That they are now called
donations
doesn’t alter their obligatory character.
Sloterdijk - Selected Exaggerations
Financial debts are rather like sins we can be forgiven for by redeeming them ourselves – whereas moral debt has to be forgiven by others.
STEINGART/RIECKE: But it seems we can’t redeem our debts any more; we can only hope for forgiveness.
SLOTERDIJK: The old cloven hoof of religion has reappeared in the concept of debt in modern finance – from the moment, in fact, that the debts grew so big that the idea of redeeming them lost all credibility. The debt mechanism can work as long as there are
* This interview between Peter Sloterdijk, Gabor Steingart and Torsten Riecke appeared under the title ‘Die Staaten verpfänden die Luft und Banken atmen tief durch’ [‘The Countries Pledge Air and Banks Take Deep Breaths’], in Handelsblatt magazine (17 December 2011).
Gabor Steingart is a German journalist and author. He was editor-in- chief of Handelsblatt from 2010 to 2012.
Torsten Riecke is a journalist and was head of the Opinion and Analysis section of Handelsblatt at the time of this interview.
238 Mortgaging the Air: The Financial Crisis
people who seriously believe that a debtor is in a position (a) to pay off the whole loan amount, and (b) to pay the extra charge in the form of interest. Anybody who can credit something like that can become a creditor.
STEINGART/RIECKE: What you describe was the basis of eco- nomic behaviour in transactions in the past 200 years.
SLOTERDIJK: Much longer! A good example occurred in the sixteenth century: the wealthy tradesman Jakob Fugger had the Tyrolean prince give him the country’s silver mines as security, whereas a bungling relative from another branch of the family, Fugger vom Reh, accepted the city of Lüttich [Liège] as a deposit – but realized one morning that a city can’t be a deposit because it can’t be seized in foreclosure. To have trust you need to be smart about security.
STEINGART/RIECKE: But hasn’t the connection between guilt and debts been lost because in modern economic theory debts can’t be considered as guilt any more? Aren’t they regarded as invest- ments, and isn’t it therefore seen as a kind of basic right for present generations to help themselves to the putative treasures of future generations? The Americans call that a stimulus package. Nobody in modern credit capitalism thinks about redeeming debts any more.
SLOTERDIJK: Basically it’s a matter of cultivating a pathologi- cal relationship to the past. Crimes or sins are pathological – they bind perpetrators to what has happened by foreshadowing the suf- fering that will ensue later. Their crimes will catch up with them. The long arm of guilt that stretches out from the past to grab people in the present is represented mainly by credit in modern society. Credit, in turn, has to be tied to two stabilizing factors: first, the deposit, and, second, a state that guarantees foreclosure.
STEINGART/RIECKE: On that argument the cuckoo, not the German eagle, should represent the state.
SLOTERDIJK: It would generally be helpful if we talked less about a federal chancellor and more about a federal bailiff. The real semantic or juridical-moral centre of the body politic is located where legal enforcement is guaranteed. For a community that relies mainly on a credit-driven economy, the mechanism that assures credit by enforcement is the ultimate moral criterion. In other words, before we expect justice from the state we should be clear that the state, as guarantor of legal enforcement, has long since been at the heart of specifically modern transactions.
STEINGART/RIECKE: In Greece the creditors have realized that they have lent more than they can impound. Evidently they are not very smart about collateral either. For them it is like a replay of the Hans Fugger situation.
Mortgaging the Air: The Financial Crisis 239
SLOTERDIJK: We are reaching the point again where states are going to experience what happened to Fugger vom Reh. As we know, he dropped out of economic history, whereas the family line represented by Jakob the Wealthy prospered – due to collateral smartness. And that’s exactly what is missing today. Governments mortgage the air over their national territory and banks take deep breaths. This may lead to a European-wide disorientation of historical dimensions, possibly comparable with the massive moral- economic meltdown of 1922/23, the period of hyperinflation.
STEINGART/RIECKE: Since that period the Germans have been more traumatized than other nations, and even more deeply after the second hyperinflation after the end of the Second World War. Is this moral way of reflecting on the crisis typically German?
SLOTERDIJK: I would say that the German language is delight- fully German in this respect – it delivers these ideas to our doorstep. We shouldn’t criticize it for one of its merits, that of making it easy to understand connections that might otherwise remain obscure. Saying the words ‘debt’ and ‘guilt’ in English doesn’t clarify any- thing, and that particular play on words doesn’t work at all in the Romance languages. But if we consider the issue, we come to the same conclusions all round because it is always the knots that were tied in the past that bind the present to the past.
STEINGART/RIECKE: What you are saying is a curious way to provoke the people who coined the slogan ‘Occupy Wall Street’. They say, ‘Occupy’ or, even better, ‘Expropriate the creditors! ’ You argue back: ‘Creditors have a right to demand repayment of the debts on their books. ’ Is the protest against the banks simply a big mistake?
SLOTERDIJK: First of all, the debtor is always the guilty party, the party that owes something. Given this, it would be good to set up a lawyer’s office that specializes in reclaiming debts opposite every bank branch, to make the connection clear to people coming out of the bank with loans. The probability that a borrower will get into debt in the sense of owing both interest and the capital sum is constantly increasing. This makes us suspect the seriousness of the borrower’s intentions. Our confidence erodes fastest when the really big players turn out to be the most unscrupulous because they never seriously considered repaying the loans.
STEINGART/RIECKE: Do you mean the United States?
SLOTERDIJK: The Americans illustrate this very well: they have long since stopped thinking how to repay the national debt. Of course they talk about saving, but in today’s parlance that means reducing new borrowing. My grandmother interpreted the concept of saving very differently in her day.
240 Mortgaging the Air: The Financial Crisis
STEINGART/RIECKE: Do you mean the concept has become distorted?
SLOTERDIJK: Saving used to mean putting something aside. Today’s finance ministers use the word to applaud themselves when they make fewer new debts.
STEINGART/RIECKE: In other words, the banks stand acquitted?
SLOTERDIJK: Be careful! The banks as banks aren’t respon- sible for every mistake. First of all, for a society driven by money, honest belief in repayment is indispensable.
STEINGART/RIECKE: We could say that just an illusion of repayment would be worth a great deal. But even that is unreal in the case of Greece, as well as Japan and the USA.
SLOTERDIJK: Repayment illusion is a lovely name for a moral construct protected by the state – provided the state itself remains credible as a debtor. That is hardly the case today.
STEINGART/RIECKE: The illusion is fed by the fact that the debts are continually recycled. All the debtor nations pay their debts every few months with new debts.
SLOTERDIJK: That’s an idea Dante himself couldn’t have come up with. We should add a fourth part to his Divine Comedy. As we know, Dante conceived Purgatory as the purification system for venial – let’s say, redeemable – sins. They would be marked on the sinners’ brows with seven ‘P’s – even in the hell of purification everything important must be in writing. After every stage, one ‘P’ (for peccatum) would be erased, until the former sinner would stand there with a clear brow. No one in medieval times could imagine that charges from the past could be restructured. But that is exactly what would happen in the annexe to Purgatory. The drawback is that one would never get away completely from the past again and there would be no chance of being accepted into the sphere of heavenly joys.
STEINGART/RIECKE: Ludwig Erhard1 said that moderation was an integral part of the social market economy. Have we forgot- ten that?
SLOTERDIJK: Most people let their income determine their level of moderation. True, you can artificially boost your income with private credit, but income is the determining factor, and for the majority of people it is modest enough to ensure they don’t build castles in the air.
1 Ludwig Erhard (1897–1977) was a conservative German politician, Minister of Economics and architect of the 1960s ‘economic miracle’ in West Germany. He was Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany from 1963 to 1966.
