It is inevitable that occultism should decapitalize man and society, both materially and spiritually. Occultism is an intensive application of the Satanic principle that every man is his own god, choosing, knowing, or establishing what constitutes good and evil for himself (Gen. 3:5). The Fall of man meant not only that man was now his own god but also his own heaven and hell, his own universe. As his own universe, man could not therefore tolerate another man, and it is not surprising thus that Cain killed Abel (Gen. 4:8), and Lamech early in history celebrated his autonomy from all men by boasting of his freedom and power to kill other men at will (Gen. 4:23-24).
God’s heaven and hell being denied, it becomes necessary for man to create his own heaven and hell. But, because man cannot, being a sinner, create a heaven, but only a hell which is a projection of his own nature, fallen man, aiming at paradise, creates ever-proliferating hell on earth.
A consequence of this is that man, in his social development, while an unbeliever in God, becomes in some fashion a believer in the devil. The only real world fallen man will acknowledge has to be, in terms of the implied logic of his position, in some sense demonic. The result is the kind of perspective set forth in the fall of 1968 by Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones, a “rock-music” group, in a composition called “Sympathy for the Devil.” In the song, the Devil, as the singer, says we know him better than we think. He is present in all violence, good and bad, in revolution in all its horrors, and we cannot choose only the “good” side of the violence our efforts engender but must accept our world as our creation.
The acceptance of violence as a new faith appeared in another Jagger song about rape, in which “Jagger brilliantly mimed the acts of rape and murder. As he twisted himself voluptuously around his unseen victim, teenage girls leapt up on the stage and threw themselves hysterically at his feet—‘Do it to me!’ I heard one yell”201
The principle of this Faustian “sympathy for the devil” is the belief that “it is only by virtue of ‘everything you call sin, destruction, evil’ that any sort of creation can go on.”202
The conclusion therefore is, “Accept your destructiveness as part of your divine creativity, and you can throw off your guilt and leave your closet.”203 In terms of this worldview, The Doors, another “song” group, sing, “We want the world, and we want it—NOW!” But as Berman recognizes, he and his fellow radicals of the 1960s, who were out to destroy in order to create, were no different from the establishment they were opposing, for President Johnson, too, “wanted the world even more
201
Marshall Berman, “Sympathy for the Devil: Faust, the 60s and the Tragedy of Development,” in Theodore Solotaroff, ed., American Review 19 (January 1974): 34.
202
Ibid., 47. 203 Ibid., 48.
than we did, and who was bombing it—for the sake of its future developement, of course—even as we marched and sang.”204
Departure from God means the affirmation of regeneration by violence and destruction, hell as the means of building heaven. It means not only sympathy for the devil but that all sides of the humanistic spectrum are now in principle demonic, communists and conservatives, anarchists and socialists, fascists and republicans, all alike embrace variations of a common principle of autonomy from God and a self-definition of ends and means. In every area, therefore, their activity becomes destructive. Hatred remains, but the ability to make valid moral judgments disintegrates.
The society of fallen man’s dreams is one which is an imitation of his ideas of heaven. Because God neither grows old, develops, or changes (Mal. 3:6), being absolute and perfect, the imagined society has like attributes. Future consequences are not properly envisioned, in that their “eternal” order should supposedly embody both will and potentiality in its creation.
Let us examine the implications of this for the economic organization of society, particularly in the area of interest. More than a few societies in the past have been bitterly hostile to the taking of interest, or, to use the older term, usury. Usury is a recognition of problems, or shortages, needs, and crises. A man or a business needs money desperately, to survive a crisis or to effect a necessary growth, and a loan with interest becomes their resort. Such loans can be effected either directly to a person or business, or indirectly through a bank. All depositors in banks are lenders, and the bank serves as their lending agency and shares the proceeds or interest with them. Those who affirmed an eternal social order, here and now, dislike the idea of interest because it means problems, change, and development.
In ancient Greece, the horror for usury was based on a realistic recognition that continuous interest had led to a concentration of power in the hands of moneylenders, so that most Athenians, for example, who were nominal freemen were actual slaves to a small plutocracy. The consequence was debt repudiation under Solon (594 BC).
Ancient Rome tried to regulate interest by setting a maximum rate, but again the result was failure. A maximum rate denies the significance of supply and demand; those who decried the high rates resented even more the unavailability of any loans at a required low rate. In Rome, the small free farmers, caught in the pressures of war, taxes, and interest, were either wiped out and reduced to slavery, or continued as virtual slaves. When Julius Caesar instituted debt repudiation, the middle classes were already destroyed.
Because of these and like experiences, the ancient world, and its thinkers, men such as Aristotle, Cato, and Cicero, regarded usury or interest as evil, and Cato held it to be as destructive as murder. On the other hand, neither they nor the medieval opponents of usury could eliminate it: in a noneternal world, societies required it for development. Moreover, as societies grew, the commercial use of interest began to outweigh by far the use of loans for necessities and disasters. In modern society, industrial development is heavily dependent on commercial loans, so that
now far more loans are made to wealthy individuals and corporations than to poor and needy persons. As a result, the old hostility to usury is regarded in most quarters as a matter of historical interest only. (This situation can change drastically in an economic crisis.)
