There was once a time when a man worked for a company not only from dawn to dusk, but in sleep as well. His house was built on company land. His food was bought at the company store. His wages were carefully measured to fall just short of his needs. Thus, with each passing week, he sank deeper into dependence, and his labor ceased to be a gift of his strength; it became tribute, paid for the right to survive.
The company store no longer stands at the end of the road. Its wood has rotted, its shelves are bare. But its spirit lives on, clothed now in the subtlety of modern finance. It no longer needs to wear a uniform. It has no address. Yet it is everywhere.
It is called debt.
Debt today is not the result of vice or folly, but of necessity. The wages offered for honest work are insufficient to meet even the modest demands of living: shelter, food, education, care. And so people borrow, not to indulge, but to endure. They borrow to exist.
It is said that debt allows for freedom: the freedom to study, to buy a home, to seize opportunity. But what is called freedom here is often only the permission to shackle oneself with invisible chains. Chains that do not clink, that are forged in silence, but which pull nonetheless with unrelenting weight.
Under the old regime, the company store was explicit in its cruelty. The prices were inflated, the wages rigged, and the debt perpetual. But it was honest, in a way. Its violence was visible. What has replaced it is more insidious, because it pretends to be benevolence. The bank smiles. The contract is signed freely. But the borrower, like the miner of the past, finds himself laboring not to ascend, but to stay barely afloat.
He learns quickly that his effort belongs not to himself or to any purpose he has chosen. It belongs to the payment due. His future is sold in monthly increments, each one a promise made under quiet duress. And just like the company store, the debt grows faster than he can repay. Interest accumulates like silt in a riverbed, slowing the current of his life.
The cruelty lies not merely in the financial burden, but in the spiritual deformation it causes. The soul, already bowed under the weight of necessity, begins to forget its own dignity. A person in constant debt loses the capacity to act from love, from contemplation, from truth. Every decision becomes a calculation. Every day becomes a negotiation with fear. This is not life; it is survival arranged by ledger.
The system justifies itself by invoking choice. “No one is forced,” it says. But when the necessities of life (housing, healthcare, education) are priced beyond the reach of wages, choice becomes fiction. It is not liberty when the options are debt or deprivation. It is only a different form of compulsion, one dressed in the language of contracts and terms and conditions.
There is no tyrant here, no foreman barking orders. Only quiet systems, coded in law and policy, which ensure that the many must borrow from the few in order to live. This is not a marketplace; it is a cage.
The remedy will not come from slight reforms or better interest rates. The remedy lies in reimagining what an economy is for. If work does not sustain life with dignity, it is not just unjust, it is sacrilege. If the fruits of labor cannot cover the costs of a modest, whole existence, then the economy has failed its moral test, no matter what numbers rise on a screen.
A just society would not build itself upon the permanent indebtedness of its people. It would not tolerate an order where life is mortgaged from the moment of birth. It would seek not only efficiency but compassion; not only profit, but soul.
To reduce a person to their credit score is to deny the infinite in them. It is to treat a soul as collateral.
The old company store may be gone, but we must see clearly that its spirit remains. And it is no less oppressive for being polite. The modern chains are softer, but they still bind. If we wish to be free, not in name, but in truth, then we must begin by asking: what do we owe each other, simply for being human?
Until that question is answered, and acted upon, the store is still open. And we are still buying our lives, week by week, from those who sell them back to us with interest.
Join us in making the world a better place – you’ll be glad that you did. Cheers friends.