Mortgaging the Air: The Financial Crisis 241
STEINGART/RIECKE: The citizen, the ego, stays within limits. But the state, the ‘we’, isn’t able to?
SLOTERDIJK: One thing we should not forget in this situa- tion: the first half of the twentieth century was marked by so-called ‘system competition’. We had real existing socialism on the doorstep, that is, the communist command economy. The situation created enormous psycho-political pressure, especially here in Germany. It inspired the general social democratization of the West. In other words, comrade Stalin gave us the gift of the welfare state. But that competition had definitively ended even before the implosion of the Soviet Union. Margaret Thatcher knew what she was doing when she held out for over a year in the battle with the British miners.
STEINGART/RIECKE: But communism was still alive in her time.
SLOTERDIJK: It still existed as a system but no longer as a source of inspiration or a pervasive threat. By 1975, if not before, people had recognized that communism was a paper tiger, an empty threat. Back then, there were authors who seriously said: ‘Now is the moment to try out real existing capitalism for the first time. ’ Until then, there had never been pure capitalism. Instead there had been a mixed system, let’s say a worldwide relatively successful semi-socialism that had developed out of the systemic alternatives of social democracy versus Leninism. The removal of pressure from the Soviet Bloc engendered the neoliberal phase that is coming to an end today.
STEINGART/RIECKE: Going back to your concept of semi- socialism: have we possibly gone too far with system convergence? Socialism, as we know, was completely run down. The machines were worn out; the people, intellectual and spiritual life, and the buildings as well. But we in the West – contrary to what the left wing often claims – didn’t take from the rich and give to the poor; we took from creditors. Semi-socialism allied with the banks and got loans in the night to impress voters the following day. Haven’t we simply relocated the wear and tear in the future?
SLOTERDIJK: To a great extent, national debt is an indica- tor of a structural deficit of socialism in the community coffers. What can’t be obtained in the form of taxation is borrowed from irresponsible creditors. The social deficit expresses that precisely in the scale of national debt. In the era of flourishing Rhine capi- talism in Germany,2 the level of national debt was low because
2 ‘Rhine capitalism’ (sometimes called ‘social capitalism’) denotes the eco- nomic policies in Germany and other European countries in the 1980s at
242 Mortgaging the Air: The Financial Crisis
semi-socialism functioned better under conservative governments. Ludwig Erhard’s social market economy rewrote this concept so resonantly that even conservatives liked it. In reality we have long been living in a fiscally organized semi-socialism integrated by the mass media and based on an interest-driven economy that many people call capitalism.
STEINGART/RIECKE: Do you mean it was not the ‘invisible hand of the market’ but the invisible hand of Stalin that gave us the social market economy?
SLOTERDIJK: Stalin’s hand certainly played a major role, and trade-union positions were much stronger at that time as well. Most of all, we had a completely different basic psycho-political situation back then: Almost everybody believed in ceaseless improvement. The real historical breach came at the moment when people in our part of the world found themselves looking not at a clear horizon but at a horizon that was cloudy, even menacing. In psycho-political terms that is the primary fact in the present-day West. In the past we could cultivate luxury pessimism: just remember the dying forests. In tune with that luxury pessimism we also had a hysterical, over-exaggerated attitude to the atomic threat. Nowadays realistic pessimism has the upper hand.
STEINGART/RIECKE: How do we get out of this mess of debt again? The neoliberal approach is politically discredited, and people are starting to believe in the strong state again. Are the left-wingers correct after all, as Frank Schirrmacher, editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, has said?
SLOTERDIJK: Unfortunately, the left can’t be right because they haven’t introduced any new ideas into the debate. They only repeat washed-out slogans: ‘You must take it by violence from those who have. ’
STEINGART/RIECKE: The left responds to the debt ques- tion unambiguously by saying the banks are to blame – they have pumped us full of the debt drug like a dealer.
SLOTERDIJK: That’s like the cigarette smoker who gets a tumour and claims damages from Marlboro.
STEINGART/RIECKE: But who is supposed to liberate the state from the misery it created itself? In the end, doesn’t the money have to come from the rich?
SLOTERDIJK: That is the obvious conclusion. The money is there. The wealth is enormous. Nonetheless, from a psycho-political
the time of the ‘neo-American’ economics advocated by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.
Mortgaging the Air: The Financial Crisis 243
perspective, we have been cheering on the wrong side for centuries. We have seen redistribution as something that can be achieved either by murderous violence, as in Leninism, or by moderately gentle fiscal force as in the Western system. But that was done without reckoning with the citizens.
STEINGART/RIECKE: Will the rich give their money voluntarily?
SLOTERDIJK: You know, taxes are a wonderful instrument for testing the donor capability of different population strata. We have 40 million working people in employment in Germany. Around 16 million are exempt from direct taxes because of their low incomes. They are also not heavily involved in the VAT system because they spend a large part of their income on food, which has a VAT rate of only 7 per cent. It is nonsense to say, as we hear so often in the tax debate, that everybody pays the same amount of VAT. If we look at this pseudo-truth in detail we can see, of course, that the same people who top the list for paying VAT pay the lion’s share of income tax.
STEINGART/RIECKE: That is because some people can’t dis- tinguish between absolute and relative, and judge things on the basis of relative tax rates. The rates are relatively high for small incomes and the yield from them is low in absolute terms.
SLOTERDIJK: The so-called taxation experts don’t use their brains, which would tell them that the people who are more involved in the income-tax sphere because of their higher degree of consumption naturally also account for the greater part of the VAT returns, even if it’s true that VAT affects everybody. But the new idea is self-evident: on one hand we have a society with a very high level of private wealth and, on the other hand, massive public debt. The rich city of Bremen is a good example, because it is the German city with the biggest public debt. What are the results? A child could work it out.
STEINGART/RIECKE: Do you want to hit the wallets of left- wing professors in Bremen?
SLOTERDIJK: We must call on the strong with their strength, that’s right. But it shouldn’t be done any longer by using the method of confiscatory taxation. We finally have to restructure the whole sphere of public finance to become a matter of honour. In psycho- political terms this is a very ambitious manoeuvre, something that can easily take a hundred years. But we have to be clear about the historical dimensions of the problem. We believed that the problem of nobility was resolved from the time a large number of aristocrats had their heads chopped off in the French Revolution. But it is not resolved. The result of the French Revolution shouldn’t be that the
244 Mortgaging the Air: The Financial Crisis
national population gets the right to behave like the mob. On the contrary, the common people should be raised to the rank of the aristocracy. I think we haven’t fully realized the superior kind of psycho-political tendencies of the French Revolution – whereas the liberation of the mob has been largely successful.
STEINGART/RIECKE: Do we have the aristocratic idea innately as human beings?
SLOTERDIJK: The only people who have shown that public spirit can support the state in a casual way are the Swiss. To para- phrase O. W. Fischer in the film Helden:3 ‘No aristocratic title is more beautiful than the simple Swiss address, “Herr”. ’
STEINGART/RIECKE: Haven’t the modern Greeks taught us that the rich don’t pay voluntarily? In a way, Greece is living out the model of an abstinent country that demands taxes but doesn’t collect them.
SLOTERDIJK: The idea of the state hasn’t caught on at all in Greece. I get annoyed whenever people say Greece is the cradle of democracy. The real Greece is a psycho-political ruin in which 400 years of Turkish occupation left a residue of resignation, priva- tism, wisecrack attitudes and remoteness from the state. It reminds me of what Joseph de Maistre said about the Turks in Greece. (Incidentally, they had enough time to become Europeans while they remained on European soil for 400 years. But what happened? The Greeks became orientalized; they failed to Westernize the Turks – if they ever tried to. In those times, however, they didn’t know about the fairy story of the cradle of democracy. ) Remember De Maistre’s verdict on the Turks of that time: they remained Tartars camping on European soil.
