key points was “i will not indulge in usury or associate with usurers”. I personally find usury morally repugnant and unjustifiable. I will not pay interest to banks, i will not take out a loan and i will not have a credit card. For me they are traps just waiting to suck me in and i avoid them like the plague. I recently had my bank manager call my mobile asking why i had sent her back the pre-approved business credit card form Barclays had so thoughtfully posted by special delivery with an opening balance of £10,000. I saw it is an insult, and an open invitation to be enslaved, as dramatic as that sounds.

But look at it this way: If a jailer with a set of keys was smiling away at you telling you about the nice cell he had prepared for you, and that you should take advantage of the comfortable facilities, would you smile back and say “thanks”? No you wouldn’t. You’d tell him to get fucked.

Understandingthe historic disgust at usury is a very powerful example of what happens when you challenge an existing paradigm. For most of us in the Western world, usury (money-lending) is so commonplace and institutionalised that is an essential part of our lives, and seen as relatively harmless. Its also on eof the most brilliant marketing couxes of recent times. Orwell’s point that language can corrupt thought is poignant - we give something 2 names, and it seems like 2 separate things. But its not.

Money-lending has been denounced by a number of spiritual leaders and philosophers of ancient times, including Plato, Aristotle, Cato, Cicero, Seneca, Plutarch, Aquinas, Muhammad, Moses, Philo and Gautama Buddha. In the musical “Cats” it is compared to murder. Saint Anselm of Canterbury called it theft. In “The Divine Comedy” Dante places the usurers in the inner ring of the seventh circle of hell, below even suicides. In historical texts it is regularly referred to as a “vile enterprise”.

The Abrahamic religions forbid and denounce usury. Naturally this is subject to interpretation, but here’s what some of them say. First up, the Hebrew Bible, or Jewish Torah.

Thou shalt not lend upon interest to thy brother: interest of money, interest of victuals, interest of any thing that is lent upon interest. (Deuteronomy, 23:20-21)

Next, the Christian New Testament:

Wherefore then gavest not thou my money into the {e} bank, that at my coming I might have required mine own with usury? (Luke 19:23)

And lastly, with sheer and expected diplomacy, Islam:

Those who charge usury are in the same position as those controlled by the devil’s influence. This is because they claim that usury is the same as commerce. However, God permits commerce, and prohibits usury. (Al-Baqarah 2:275)

And for practicing usury, which was forbidden, and for consuming the people’s money illicitly. We have prepared for the disbelievers among them painful retribution. (Al-Nisa 4:161)

OK, so that’s pretty clear. Usury is a seen as a very bad, perverse and immoral thing. What you always need to bear in mind when reading religious texts is that they are written in the context of the day. But what is referred to here is a trade and a principle. Usury as a practice is forbidden and immoral. Yep, eating shellfish and homosexuality might be too, but there’s a world of difference between those and the damage usury inflicts on people, and how it is almost always a “flagrant manifestation of unchecked greed”.

Usury is the flagship tenet of anti-semitism. Nationalistic morons who stereotype the Jewish race do so on the pretence that they are a race of “corrupt money-lenders”. But those who are wise understand that as the Jews were ostracized from most professions by local rulers, the church and the guilds, they were pushed into marginal occupations considered socially inferior, such as tax and rent collecting and moneylending. This was said to show Jews were insolent, greedy usurers. Natural tensions between creditors and debtors were added to social, political, religious, and economic strains. The thing they were despised for was forced upon them by that despise.

In Islam they go way further, as they do with everything. Usury (known as “Riba”) and interest-charging is out and out forbidden. In some Middle Eastern states, you can still be executed for it. Sharia law has been adapted to provide mechanisms for money exchange in Arab states, and transactions must occur on the spot, rather than over time. As an alternative to usury, Islam strongly encourages charity and direct investment, where the debtor shares whatever profit or loss the business may incur. Now isn’t that an interesting idea?

There is also an interesting concept i believe is found in the Jewish Mishnah that suggests a cultural rule that debats are completely wiped for the whole population every 7 years. Can you imagine what would happen to the Western world if all our debts were erased every decade or so? That would certainly challenge a lot of the conventional norms we have today.

But what we must face is that our generation is looking at an entire economy based on debt. The UK consumer debt is over £1,300 Billion, and it was big news when it hit £1,000 Billion. To understand how we got there, you need to understand macro-economics. Money keeps moving. In fact, all it does is move. When money stops moving, or starts moving backwards, you get what is commonly known as a recession (to recess means to stop, break, pause, halt etc). Recession is bad. Really fucking bad. The way you fight a recession and hold it off is to keep the money moving.

So how do you keep the money moving? You get people borrowing. After they borrow, they spend. Money moves around again - businesses trade, create jobs, pay back to their employees, who then spend, and it all goes round nicely. As long as they’re spending, recession is kept at bay. Give people money they don’t have. You do it by lowering the basic interest rate as set by the Bank of England, and offer lenders favourable economic terms and a very light touch when it comes to regulation. Perfect eh?

Only one problem. It’s a false economy. Those debts have to be repaid by the consumer sometime. If they get paid the same as they did before (i.e. their salary or income doesn’t rise), then they are squeezed. If they get paid less, or less jobs are available, or they pay more tax, it hurts even more. They’re in for big trouble.

So what do they do? They borrow more. They take out a loan to consolidate their other debts or re-mortage their house. Great news as it keeps that money moving. It can continue for 10-20 years and make it seem like the sun is shining, but all the time that interest is wracking up, and the repayment cycle is going uphill. In case you hadn’t realised, credit card companies only want you to pay the minimum balance every month because then the interest stacks up higher on the outstanding amount. Which is in turn why you are forbidden from paying off certain loans early (e.g. mortgages etc). No financial institution wants you to pay off your debt, ever.

What happens next is ugly. When the cost of living goes up, your salary stays the same (or gets less), consumers can’t pay back their debts. A government’s response is to make the bankruptcy laws more flexible so it is easier to go bust and start the borrowing process off again. HSBC wrote off £95 million in unpaid debts last year. In February, we reached a new record of bankruptcies in the UK. The CAB estimates that it could take an average of 77 years for a typical Briton to become free of debt.

Roman Polanksi’s “The Ninth Gate” is a genius work of cinema about a corrupt book dealer who is hired by a obsessive billionaire collector of Satanic texts that are supposedly written by the Devil himself and able to raise him in ritual. On his journey, the dealer is accompanied by a mysterious blonde girl who is with him through his descent into evil and incremental sin, and eventually revealed as Lucifer. The Satanic cult who are intent on ritualising through the book(s) are so obsessed with them that they cannot see that Lucifer is immediately in front of them through everything, and only interested in the destructive journey and those who are relatively normal but intrinsically corrupt, as we all are.

The point is that usury may have a new name, but it is an old evil and malice that has been around for centuries. Just because it has become institutionalised and acceptable does not mean it is something else or somehow a harmless practice. An old evil with a new name is still an old evil. Words control our thoughts and vile enterprise doesn’t need to re-invent itself to survive and propagate, it merely needs to change its clothes.