Debt Meme Pattern

An attempt to describe the debt meme within a PatternLanguage. Since the author if this page also wrote the original MemesShmemes, he hopes the memeticists on wiki will pile on and improve the following. Naturally, he's still looking for a constructive and predictive distinction for a meme. And, no, hasn't found one yet. But he lives in hope ... for which see HopeMemePattern? ...

Context:

Participants grok QuidProQuo. Participants grok TimeAsContinuum?. Participants grok WorkAsResource?. Participants grok SocialContract.

Forces:

A large number of participants live together.
Participants do not grok PotLatch or can be disabused of same by violence.
Participants barter, but the barter networks have grown large and inflexible.
Some participants benefit by this inefficiency.

Solution:

Represent future work as a resource called debt. Represent time as interest. Create a business called "bank" that barters debt resources and maintains associated interest processes.

Consequences:

Debt propagates rapidly through the social space. Counterfeit debts called "taxes" are created by bankers calling themselves "government". Banks begin to trade debt between each other, creating a derivative market for interest.

Taxes pre-date banks, you know.
Modern banks were invented in the 17th century by a fellow named, believe it or not, John Law. But grain stores and piles of gold were happily hoarded and loaned long before then. Tax these days, which is almost always income tax or goods and services tax, presupposes banks.

Due to their flexibility, participants come to prefer tokens of debt to actual material resources. Unrepresented qualities of material resources - usually their moral, aesthetic, and sustainability implications - are undervalued, resulting in abuses on a massive scale. Observing this, some participants suggest debt is an AntiPattern and TurnOnTuneInDropOut.

Failing to observe debt often lands one in the constant unwanted company of a CollectionAgency.

Yes. See also ViolenceMemePattern? and HumorMemePattern?.

Whatever axe you have to grind about debt, all of the above appears to have to do with individuals.

AdHominemMemePattern??

To a (well-run) corporation, debt is just another tool, of no more and no less interest than is run time cost of an algorithm to a programmer (that is, not something to be particularly concerned about as long as it doesn't get out of hand).

Do corporations have memes, or are they something only an individual can have? As to what a corporation "thinks" of debt, you do realize that corporations don't have thoughts, right? Perhaps you're calling for a CorporationMemePattern??

No need for extreme literalism; it is common to refer to a thing by instead talking about something related to the thing, for instance, calling a king "the crown". In this case, the literal meaning of "corporation" is actually "the executives who run companies".
I'm still confused then. Corporations are processes involving interactions among a group of people called shareholders, another group called workers, another called suppliers, another called regulators, still more called partners and contractors, and that group called customers. Sure there are executives involved too, but why single them out?
Memes are defined as replicable units of culture. Corporations can adopt, create and replicate them. Memes are not limited to single organisms. Any system that can learn by imitation can propagate them.
Corporations as systems are extremely inefficient learners. Their memory depends on their staff, who regularly turn over, and on their databases, which are very low-dimensional and poorly organized. Most corporations have memories limited to just a few years. Maintaining a meme - whatever such a thing might be (MemesShmemes) - seems beyond them.
Moreover, a corporation being itself a culture, the definition seems rather circular.

Modern money is all based on abstract derivatives, and is largely unrelated to the thing called "money" (coins and other scarce tokens) as originally invented to replace barter, in the same way that a 747 is largely unrelated to the original plane the Wright brothers flew at Kitty Hawk - and just as hard (or harder) to understand.

So what?

So debt cannot be eliminated, it is an integral part of the modern kind of money.
What does eliminating debt have to do with this page?

The Baroque Cycle trilogy by Neal Stephenson (volume 2, Confusion, was just released) has quite a bit of background concerning a turning point in this evolution.

Damn, now I'll have to finish QuickSilver.

I am usually not into historical fiction (which is largely what this is; the science-fictional aspects are barely touched on in the first two volumes), but I find myself engrossed, and avidly waiting on volume 3 this fall. YMMV.
Stephenson is a wonderfully vivid writer, but his books shouldn't be taken without science fiction sized doses of salt. Here he's particularly fond of using fictional characters to intimately link historical figures who in life hadn't much to do with one another. But if you like this stuff you might also check out RobertAntonWilson's excellent "Historical Illuminatus Chronicles" and, of course, Fraser's magnificent FlashMan series.