STEINGART/RIECKE: Where is the cradle of democracy? In Paris?
SLOTERDIJK: More likely in Rome. Initially it wasn’t a ques- tion of democracy as a form of popular rule, it was more about the res publica, which is about having an open space in which people feel that the noblest thing anyone can do is to participate in shaping the body politic. And that was more to do with Roman philosophy of the state than the Greek heritage.
STEINGART/RIECKE: But how do we achieve the psycho- political change you are discussing and demanding, in which citizens give voluntarily, without the state collapsing?
3 Helden was the German version of the film Arms and the Man, starring O. W. Fischer (1958). The film was adapted from the play of the same name by George Bernard Shaw.
Mortgaging the Air: The Financial Crisis 245
SLOTERDIJK: There are two main possibilities: first, that human beings are asocial creatures by nature – as representatives of black anthropology from Thomas Hobbes to Adorno have told us – and only fear can force them into coexistence. Think of Schopenhauer: bourgeois society resembles a group of freezing porcupines that huddle together for warmth and can only hurt each other. These images are enough to substantiate the pessimism of black anthro- pology. But there is another track. If we consult the works of the ‘moral sense’ philosophers that gave rise to political economy, the works of the Scots, of Adam Smith and of Lord Shaftesbury, one of the most wonderful figures in European intellectual history, we get a completely different picture. Shaftesbury taught and practised an enthusiastic attitude to sociability.
STEINGART/RIECKE: Wilhelm Röpke, the author of Jenseits von Angebot und Nachfrage,4 also had a view of humankind that regarded capitalists as more than just monsters and the state as more than merely an auxiliary machine.
SLOTERDIJK: Convivial philosophers assume that human beings are creatures that feel well in company. Human beings like seeing their reflection in the eyes of others and are full of empathetic virtues. The main thesis here is that concern is first nature to us and bourgeois coldness is only acquired with additional educa- tion through whole epochs of negative dressage. Philosophers then plump up the results into dark anthropological theories.
STEINGART/RIECKE: Because we have redacted empathy away.
SLOTERDIJK: Still, empathy is the basic given factor. Everything else is more of an acquired vice. I want briefly to point out one thing: people in a fiscal democracy in which there are still elements left over from absolutism are accustomed to being called on as donors anyway. They wouldn’t suffer any more than they do now if we introduced a new official term for channelling public emo- tions, stating that from today, everything we pay into the communal coffers is not called ‘taxes’ but ‘donations’ from citizens.
That they are now called donations doesn’t alter their obligatory character. That was, by the way, the starting point taken for the almost totally ignorant debates on my theses that shocked the German cultural press two years ago. Many of the people who voiced their opin- ions had not read Marcel Mauss; it was he who pointed out that
4 Wilhelm Röpke, A Humane Economy: The Social Framework of the Free Market (Chicago: Henry Regner), 1960.
246 Mortgaging the Air: The Financial Crisis
donations involve a curious unity of duty and voluntariness. 5 His theory about the dual nature of donations contains everything one needs to know to see the plausibility of switching from confiscation to donation as the way to fill the communal coffers. Incidentally, Mauss was a socialist and he knew what he was talking about. The spontaneity of donations doesn’t eliminate their obligatory character – that doesn’t occur to a convinced étatist and fiscalist. An alternative interpretation of social relations can only emerge from the idea that the whole society functions in donor streams and will no longer be animated by the tax burden.
STEINGART/RIECKE: So far your ideas haven’t found many supporters. Taking seems more blessed to us than giving.
SLOTERDIJK: The German Social Democrats have just dis- cussed increasing taxation again at their party conference. What they didn’t want to understand is that in recent years in America the initiative called ‘The Giving Pledge’ has begun turning billion- aires into social democrats. Social democracy lives from the simple formula: ‘half for the communal budget’. Warren Buffet’s words rang in my ears because he and his fellow campaigners seem to be aware of precisely that figure. Apparently, the 50 per cent logic has found its place in the minds of American billionaires. Meanwhile, here in Germany all those flatfooted psychologists are lumbering around and still using the language of threats when tax increases are up for discussion.
STEINGART/RIECKE: Is Warren Buffett your hero rather than Sigmar Gabriel? 6
SLOTERDIJK: I think Sigmar Gabriel is able to learn. My opinion is based on personal observation and a wise proverb from the Middle Ages: if God considers somebody for office, he equips him beforehand with the intellect appropriate to that office.
STEINGART/RIECKE: What does that poetic statement mean?
SLOTERDIJK: That office and intellect converge. Which is really not stupid, by the way. Most people laugh about it, but I think the contemporary word ‘competence’ expresses precisely this faith in the relation between office and intellect.
STEINGART/RIECKE: The SPD decided to increase taxation again. They only argued about how much they should take.
5 Marcel Mauss (1872–1950) was a French sociologist, ethnologist and anthropologist. Sloterdijk is referring here to his theory of ‘give and take’. 6 Sigmar Gabriel, a leading German Social Democratic politician, held the post of Vice Chancellor and Minister for Economic Affairs and Energy in the centre-left coalition government that took office in Germany in 2013.
Mortgaging the Air: The Financial Crisis 247
SLOTERDIJK: They are sticking to the old pattern of compul- sory state-organized taking.
STEINGART/RIECKE: What actually distinguishes your dona- tion from compulsory taxation? You cite Benjamin Franklin, who said that only two things are certain in life: death, and paying taxes. Isn’t it a habit that has become second nature to us?
SLOTERDIJK: Absolutely. We shouldn’t underestimate the depth of habit. When Franklin said only death and taxes are certain, he put those two phenomena into the same category of resignation. That means, in relation to these two things, we have become psycho- logically almost incapable of learning. Anybody who interferes with taxes should abandon hope, as in Dante’s Hell. Mortality and the duty to pay taxes are handled in the same area of the brain. They are surrounded by the same feeling of inescapable fatalism.
STEINGART/RIECKE: But your flatfooted theologians object that they really need binding agreements because, after all, the welfare state has binding expenditure commitments.
SLOTERDIJK: Everything is binding in the alternative system as well. But the quality of the transaction as such will be experi- enced differently. People will finally be acknowledged in terms of their donor qualities – it would be an almost invisible but incredibly far-reaching psychological revolution if the people who really fill the communal coffers would be taken seriously as such for the first time. It is quite wrong that at the moment when I devote myself most to the system in general, the moment when I pay my taxes, I see myself pushed into the most passive and undignified role by the fiscal authorities.
STEINGART/RIECKE: In our system the donor is actually the debtor.
SLOTERDIJK: That is a psycho-political mistake that could explain modern democracy’s failure. The étatists of all kinds don’t take it seriously enough. They think the systems run forever on their own. Our whole world is founded on a fundamental psycho-political error because it doesn’t sufficiently value the voluntary dimension in all the transactions between the state and its citizens.
STEINGART/RIECKE: But hasn’t the liberalism of the Free Democratic Party fallen for the same friend–enemy pattern by inventing the hand that gives back in reciprocation for the hand that takes – that is, by reducing taxation? Isn’t it the same stupid policy, only with different symptoms?
SLOTERDIJK: I don’t know what those people really think. The motivations behind this kind of rhetoric are certainly related to pleasing their clientele. But the liberals, like everybody else, don’t use the right tone to address their clientele’s positive community
248 Mortgaging the Air: The Financial Crisis
consciousness. They behave as if they were merely a party trying to avoid taxation. We shouldn’t forget, however, that the avoidance reflex stems from a false psycho-political development that goes back a very long way. Now it is becoming disastrous because it coin- cides with decades of the state pursuing terribly wrong fiscal policy.
