Mozes was a banker, the original banker, although most people would never think about it that way. What did he do? He made a promise to his people. He endebted himself to them, and as they listened to him and went through the desert to the promised land he turned things around. He conditioned his followers to the idea there was a God, and this god was angry, and whoever broke the rules set by God would be punised. Het used violence in the name of his God (by smashing the stone tables and idols) and people started to feel guilty. That was Mozes payday. His promise, his risk taking had payed of. Now he could leverage the debt he owed to (now) ‘his’ people with the guilt they felt for being sinful. The rest is history.
Guilt and Debt are not the same thing
Debt and guilt are two sides of the same coin, but they are not the same. One can owe a debt without feeling guilt, and one can feel guilt without being in debt. The difference is emotion, guilt moves in the existential emotional regions of our mind, debt in the rational, abstract regions. Yet the behavioural effects are identical. This is because on a societal level people have emotional bonds and feel guilt, about their position on the social ladder, about their responsibilities. The system now governing this guilt, our credit based economy,however, does behave like it has no responsibility other than make sure the emotions remain directed to the self, ‘down’ so to say. Like Mozes managed to project the guilt of his followers onto themselves.
Religious ’emobanking’ basically was to risky for the clergy, so it turned into ‘debtbanking’ with real punishments as conditioner. The best example of that type of banking is in the criminal circuit, loansharks, but also where companies use agressive collection services, often anonymous and semi legal. Debt caused and expanded by banks become very real when it means people have to move out of their homes, not take their medicine or lose out on their freedom (the US has debt prisons where people do slave labour). The deaths caused by the ‘bank crisis’ run into the thousands, we are talking elderly all across Europe and the US that have no medical care, people that actually commit suicide. They don’t have a voice because they are dead. We can add to that all the victims of recent middle east energy wars, women who die of aids after being forced into prostitution, men who die in gunbattles after becoming gang members or drug pushers. None of these criminal activities are without benefits to banks though, Wallstreet owns most payday (microcredit) loan companies, and has been demonstrably laundring drug money. There’s nothing that moves that does not push up revenues for banks.
5000 americans commited suicide after losing their houses (source)
Like Mozes and other guilt bankers (the pope), not Jezus by the way, he asked people to forgive each other, todays bankers don’t let go of the debt they own. But it is a mental prison endebted people feel they are in, not a real one. It becomes real when people can’t physically act against their debt or those that want to extract wealth of posessions, when the debt collectors come around and ransack the house or evict you (in the US that could be police men). All this because of the local social emotional mechanisms.
The Bonus system serves to pull people down to the individual emotional level of understanding. It is a fraction of the debt farmed by the system
The trick to finding an appropriate response to a situation like Mozes or our present banks, is not to focus on the token of debt, the promise, the money, but on the beneficiary of it. You follow Mozes, he does not deliver, you stop listening to him. You follow economists and bankers, they make a sick mess out of society, you don’t want their stuff anymore, their stuff is money, thier token of debt. We are really in a wierd situation with an ECB cursed by the US and a Federal reserve cursed by Europe. The thing bankers worked for was to create ever more abstract entities to blame, an all to blame one or another, and noone blame the people benefiting from the belief system as a whole, the banking system. You need to pay to your bank, but it is but a small bank in the big scheme of things. That is what everyone is led to believe. I am but the messenger, I am but a prophet.
We respect neat people, irrespective of what they do to us. We think "How can he/she look neat if they are not nice people"
Where we need to cut is right into the debts, until there are no debts left. This is like proving to the Egyptian jews there is no promised land before they set off. You will be a slave if you have a leader. You will be a master if you have none. The best is in the middle, being masters that cooperate to serve a shared ideal, without that ideal being owned by anyone in particular, without a leader. If all can repeat and agree with what a leader could say, there is no need for one, in fact, it is introducing a serious risk of bias and abuse. Pushing responsibility to where its effects are felt may be a good heuristic. Right now responsibility lies where the effects are not felt in the least.
Lesson learned : Don’t follow the man or woman promising the land of milk and honey, create it yourself!