The classical view opposed usury because it was not only a recognition of problems, shortages, needs, and crises, but also a factor which aggravated what it was supposed to solve. Ancient pagan societies were in some sense all divine societies, representations of the order desired by the gods, and usury was a standing insult to the integrity of that order. Plato’s Republic is an extreme statement of social order, but it is also very representative of the ancient, classical idea of a fixed, unchanging state. Interest or usury is a most effective instrument of change, and its wise or unwise use alike alter the nature of man’s economic status and the social order he lives in. Interest or usury was thus a principle of revolution within society and hence a menace to a supposedly fixed social order. Whenever the old pagan dream of a fixed and permanent order is revived, as under Marxism, the free functioning of interest is arrested or abolished, because it is recognized as a revolutionary (or counterrevolutionary) force.
In the modern era, together with the humanistic doctrine of progress, the idea of the free market for interst has been precisely this, a revolutionary force, and the result has been a radical and continuing change in every social order which becomes modern. Interest has been seen as freedom to grow, and the early champions of interest in the seventeenth century wrote of it with almost religious fervor. In the 1960s, a major industrialist, an orthodox Christian, told me that, at this point, biblical law was invalid, because interest was essential to the growth of modern technology.
Howard E. Kershner saw the fallacy of the modern perspective to a degree, in his analysis of the falacy of long-term, compound interest: “At 5 percent compounded annually, money doubles in a little less than 15 years, or about seven times in a century.” As a result, Kershner points out, had one million dollars been loaned at 5 percent compounded annually from the day that Columbus discovered America, there would today not be enough money in all the world to repay the loan. “Obviously, long, continued compound interest is a fallacy and any government dedicated to maintaining it will bankrupt itself.”
Society, Kershner states, has devised three methods over the centuries to correct this error. The first, which he does not consider seriously, is the biblical law of the sabbath years and the Jubilee, and the limitation of loans to six years.
Second, the private enterprise system provides correction through bankruptcies, so that only the unwise are penalized, Kershner states. This does not prevent the process of concentration common to Greece, Rome, and modern societies, so that, while Kershner prefers this alternative, it is no long-range answer. As he recognizes, “The people of this country are now paying out one-sixth or more of their income for interest on various kinds of debts.”
Third, in socialist countries “monetary reform” is used to solve the matter. On a given day, all old rubles, for example, are exchanged for new ones, so that one hundred old ones become replaced by ten new ones. Inflation is thereby halted, but the essential evil of the creation of new
money, by long-term compound interest and by credit and state creation, is not eliminated. The same process is soon repeated.205
The answer of biblical law to the problem of debt needs urgent attention in our time. In Deuteronomy 15:1-7, we have a central statement of this law:
At the end of every seven years, there must be a cancelling of debts, and this shall be the way of the cancelling: Every creditor shall cancel the loan he made to his neighbor or to his brother; he shall make no demand for repayment, because the LORD’S release has been proclaimed. A foreigner you may press for payment, but whatever of yours was due from a brother you shall cancel. However, there should be no poor among you, for the LORD your God will abundantly bless you in the land He will give you to possess as a heritage, if you listen to the LORD your God and rightly observe all these commandments which today I am enjoining upon you. When the LORD your God blesses you as He promised you, then you shall lend to many nations, but not borrow; you shall rule many nations, but they shall not rule over you. When there is among you a poor man, a brother of yours, in one of the towns which the LORD will be granting you, you shall not harden your heart or close your hand for your poor brother, refusing him a loan; no, you shall open wide your hand for him and lend him liberally to meet his need amply. (Berkeley Version)
Basic to this law are several principles. First, for freemen in a free society, the only godly principle is short-term debt, six years only, no more. No man has a right to mortgage his future: he belongs to God. Since debt is slavery, the godly man cannot enslave himself by means of debt for “the borrower is slave to the lender” (Prov. 22:7, Berkeley Version). Second, since the ungodly are slaves to sin, they are in principle slaves and cannot be prevented from manifesting their bondage. Long-term loans are permissible to them, nor is there any cancellation of debts on the sabbatical year. Third, loans to a needy brother, charitable loans, are to be without interest (Ex. 22:25-27; Lev, 25:35-38; Deut. 23:19-20). Charity and business are two separate things and are not to be confused. However, a loan to a brother is not a gift: it is a loan. Fourth, the ungodly are excluded both from the charitable loan and from the cancellation of debt. They cannot have the privileges of faith without faith.
Fifth, during the six years of debt, there is no limited liability, as in modern society.206 There is unlimited liability, but a limited term to debt and interest.
Sixth, in a society in which men are believers who obey God’s law, there will be no poor, according to God’s declaration. Obedience to this law would prevent the polarization of society
205
See Howard E. Kershner, “Why the Socialist State Will Inevitably Bankrupt Itself,” Through to Victory, 10, no. 3 (March 1970): 1, 3-5.
206
On limited liability, see R. J. Rushdoony, Politics of Guilt and Pity (Nutley, NJ: Craig Press, 1970), 252, 254- 262. See also R. J. Rushdoony, Institutes of Biblical Law (Nutley, NJ: Craig Press, 1973), 104-106, 273-74, 463- 467, 664-669.
into the rich and poor. Debts would be restricted; the pernicious and inflationary effects of debt and interest would be curtailed, and a greater degree of freedom and responsibility would prevail. Seventh, the modern form of long-term debt with compound interest on notes and loans, plus the limited-liability laws, make possible a rapid and inflationary growth followed by a radical and revolutionary decapitalization and destruction of society. This the biblical law prevents.