STEINGART/RIECKE: Is that the origin of the present crisis?
SLOTERDIJK: The analysis of the origins should come before the crisis report: we have a huge crisis of trust that is also the cred- ibility crisis of credit. It is gradually becoming impossible to take countries seriously as borrowers. The cannon is no longer the ultima ratio of states; instead, it is bankruptcy.
STEINGART/RIECKE: Yet the state has two things not granted to us private citizens: it can wage war, that is its first right, and it can print money. It is doing the latter now, to avoid bankruptcy, to be able to carry on. While we are sitting here, money that has not been earned is being put into circulation in Frankfurt, and the same goes for America. What do you think of that?
SLOTERDIJK: Twentieth-century economists hailed printing money as the lesser evil if it helped prevent recessions. As soon as recession was defined as the worst possible evil, inflation policy obviously became the lesser evil. This brings us back to social democracy. In the world-historical competition with Leninism it always presented itself as the party of the lesser evil.
STEINGART/RIECKE: But nowadays all social democrats and all conservatives are involved in the business of flooding the markets with money. Whatever our political differences, the advocates of monetary flooding make up the really grand coalition.
SLOTERDIJK: Maybe some financial genius will come along soon and show us that the United States’ national debt can tend towards infinity without anything happening. It would be a new mathematics that the brain of old Homo sapiens isn’t ready for.
STEINGART/RIECKE: But do you agree with the analysis that a recession would be the worst case?
SLOTERDIJK: I have another worst case in mind, that of com- plete general demoralization. That’s what we’re heading for.
STEINGART/RIECKE: Demoralization of society as a whole?
SLOTERDIJK: Collective demoralization is worse than a tem- porary recession can ever be. Recessions have the saving grace that they accustom people to exercising moderation again. I don’t mean being moderate as in tightening one’s belt, but practising modera- tion in terms of not losing one’s sense of proportion. We have lived for decades in a spooky atmosphere with ambiguous messages constantly raining down on people and making them crazy. They are being told simultaneously to save money and waste it; they are
Mortgaging the Air: The Financial Crisis 249
supposed to take risks and do solid business, and they are supposed to speculate sky-high and keep both feet on the ground. In the end this completely wears people down. The same demoralizing effect likewise comes from the rapid growth of incomes without perfor- mance. This poisons young people because they start dreaming about pursuing pseudo careers. The whole thing has an ugly psycho- logical name: the dream of excessive reward. Many people get up in the morning and want the highest premium right at the start. The inner millionaire has been awakened in everybody. However, he or she is simply not yet the same as the real, existing person.
STEINGART/RIECKE: But isn’t the same attitude there at both ends – at one end the bank employees, who rely on their bonus and have the feeling they are owed something; and at the other end those who believe they are owed part of the national income without doing any kind of work for it?
SLOTERDIJK: The welfare system is indispensable, but it also spreads disinformation that leads to false attitudes. The Americans took a more courageous route in the Clinton era. They took the vague idea that society owes us support when we’re in need and reworked it into the precise idea of welfare state credits with a time limit, which every citizen has a right to.
STEINGART/RIECKE: The programme was called ‘Welfare to Work’ . . .
SLOTERDIJK: And it meant that every citizen going through a bad patch could rely on support. The side effect of this was a sharp reduction in the intentional propagation of poverty within the welfare system. Before then, after giving birth to her fourth child a woman could get a secure position in the welfare system, rather like a public servant.
STEINGART/RIECKE: Ronald Reagan actually spoke of the ‘welfare queen’ who strutted through the ghettos because she boasted an astonishingly high income.
SLOTERDIJK: This phenomenon is also related to the false psycho-political construction of our fiscal affairs. When money first enters the fiscal system it is just a factor to be used, without charac- teristics. It doesn’t show the imprint of the donor group any longer. The recipient shouldn’t be able to trace the donors’ input at all. We used to call it ‘state dough’, neutralized money. This confuses the recipients because they can’t feel the warm current reaching them in a material sense from the donor side. On the contrary, there is often a kind of recipient anger because the clients are annoyed, thinking it could easily be more. We don’t know much about the real processes in the transfer.
STEINGART/RIECKE: That brings us back to the politicians
250 Mortgaging the Air: The Financial Crisis
again. You talked about the need to create an employers’ movement symbolically modelled on the workers’ movement. What can that achieve?
SLOTERDIJK: An employers’ movement is very meaningful if you use a metaphorical concept of the employer. Nowadays I would express it differently. We are looking at a new start in which each taxpayer is seen as a future sponsor. Only then will the com- munity be on the right psycho-political track. Everybody who fills the national coffers has the right to the title of sponsor. Sponsoring, in any case, demonstrates an interesting analogy to the relationship between taxpayers and the tax state because it is based on the idea of service in return. This should also apply to the situation between the fiscal system and citizens in a democracy. At the time I first proposed this idea, it was interpreted as an argument in support of universal patronizing arrogance. It’s actually about something very different, namely, that we should develop a universal sponsoring consciousness by which everybody who contributes to the com- munal economy should be recognized as a donor. In immensely big societies like ours, the currency of recognition is the psycho-political fluid that remains the only halfway reliable medium for democratic coherence.
STEINGART/RIECKE: Can you describe this in detail?
SLOTERDIJK: We can look back today on 3,000 years of high culture in which the coherence of the many was almost always created by phobocratic means: with the rule of fear, even in the churches. The great structures were integrated by fear of the Lord and consolidated with mechanisms of paranoid integration based on the idea of common enemies. We seem to have largely overcome all that. In present-day societies, which are primarily communities for shared concerns and entertainment, social coherence can’t be achieved with purely phobocratic methods. Threats don’t get us very far nowadays. From this perspective the Germans are amiable folk. For the past three or four years, they have been threatened daily with horror stories by climate theorists and tax or finance scaremongers. But what have the Germans done at Christmas time for the past three or four years? They have proved that people can’t be bullied in relation to their feeling about life. They have broken one consumer record after another. This tells us something that has far-reaching significance.
STEINGART/RIECKE: There are evidently social tendencies for immunization against scaremongering.
SLOTERDIJK: Your profession is getting more difficult too, isn’t it?
STEINGART/RIECKE: But we journalists are also working
Mortgaging the Air: The Financial Crisis 251
in the field of the quest for meaning. After all, newspaper readers aren’t only looking for shock and horror; they are looking for orien- tation as well. In this respect, we are all registering rising circulation and more website visits in this crisis, because people are looking for orientation and Mr Ackermann clearly can’t provide it on his own. 7
SLOTERDIJK: We are heading for a time when people will become aware of the experimental character of politics in general. More and more people are also starting to understand the experi- mental character of economic decisions at the highest level. That is very disturbing because there should be things that aren’t experi- mented with. That’s what the Pope says as well. But he’s more concerned with sex and the family.
STEINGART/RIECKE: Are you thinking about the state and the rules of the game for society?
SLOTERDIJK: Yes. Sometimes I think if Montesquieu came back, he would have to say to himself: I didn’t understand the dis- tribution of powers properly. I only mentioned the judicative, the legislative and the executive, but I didn’t take note of the speculative.
STEINGART/RIECKE: Habermas doesn’t even try to look for the psycho-social level, but says we should remove these things from the jurisdiction of the nation-state. He says we need new European institutions. He acts as if he were the new constructor of an extra supranational level that is supposed to use new institutions to solve our problems in this area, which is actually more pre-democratic than democratic. He is building a new Europe for himself. What do you think of that?
