A nice op-ed in the NYT today by Margaret Atwood, expounding on the human associations of "debt." Debtor-creditor relationships are not simply the stuff of economic calculation, they are expressions of more deeply held understandings and expectations, something easily forgotten in our business-dominated world. She writes:
We are social creatures who must interact for mutual benefit, and — the
negative version — who harbor grudges when we feel we’ve been treated
unfairly. Without a sense of fairness and also a level of trust,
without a system of reciprocal altruism and tit-for-tat — one good turn
deserves another, and so does one bad turn — no one would ever lend
anything, as there would be no expectation of being paid back. And
people would lie, cheat and steal with abandon, as there would be no
punishments for such behavior.
At first I was thinking of this in Confucian terms, the necessity of maintaining our focus on cultivating our social relationships even as we engage in material-economic activity. But, then, I remembered a passage from the Tao Te Ching that gets at something similar. It's passage 78:
You can resolve great rancor, but rancor always lingers on.
Understanding the more noble way, a sage holds the creditor's half of contracts and yet asks nothing of others. Those with Integrity tend to such contracts; those without Integrity tend to the collection of taxes.
The Way of heaven is indifferent, always abiding with people of nobility.
This is not the same as the Shakespearean injunction "neither a borrower nor a lender be." Rather is suggests that we should not carry debt. Holding the "creditors half of contracts" is preferable. Not only in money matters, but also in social relationships. Don't depend on others doing things for you, or don't let such debts go unpaid, but do things for others as the occasion arises.
This advice is offered because it is hard to overcome the resentments and rancor created by a sense of unresolved indebtedness. The Tao Te Ching is not denying the inevitability of debtor-creditor interdependence in all facets of human life. It is simply telling us to take care of how we manage our debts. Doing so is a reflection of our Integrity; not doing so leads us to rely upon extracting things from others, in the manner of demanding taxes – certainly not the best way to engage in human interactions.
Perhaps what is behind this is the general Taoist belief in balance. To be a chronic debtor is to be out of balance in relation to others. To avoid that possibility, we have to attend to our debts, resolve them, move ourselves back toward the "creditor's half," because, if we do not move in that direction we will drift the other way and be unbalanced. Atwood suggests something like this as well:
But what we seem to have forgotten is that the debtor is only one twin
in a joined-at-the-hip pair, the other twin being the creditor. The
whole edifice rests on a few fundamental principles that are inherent
in us.
Maybe that's why the NYT op-ed page editor added an illustration familiar to Taoists everywhere:
The Useless Tree 
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