Usury: Artificial wealth and real poverty
By Sean Jobst, 6 January 2011
Usury is charging interest on a loan, irregardless of the rate or amount of interest. Leading proponents assume that usury is merely exorbitant interest rates, while they justify lower rates. The problem with such a distinction is even leading proponents do not agree on the threshold between “exorbitant” rates and “reasonable” ones. In actuality, such a distinction is only made to justify what has been universally condemned in every tradition, but what is a central aspect of banking.
Many basic assumptions are violated by usury. One is the right to keep the fruits of one’s labor. Usurers make their income on the livelihood of others, without providing a real service of their own. What labor are they doing other than enriching themselves from what others earn? On the contrary, it assumes they have some special right to take more than the loan. The basic assumption is that money is rightfully gained through honest labor, whereas usury only makes the rich avaricious and burdens the poor with debt.
It is a greater concentration of wealth into the hands of a few, the privatization of profit for a few and socialization of debt to the majority of people. Hence it naturally creates a false hierarchy of wealth, just as it impoverishes people who would otherwise enjoy more fruits of their labor. Furthermore, it turns money into an end itself rather than a means. This is an obvious invitation to greed.
The basis of any real healthy society is certainly justice. But this basic tenet is the antithesis of usury, which surely is unjust since it assumes the legitimacy of a few to live from taking away wealth that doesn’t even exist at the time the loan is made. “To take usury for money lent is unjust in itself, because this is to sell what does not exist, and this evidently leads to inequality which is contrary to justice.” (1)
And that truly is the basis of our current work, although this is simply a jumping off point. For we recognize the nature of fiat paper money is likewise artificial and that it cannot separate from usury. Both are manifestations of debt. So from this realization, it is only natural that any struggle against usury must be followed up on the monetary realm. We oppose the artificial with the real.
While rejecting the artificial, we accept the real. From the monetary viewpoint, this means something of intrinsic value such as gold and silver or tangible goods as the medium of exchange. And on a vaster scale, it means that despite what its proponents allege, usury is not synonymous with honest trade, but is its antithesis. “Those who practice usury will not rise from the grave except as someone driven mad by Satan’s touch. That is because they say, ‘Trade is the same as usury.’ But Allah has permitted trade and He has forbidden usury.”(2)
We accept the right of everyone to the fruits of their labor. We recognize that real wealth cannot be artificially created out of thin air, but has to be found within nature. The only legitimate medium of exchange is commodities, such as gold and silver, or tangible goods such as has traditionally been the mediums of exchange throughout the world. Such recognition is to know the organic basis of societies and human nature, while its opposite is surely an illusion.
We break off the chains of our enslavement and wait for the freedom within to illuminate our souls, overtaking our hearts and showing us the way forward. We allow the financiers to enjoy their illusions – we will seize for ourselves the real, as seekers of the Beloved Who IS the REAL.
We worship something REAL, whereas the financiers and all who accept their power as being the only “reality,” are worshipping an illusion that wealth can be created out of thin air and that it is the only measure of being human. And while they will seek a false nourishment via such illusions, we will taste the Most Real nourishment and accept it within our hearts and allow our souls to grow with it.
NOTES:
(1) St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 1265-1274, Question 78: The sin of usury.
(2) Qur’an, Sura Al-Baqara, 2:275.
http://johnturmel.com/poembibl.htm contains Ezekiel 18 where he condemns he who exacts usury or excessive interest. Reasonable interest on cows is payable but any interest on money is not, usury, which causes the death-gamble mort-gage by everyone owing 11 after all borrowing 10. Duh.
Thanks for commenting,
From Ezra Pound’s Canto LXV
“With usura hath no man a house of good stone
each block cut smooth and well fitting
that delight might cover their face,
with usura
hath no man a painted paradise on his church wall
harpes et luthes
or where virgin receiveth message
and halo projects from incision,
with usura
seeth no man Gonzaga his heirs and his concubines
no picture is made to endure nor to live with
but it is made to sell and sell quickly
with usura, sin against nature,
is thy bread ever more of stale rags
is thy bread dry as paper,
with no mountain wheat, no strong flour
with usura the line grows thick
with usura is no clear demarcation
and no man can find site for his dwelling
Stone cutter is kept from his stone
weaver is kept from his loom
WITH USURA
wool comes not to market
sheep bringeth no gain with usura ….”
Ezra Pound was an outspoken opponent of this economic system which is based upon usury and a social system where the “art” of economics has been raised to the level of a religion, with the words of an elite called “economists” taken as written in stone. What he seems to highlight here is the need to re-evaluate our monetary structure, or rather the way economics is generally considered.
For example, in the U.S. successive governments and the corporate mainstream media seem to be in awe of whatever the Federal Reserve chairman says or does, as if he possesses some sort of higher wisdom that is not to be called into question. One can easily posit the question: how often is it exactly those who create the conditions, who then plead ignorance about the effects of these conditions – and are then believed to hold the solutions to the very same problems they created!
Pound belonged to a small but vocal element within the English-speaking world who criticized the usurocratic banking order; “right in the belly of the beast”, given that the financial houses and global monetary order really received the utmost of their growth in America and Britain. Although the Federal Reserve is accepted as fact today, most Americans forget the earliest historical tradition against the central banks in this country. Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and Andrew Jackson were some of the most vocal opponents of banking.
In the literary field the tradition was passed on to the Transcendentalists, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. While the power of the banking order was growing in ascendency, another vocal group called the Individualist Anarchists spoke out against it and their leading representative, Benjamin Tucker, condemned usury as one of the four monopolies on which the statist-capitalist system rests.
There was the advocates of the Silver Standard, led by William Jennings Bryan. As the Federal Reserve was solidifying its hold upon the monetary order, helped in this by a gradual effort to literally steal the people’s gold, two other Americans took up the mantle: Thorstein Veblen and Ezra Pound. During his residence in Italy, the latter wrote:
“In the bosom of the usurocracy, William Morris, Ruskin, the Pre-Raphaelites and all the other useful and fertile groups of London and Paris formed a loose coalition to struggle for artistic autarchy. Although never clearly foreseeing that the arts could be fully incorporated in the body public, they fought against the usurocracy, against the hierarchy of filthy and fetid values in the mercantile century” (Meridiano di Roma, 2 June 1940; quoted in Pound, Idee fondamentali, ed. Caterina Ricciardi, Roma: Lucarini, 1991, p. 39).
I should like to conclude this with an interesting observation Pound made concerning the spiritual effects of Islamic belief as noble, as made apparent in the architecture and the numinous simplicity of life compared to the rank consumerism – or “the hierarchy of filthy and fetid values”. In 1913, Pound observed that he was unaware of the power unleashed from the Arabian Peninsula in the seventh century that had swept across to the Atlantic in a short period of time, but reflected that he had caught a glimpse of it merely by observing the way a Muslim walked in Tangier.
Subhanallah! We must never forsake the effect that our Iman has upon our outward being, i.e. when our inner heart is at peace than our outer limbs will surely follow. Iman is a light upon the face, a nobility upon the soul. Clearly then our own struggle against the banking order is interconnected with our inner spiritual struggle. Hasbunallahu wa ni’mal wakil.
True, indeed Ezra Pound, in spite of some of his failings, was an astute social observer and critic of Western society. His Cantos, much derided by other critics, are a cry for help and a plea to find some truly moral, ethical, and spiritual basis on which to renew Western societies from the decay it experienced under its capitalist, banking elite managed, banal and insipid leadership.
Damn, someone beat me to the Canto. Great article and website….I love the header picture.
Thanks 🙂
Re/ Header, I’m switching them up a bit