SLOTERDIJK: Habermas has evidently not thought through some of the assumptions of his theses properly. The fundamental thrust of his ideas is quite plausible and has a certain appeal. But the basic analysis is missing, because what he doesn’t see is that nation-states continue to exist today not only because of their slug- gishness, their traditions and their cultural attributes. They remain alive and have a future because their system of solidarity continues to be organized on a national scale. That means nobody today is a national socialist, but everybody is a social nationalist. Now, and for the foreseeable future, we are living in real social national- ism because the great majority of generational contracts are still concluded in a national format, with the exception of an ongoing but rather marginal tendency towards integrating migrants into
7 Swiss banker Josef Ackermann was chief executive officer of Deutsche Bank, Germany’s biggest banking group, from 2006 to 2012.
252 Mortgaging the Air: The Financial Crisis
national social budgets. However, we are still light years away from a supranational social state.
STEINGART/RIECKE: Wouldn’t a European transfer union create something like that?
SLOTERDIJK: No. We would achieve that if all Europeans were to receive their pensions from Brussels – that’s the way a united Europe would work. We can’t construct it from the other end, from the parliaments and the commissions. The social nationalist reflex is already there, and we can say, ‘Ubi bene, ibi patria’. I am at home where my retirement pension is guaranteed. The people who give me my homeland are those who calculate my pension. As long as that happens through the auspices of the good old Federal German Employment Agency or my public service pension scheme, I will keep my national ties and remain securely in the social insurance system. We could only think about the things Habermas is talking about if we could give that up. But, as always, he starts building from the top down.
STEINGART/RIECKE: Democracy appears too rarely in what constructivists are propagating now in terms of institutions and fiscal union – all the slogans all along the line from Habermas to Chancellor Merkel. 8 Not only do they fail to include the social insur- ance system, but the idea of democracy is also completely absent.
SLOTERDIJK: The very grand coalition of post-democrats that negotiates destinies in Europe has existed for a long time. Naturally it is a benevolent post-democracy, but of the kind that wants to force citizens to take part in all the procedures as always, only in this undignified form of compulsory fiscal behaviour that goes back to absolutism. In Habermas’s scheme there would be more parliamen- tary business and more elections, but his Europe would basically be the same monster consisting of twenty-seven states operating compulsory taxation that already completely bewilders citizens, only with more symbolic superstructure. If Europeans had more pride it wouldn’t be possible to keep playing this game with them. But as I have already pointed out, people have been trained for centuries in the deprivation of their dignity – the training of death and taxation – and that can’t be shaken off quickly. If a free spirit like Benjamin Franklin mentioned both things in one breath, then it is easy to understand why a social democrat today can only speak
8 Angela Merkel, a leading Conservative German politician and chair- person of the German Christian Democratic Party, served as Federal Chancellor of Germany from 2005.
Mortgaging the Air: The Financial Crisis 253
fatalistically about the topic of taxes, with an added twist: we’ll give fatalism a helping hand by increasing the highest tax rate.
STEINGART/RIECKE: So far we have talked a great deal about the state and its institutions. Could you please say something about capitalism and the money business: where do you think changes, changed thinking patterns and changed processes have to be imple- mented? Or is the state the main engine of events as a whole?
SLOTERDIJK: I think the state has made capital errors with its mad central-bank policy in the last twenty years, and now that people can see the results of those errors they want to correct them by repeating them on an even bigger scale. You only have to look fairly carefully at the effect of flooding the markets. The result is that most of that money – up to around 80 or 90 per cent – doesn’t go into the real economy but into financial speculation. We are dealing with purely technical central-bank mistakes, which you can easily understand if you read Walter Bagehot’s book Lombard Street, which is on my desk over there. It is the central bank errors that have opened the floodgates to speculation. That’s why I don’t believe a word of the greed psychology that is so fashionable right now. Of course people have the ‘I want’ reflex, particularly in the form of ‘I want as well’. There is women’s urge to collect, and men’s expectation of booty, and in our hermaphroditic age these two acquisition reflexes constantly get mixed up with each other. But who has left easy money lying around where anybody passing by would have to be an idiot not to take it? In the end it is the central bankers who have made speculation possible.
STEINGART/RIECKE: Show us the way out of this stupid situation.
SLOTERDIJK: The possibility for the real economy to obtain credit has to be decoupled from the shady, speculative world of commercial banks, funds and other institutions. In other words, if the state really wants to function usefully as a lender of last resort, in emergencies it should offer short cuts for genuine credit-seekers in the economy instead of throwing eight-tenths of smart money at speculators at low interest rates. A short cut of that kind between the highest-level bank and the real economy must be tried out, and there are clever institution designers around who understand such things. That would be a simple measure to restrain the financial market branch, which has become too powerful, to its limits within the system.
STEINGART/RIECKE: We began by acquitting the bankers as creditors. When it comes to guilt, are we going further now and saying that the central bankers are guilty?
SLOTERDIJK: Given the premise that the basic mistake has
254 Mortgaging the Air: The Financial Crisis
already been made, many banks have acted correctly – but, as we know, ‘There is no right life in a false life. ’9 Besides, the banking sector had its black sheep who are guilty above and beyond their role in that wicked game.
STEINGART/RIECKE: But it seems we can’t redeem our debts any more; we can only hope for forgiveness.
SLOTERDIJK: The old cloven hoof of religion has reappeared in the concept of debt in modern finance – from the moment, in fact, that the debts grew so big that the idea of redeeming them lost all credibility. The debt mechanism can work as long as there are
* This interview between Peter Sloterdijk, Gabor Steingart and Torsten Riecke appeared under the title ‘Die Staaten verpfänden die Luft und Banken atmen tief durch’ [‘The Countries Pledge Air and Banks Take Deep Breaths’], in Handelsblatt magazine (17 December 2011).
Gabor Steingart is a German journalist and author. He was editor-in- chief of Handelsblatt from 2010 to 2012.
Torsten Riecke is a journalist and was head of the Opinion and Analysis section of Handelsblatt at the time of this interview.
238 Mortgaging the Air: The Financial Crisis
people who seriously believe that a debtor is in a position (a) to pay off the whole loan amount, and (b) to pay the extra charge in the form of interest. Anybody who can credit something like that can become a creditor.
STEINGART/RIECKE: What you describe was the basis of eco- nomic behaviour in transactions in the past 200 years.
SLOTERDIJK: Much longer! A good example occurred in the sixteenth century: the wealthy tradesman Jakob Fugger had the Tyrolean prince give him the country’s silver mines as security, whereas a bungling relative from another branch of the family, Fugger vom Reh, accepted the city of Lüttich [Liège] as a deposit – but realized one morning that a city can’t be a deposit because it can’t be seized in foreclosure. To have trust you need to be smart about security.
STEINGART/RIECKE: But hasn’t the connection between guilt and debts been lost because in modern economic theory debts can’t be considered as guilt any more? Aren’t they regarded as invest- ments, and isn’t it therefore seen as a kind of basic right for present generations to help themselves to the putative treasures of future generations? The Americans call that a stimulus package. Nobody in modern credit capitalism thinks about redeeming debts any more.
SLOTERDIJK: Basically it’s a matter of cultivating a pathologi- cal relationship to the past. Crimes or sins are pathological – they bind perpetrators to what has happened by foreshadowing the suf- fering that will ensue later. Their crimes will catch up with them. The long arm of guilt that stretches out from the past to grab people in the present is represented mainly by credit in modern society. Credit, in turn, has to be tied to two stabilizing factors: first, the deposit, and, second, a state that guarantees foreclosure.
