Debt, Decivilization, and Cultural Poverty

    Debt is the consumption of future income and economic capital. Debt can lead to economic poverty.

    Decivilization is the consumption of cultural capital, and can lead to cultural poverty.

Cultural Capital

    Usually the word capital is used in the economic context. In this context everyone understands it well enough - whereas goods are something you can consume at any time, capital helps you to produce goods, such that goods are much easier to acquire. A shovel, for example, makes digging holes much easier than using your hands.

    However, there is also such a thing as cultural capital. Whereas economic capital is usually in the form of tools or machines, cultural capital is composed of relationships, institutions, languages, and common understanding. When someone writes a book, for example, the readers do not have to repeat the author's struggle for knowledge, thus letting them acquire and build upon his knowledge much more easily. Imagine, for example, a world where every person has to re-invent math for himself, from scratch.

    In the same way that someone who saves money consistently eventually becomes wealthy, or in the same way that many people contributing to a foundation can build a great foundation over many years, so too can cultural capital be built and saved over time. For example, a group of people form a rule about standing in line to determine who gets served first. Once this very simple institution of "waiting in line" is formed, any problem to do with a large number of people needing to be served now has a ready-made solution. Once the institution is formed, resources are then freed up for more useful purposes. If people form up into a line without "line police," for example, then resources do not need to be wasted on people waiting in line.

    Finally, we can say that as a civilization becomes more advanced, the more cultural capital it forms. And this capital is built from cultural understanding, and buy-in. If you do not understand and accept that you use a fork and knife at the dinner table, extra effort is needed to help you eat with someone who does follow that institution, and so on.

Consumption of Cultural Capital

    Now, in the same way that cultural capital can be built, it can also be consumed. This happens when institutions are destroyed by someone who abuses the institution for his immediate benefit, in the same way that someone sells investments so they can spend money today.

    For example, in the United States, in the 1960s, hitchhiking was a common institution. Even into the 1990s, there were parts of the USA (maybe still some today?) where I put my thumb out, and someone would pull over and ask if I needed a ride. There was an innate trust between the driver and hitchhiker, and the institution was useful in a time when not everyone owned cars and there weren't affordable options to get people to places not covered by a bus. However, once a few high-profile rapes and murders took place, the institution collapsed.

    In this case, you could say that the rapist was consuming the mutual trust in the institution of hitchhiking, by using that mutual trust to gain access to victims. Once this trust was consumed, the institution disappeared, and as such the culture was impoverished.

Decivilization

    This is where we get to decivilization. When more cultural capital is being consumed than produced, it means that effortless, automatic, peaceful, and normal cooperation between people is lost, and more and more resources have to be spent just to maintain basic order.

    To use our standing in line example again, imagine a few people decide that standing in line is "oppressive," and start cutting in line. If they get away with it, a few more people follow, and soon, people stop trusting the line, and it becomes pandemonium as people start jostling and shoving each other to be first. If the service is a store, people might even choose to stop shopping because the fight to be served is not worth it.

How Debt feeds Decivilization

    Because you reach a state of debt by consuming more resources than you are producing, it would make sense that this attitude of over-consumption also extends to over-consuming the whole culture. In this case, decivilization is encouraged when criminals figure out a way to convert cultural capital into money. For example...

 > Family breakdown will destroy a future generation, but in the meantime, there are welfare systems, a psychological profession, and family courts that can deliver many high paying jobs that try to "fix" the damage caused.

 > The destruction of free local markets may create the over-consumptive "corporate drone" culture, but forcing people into being consumers generates extra tax revenue today.

 > War can quite literally return a society to the Stone Age, but per Smedley Butler's book, War is a Racket, it can be immensely profitable.

The Debt-Free Society

    What does this mean for the debt-free society? A key goal of DFS is "debt-free by design," which means that becoming debt-free is beyond paying off credit cards (though that's a good thing!). It also means looking at what cultural capital has been lost, or could be gained, that makes debt less necessary.

In future essays for this series we're going to look deeper at this question. In the meantime, we can also discuss this question in the Debt-Free Society group. See you there.