STEINGART/RIECKE: On that argument the cuckoo, not the German eagle, should represent the state.
SLOTERDIJK: It would generally be helpful if we talked less about a federal chancellor and more about a federal bailiff. The real semantic or juridical-moral centre of the body politic is located where legal enforcement is guaranteed. For a community that relies mainly on a credit-driven economy, the mechanism that assures credit by enforcement is the ultimate moral criterion. In other words, before we expect justice from the state we should be clear that the state, as guarantor of legal enforcement, has long since been at the heart of specifically modern transactions.
STEINGART/RIECKE: In Greece the creditors have realized that they have lent more than they can impound. Evidently they are not very smart about collateral either. For them it is like a replay of the Hans Fugger situation.
Mortgaging the Air: The Financial Crisis 239
SLOTERDIJK: We are reaching the point again where states are going to experience what happened to Fugger vom Reh. As we know, he dropped out of economic history, whereas the family line represented by Jakob the Wealthy prospered – due to collateral smartness. And that’s exactly what is missing today. Governments mortgage the air over their national territory and banks take deep breaths. This may lead to a European-wide disorientation of historical dimensions, possibly comparable with the massive moral- economic meltdown of 1922/23, the period of hyperinflation.
STEINGART/RIECKE: Since that period the Germans have been more traumatized than other nations, and even more deeply after the second hyperinflation after the end of the Second World War. Is this moral way of reflecting on the crisis typically German?
SLOTERDIJK: I would say that the German language is delight- fully German in this respect – it delivers these ideas to our doorstep. We shouldn’t criticize it for one of its merits, that of making it easy to understand connections that might otherwise remain obscure. Saying the words ‘debt’ and ‘guilt’ in English doesn’t clarify any- thing, and that particular play on words doesn’t work at all in the Romance languages. But if we consider the issue, we come to the same conclusions all round because it is always the knots that were tied in the past that bind the present to the past.
STEINGART/RIECKE: What you are saying is a curious way to provoke the people who coined the slogan ‘Occupy Wall Street’. They say, ‘Occupy’ or, even better, ‘Expropriate the creditors! ’ You argue back: ‘Creditors have a right to demand repayment of the debts on their books. ’ Is the protest against the banks simply a big mistake?
SLOTERDIJK: First of all, the debtor is always the guilty party, the party that owes something. Given this, it would be good to set up a lawyer’s office that specializes in reclaiming debts opposite every bank branch, to make the connection clear to people coming out of the bank with loans. The probability that a borrower will get into debt in the sense of owing both interest and the capital sum is constantly increasing. This makes us suspect the seriousness of the borrower’s intentions. Our confidence erodes fastest when the really big players turn out to be the most unscrupulous because they never seriously considered repaying the loans.
STEINGART/RIECKE: Do you mean the United States?
SLOTERDIJK: The Americans illustrate this very well: they have long since stopped thinking how to repay the national debt. Of course they talk about saving, but in today’s parlance that means reducing new borrowing. My grandmother interpreted the concept of saving very differently in her day.
240 Mortgaging the Air: The Financial Crisis
STEINGART/RIECKE: Do you mean the concept has become distorted?
SLOTERDIJK: Saving used to mean putting something aside. Today’s finance ministers use the word to applaud themselves when they make fewer new debts.
STEINGART/RIECKE: In other words, the banks stand acquitted?
SLOTERDIJK: Be careful! The banks as banks aren’t respon- sible for every mistake. First of all, for a society driven by money, honest belief in repayment is indispensable.
STEINGART/RIECKE: We could say that just an illusion of repayment would be worth a great deal. But even that is unreal in the case of Greece, as well as Japan and the USA.
SLOTERDIJK: Repayment illusion is a lovely name for a moral construct protected by the state – provided the state itself remains credible as a debtor. That is hardly the case today.
STEINGART/RIECKE: The illusion is fed by the fact that the debts are continually recycled. All the debtor nations pay their debts every few months with new debts.
SLOTERDIJK: That’s an idea Dante himself couldn’t have come up with. We should add a fourth part to his Divine Comedy. As we know, Dante conceived Purgatory as the purification system for venial – let’s say, redeemable – sins. They would be marked on the sinners’ brows with seven ‘P’s – even in the hell of purification everything important must be in writing. After every stage, one ‘P’ (for peccatum) would be erased, until the former sinner would stand there with a clear brow. No one in medieval times could imagine that charges from the past could be restructured. But that is exactly what would happen in the annexe to Purgatory. The drawback is that one would never get away completely from the past again and there would be no chance of being accepted into the sphere of heavenly joys.
STEINGART/RIECKE: Ludwig Erhard1 said that moderation was an integral part of the social market economy. Have we forgot- ten that?
SLOTERDIJK: Most people let their income determine their level of moderation. True, you can artificially boost your income with private credit, but income is the determining factor, and for the majority of people it is modest enough to ensure they don’t build castles in the air.
1 Ludwig Erhard (1897–1977) was a conservative German politician, Minister of Economics and architect of the 1960s ‘economic miracle’ in West Germany. He was Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany from 1963 to 1966.
Mortgaging the Air: The Financial Crisis 241
STEINGART/RIECKE: The citizen, the ego, stays within limits. But the state, the ‘we’, isn’t able to?
SLOTERDIJK: One thing we should not forget in this situa- tion: the first half of the twentieth century was marked by so-called ‘system competition’. We had real existing socialism on the doorstep, that is, the communist command economy. The situation created enormous psycho-political pressure, especially here in Germany. It inspired the general social democratization of the West. In other words, comrade Stalin gave us the gift of the welfare state. But that competition had definitively ended even before the implosion of the Soviet Union. Margaret Thatcher knew what she was doing when she held out for over a year in the battle with the British miners.
STEINGART/RIECKE: But communism was still alive in her time.
SLOTERDIJK: It still existed as a system but no longer as a source of inspiration or a pervasive threat. By 1975, if not before, people had recognized that communism was a paper tiger, an empty threat. Back then, there were authors who seriously said: ‘Now is the moment to try out real existing capitalism for the first time. ’ Until then, there had never been pure capitalism. Instead there had been a mixed system, let’s say a worldwide relatively successful semi-socialism that had developed out of the systemic alternatives of social democracy versus Leninism. The removal of pressure from the Soviet Bloc engendered the neoliberal phase that is coming to an end today.
STEINGART/RIECKE: Going back to your concept of semi- socialism: have we possibly gone too far with system convergence? Socialism, as we know, was completely run down. The machines were worn out; the people, intellectual and spiritual life, and the buildings as well. But we in the West – contrary to what the left wing often claims – didn’t take from the rich and give to the poor; we took from creditors. Semi-socialism allied with the banks and got loans in the night to impress voters the following day. Haven’t we simply relocated the wear and tear in the future?
SLOTERDIJK: To a great extent, national debt is an indica- tor of a structural deficit of socialism in the community coffers. What can’t be obtained in the form of taxation is borrowed from irresponsible creditors. The social deficit expresses that precisely in the scale of national debt. In the era of flourishing Rhine capi- talism in Germany,2 the level of national debt was low because
2 ‘Rhine capitalism’ (sometimes called ‘social capitalism’) denotes the eco- nomic policies in Germany and other European countries in the 1980s at
242 Mortgaging the Air: The Financial Crisis
semi-socialism functioned better under conservative governments. Ludwig Erhard’s social market economy rewrote this concept so resonantly that even conservatives liked it. In reality we have long been living in a fiscally organized semi-socialism integrated by the mass media and based on an interest-driven economy that many people call capitalism.
STEINGART/RIECKE: Do you mean it was not the ‘invisible hand of the market’ but the invisible hand of Stalin that gave us the social market economy?
SLOTERDIJK: Stalin’s hand certainly played a major role, and trade-union positions were much stronger at that time as well. Most of all, we had a completely different basic psycho-political situation back then: Almost everybody believed in ceaseless improvement. The real historical breach came at the moment when people in our part of the world found themselves looking not at a clear horizon but at a horizon that was cloudy, even menacing. In psycho-political terms that is the primary fact in the present-day West. In the past we could cultivate luxury pessimism: just remember the dying forests. In tune with that luxury pessimism we also had a hysterical, over-exaggerated attitude to the atomic threat. Nowadays realistic pessimism has the upper hand.
STEINGART/RIECKE: How do we get out of this mess of debt again? The neoliberal approach is politically discredited, and people are starting to believe in the strong state again. Are the left-wingers correct after all, as Frank Schirrmacher, editor of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, has said?
SLOTERDIJK: Unfortunately, the left can’t be right because they haven’t introduced any new ideas into the debate. They only repeat washed-out slogans: ‘You must take it by violence from those who have. ’
STEINGART/RIECKE: The left responds to the debt ques- tion unambiguously by saying the banks are to blame – they have pumped us full of the debt drug like a dealer.
SLOTERDIJK: That’s like the cigarette smoker who gets a tumour and claims damages from Marlboro.
STEINGART/RIECKE: But who is supposed to liberate the state from the misery it created itself? In the end, doesn’t the money have to come from the rich?
SLOTERDIJK: That is the obvious conclusion. The money is there. The wealth is enormous. Nonetheless, from a psycho-political
the time of the ‘neo-American’ economics advocated by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.
Mortgaging the Air: The Financial Crisis 243
perspective, we have been cheering on the wrong side for centuries. We have seen redistribution as something that can be achieved either by murderous violence, as in Leninism, or by moderately gentle fiscal force as in the Western system. But that was done without reckoning with the citizens.
STEINGART/RIECKE: Will the rich give their money voluntarily?
SLOTERDIJK: You know, taxes are a wonderful instrument for testing the donor capability of different population strata. We have 40 million working people in employment in Germany. Around 16 million are exempt from direct taxes because of their low incomes. They are also not heavily involved in the VAT system because they spend a large part of their income on food, which has a VAT rate of only 7 per cent. It is nonsense to say, as we hear so often in the tax debate, that everybody pays the same amount of VAT. If we look at this pseudo-truth in detail we can see, of course, that the same people who top the list for paying VAT pay the lion’s share of income tax.
STEINGART/RIECKE: That is because some people can’t dis- tinguish between absolute and relative, and judge things on the basis of relative tax rates. The rates are relatively high for small incomes and the yield from them is low in absolute terms.
SLOTERDIJK: The so-called taxation experts don’t use their brains, which would tell them that the people who are more involved in the income-tax sphere because of their higher degree of consumption naturally also account for the greater part of the VAT returns, even if it’s true that VAT affects everybody. But the new idea is self-evident: on one hand we have a society with a very high level of private wealth and, on the other hand, massive public debt. The rich city of Bremen is a good example, because it is the German city with the biggest public debt. What are the results? A child could work it out.
STEINGART/RIECKE: Do you want to hit the wallets of left- wing professors in Bremen?
SLOTERDIJK: We must call on the strong with their strength, that’s right. But it shouldn’t be done any longer by using the method of confiscatory taxation. We finally have to restructure the whole sphere of public finance to become a matter of honour. In psycho- political terms this is a very ambitious manoeuvre, something that can easily take a hundred years. But we have to be clear about the historical dimensions of the problem. We believed that the problem of nobility was resolved from the time a large number of aristocrats had their heads chopped off in the French Revolution. But it is not resolved. The result of the French Revolution shouldn’t be that the
244 Mortgaging the Air: The Financial Crisis
national population gets the right to behave like the mob. On the contrary, the common people should be raised to the rank of the aristocracy. I think we haven’t fully realized the superior kind of psycho-political tendencies of the French Revolution – whereas the liberation of the mob has been largely successful.
STEINGART/RIECKE: Do we have the aristocratic idea innately as human beings?
SLOTERDIJK: The only people who have shown that public spirit can support the state in a casual way are the Swiss. To para- phrase O. W. Fischer in the film Helden:3 ‘No aristocratic title is more beautiful than the simple Swiss address, “Herr”. ’
STEINGART/RIECKE: Haven’t the modern Greeks taught us that the rich don’t pay voluntarily? In a way, Greece is living out the model of an abstinent country that demands taxes but doesn’t collect them.
SLOTERDIJK: The idea of the state hasn’t caught on at all in Greece. I get annoyed whenever people say Greece is the cradle of democracy. The real Greece is a psycho-political ruin in which 400 years of Turkish occupation left a residue of resignation, priva- tism, wisecrack attitudes and remoteness from the state. It reminds me of what Joseph de Maistre said about the Turks in Greece. (Incidentally, they had enough time to become Europeans while they remained on European soil for 400 years. But what happened? The Greeks became orientalized; they failed to Westernize the Turks – if they ever tried to. In those times, however, they didn’t know about the fairy story of the cradle of democracy. ) Remember De Maistre’s verdict on the Turks of that time: they remained Tartars camping on European soil.
STEINGART/RIECKE: Where is the cradle of democracy? In Paris?
SLOTERDIJK: More likely in Rome. Initially it wasn’t a ques- tion of democracy as a form of popular rule, it was more about the res publica, which is about having an open space in which people feel that the noblest thing anyone can do is to participate in shaping the body politic. And that was more to do with Roman philosophy of the state than the Greek heritage.
STEINGART/RIECKE: But how do we achieve the psycho- political change you are discussing and demanding, in which citizens give voluntarily, without the state collapsing?
3 Helden was the German version of the film Arms and the Man, starring O. W. Fischer (1958). The film was adapted from the play of the same name by George Bernard Shaw.
Mortgaging the Air: The Financial Crisis 245
SLOTERDIJK: There are two main possibilities: first, that human beings are asocial creatures by nature – as representatives of black anthropology from Thomas Hobbes to Adorno have told us – and only fear can force them into coexistence. Think of Schopenhauer: bourgeois society resembles a group of freezing porcupines that huddle together for warmth and can only hurt each other. These images are enough to substantiate the pessimism of black anthro- pology. But there is another track. If we consult the works of the ‘moral sense’ philosophers that gave rise to political economy, the works of the Scots, of Adam Smith and of Lord Shaftesbury, one of the most wonderful figures in European intellectual history, we get a completely different picture. Shaftesbury taught and practised an enthusiastic attitude to sociability.
STEINGART/RIECKE: Wilhelm Röpke, the author of Jenseits von Angebot und Nachfrage,4 also had a view of humankind that regarded capitalists as more than just monsters and the state as more than merely an auxiliary machine.
SLOTERDIJK: Convivial philosophers assume that human beings are creatures that feel well in company. Human beings like seeing their reflection in the eyes of others and are full of empathetic virtues. The main thesis here is that concern is first nature to us and bourgeois coldness is only acquired with additional educa- tion through whole epochs of negative dressage. Philosophers then plump up the results into dark anthropological theories.
STEINGART/RIECKE: Because we have redacted empathy away.
SLOTERDIJK: Still, empathy is the basic given factor. Everything else is more of an acquired vice. I want briefly to point out one thing: people in a fiscal democracy in which there are still elements left over from absolutism are accustomed to being called on as donors anyway. They wouldn’t suffer any more than they do now if we introduced a new official term for channelling public emo- tions, stating that from today, everything we pay into the communal coffers is not called ‘taxes’ but ‘donations’ from citizens.
That they are now called donations doesn’t alter their obligatory character. That was, by the way, the starting point taken for the almost totally ignorant debates on my theses that shocked the German cultural press two years ago. Many of the people who voiced their opin- ions had not read Marcel Mauss; it was he who pointed out that
4 Wilhelm Röpke, A Humane Economy: The Social Framework of the Free Market (Chicago: Henry Regner), 1960.
246 Mortgaging the Air: The Financial Crisis
donations involve a curious unity of duty and voluntariness. 5 His theory about the dual nature of donations contains everything one needs to know to see the plausibility of switching from confiscation to donation as the way to fill the communal coffers. Incidentally, Mauss was a socialist and he knew what he was talking about. The spontaneity of donations doesn’t eliminate their obligatory character – that doesn’t occur to a convinced étatist and fiscalist. An alternative interpretation of social relations can only emerge from the idea that the whole society functions in donor streams and will no longer be animated by the tax burden.
STEINGART/RIECKE: So far your ideas haven’t found many supporters. Taking seems more blessed to us than giving.
SLOTERDIJK: The German Social Democrats have just dis- cussed increasing taxation again at their party conference. What they didn’t want to understand is that in recent years in America the initiative called ‘The Giving Pledge’ has begun turning billion- aires into social democrats. Social democracy lives from the simple formula: ‘half for the communal budget’. Warren Buffet’s words rang in my ears because he and his fellow campaigners seem to be aware of precisely that figure. Apparently, the 50 per cent logic has found its place in the minds of American billionaires. Meanwhile, here in Germany all those flatfooted psychologists are lumbering around and still using the language of threats when tax increases are up for discussion.
STEINGART/RIECKE: Is Warren Buffett your hero rather than Sigmar Gabriel? 6
SLOTERDIJK: I think Sigmar Gabriel is able to learn. My opinion is based on personal observation and a wise proverb from the Middle Ages: if God considers somebody for office, he equips him beforehand with the intellect appropriate to that office.
STEINGART/RIECKE: What does that poetic statement mean?
SLOTERDIJK: That office and intellect converge. Which is really not stupid, by the way. Most people laugh about it, but I think the contemporary word ‘competence’ expresses precisely this faith in the relation between office and intellect.
STEINGART/RIECKE: The SPD decided to increase taxation again. They only argued about how much they should take.
5 Marcel Mauss (1872–1950) was a French sociologist, ethnologist and anthropologist. Sloterdijk is referring here to his theory of ‘give and take’. 6 Sigmar Gabriel, a leading German Social Democratic politician, held the post of Vice Chancellor and Minister for Economic Affairs and Energy in the centre-left coalition government that took office in Germany in 2013.
Mortgaging the Air: The Financial Crisis 247
SLOTERDIJK: They are sticking to the old pattern of compul- sory state-organized taking.
STEINGART/RIECKE: What actually distinguishes your dona- tion from compulsory taxation? You cite Benjamin Franklin, who said that only two things are certain in life: death, and paying taxes. Isn’t it a habit that has become second nature to us?
SLOTERDIJK: Absolutely. We shouldn’t underestimate the depth of habit. When Franklin said only death and taxes are certain, he put those two phenomena into the same category of resignation. That means, in relation to these two things, we have become psycho- logically almost incapable of learning. Anybody who interferes with taxes should abandon hope, as in Dante’s Hell. Mortality and the duty to pay taxes are handled in the same area of the brain. They are surrounded by the same feeling of inescapable fatalism.
STEINGART/RIECKE: But your flatfooted theologians object that they really need binding agreements because, after all, the welfare state has binding expenditure commitments.
SLOTERDIJK: Everything is binding in the alternative system as well. But the quality of the transaction as such will be experi- enced differently. People will finally be acknowledged in terms of their donor qualities – it would be an almost invisible but incredibly far-reaching psychological revolution if the people who really fill the communal coffers would be taken seriously as such for the first time. It is quite wrong that at the moment when I devote myself most to the system in general, the moment when I pay my taxes, I see myself pushed into the most passive and undignified role by the fiscal authorities.
STEINGART/RIECKE: In our system the donor is actually the debtor.
SLOTERDIJK: That is a psycho-political mistake that could explain modern democracy’s failure. The étatists of all kinds don’t take it seriously enough. They think the systems run forever on their own. Our whole world is founded on a fundamental psycho-political error because it doesn’t sufficiently value the voluntary dimension in all the transactions between the state and its citizens.
STEINGART/RIECKE: But hasn’t the liberalism of the Free Democratic Party fallen for the same friend–enemy pattern by inventing the hand that gives back in reciprocation for the hand that takes – that is, by reducing taxation? Isn’t it the same stupid policy, only with different symptoms?
SLOTERDIJK: I don’t know what those people really think. The motivations behind this kind of rhetoric are certainly related to pleasing their clientele. But the liberals, like everybody else, don’t use the right tone to address their clientele’s positive community
248 Mortgaging the Air: The Financial Crisis
consciousness. They behave as if they were merely a party trying to avoid taxation. We shouldn’t forget, however, that the avoidance reflex stems from a false psycho-political development that goes back a very long way. Now it is becoming disastrous because it coin- cides with decades of the state pursuing terribly wrong fiscal policy.
STEINGART/RIECKE: Is that the origin of the present crisis?
SLOTERDIJK: The analysis of the origins should come before the crisis report: we have a huge crisis of trust that is also the cred- ibility crisis of credit. It is gradually becoming impossible to take countries seriously as borrowers. The cannon is no longer the ultima ratio of states; instead, it is bankruptcy.
STEINGART/RIECKE: Yet the state has two things not granted to us private citizens: it can wage war, that is its first right, and it can print money. It is doing the latter now, to avoid bankruptcy, to be able to carry on. While we are sitting here, money that has not been earned is being put into circulation in Frankfurt, and the same goes for America. What do you think of that?
SLOTERDIJK: Twentieth-century economists hailed printing money as the lesser evil if it helped prevent recessions. As soon as recession was defined as the worst possible evil, inflation policy obviously became the lesser evil. This brings us back to social democracy. In the world-historical competition with Leninism it always presented itself as the party of the lesser evil.
STEINGART/RIECKE: But nowadays all social democrats and all conservatives are involved in the business of flooding the markets with money. Whatever our political differences, the advocates of monetary flooding make up the really grand coalition.
SLOTERDIJK: Maybe some financial genius will come along soon and show us that the United States’ national debt can tend towards infinity without anything happening. It would be a new mathematics that the brain of old Homo sapiens isn’t ready for.
STEINGART/RIECKE: But do you agree with the analysis that a recession would be the worst case?
SLOTERDIJK: I have another worst case in mind, that of com- plete general demoralization. That’s what we’re heading for.
STEINGART/RIECKE: Demoralization of society as a whole?
SLOTERDIJK: Collective demoralization is worse than a tem- porary recession can ever be. Recessions have the saving grace that they accustom people to exercising moderation again. I don’t mean being moderate as in tightening one’s belt, but practising modera- tion in terms of not losing one’s sense of proportion. We have lived for decades in a spooky atmosphere with ambiguous messages constantly raining down on people and making them crazy. They are being told simultaneously to save money and waste it; they are
Mortgaging the Air: The Financial Crisis 249
supposed to take risks and do solid business, and they are supposed to speculate sky-high and keep both feet on the ground. In the end this completely wears people down. The same demoralizing effect likewise comes from the rapid growth of incomes without perfor- mance. This poisons young people because they start dreaming about pursuing pseudo careers. The whole thing has an ugly psycho- logical name: the dream of excessive reward. Many people get up in the morning and want the highest premium right at the start. The inner millionaire has been awakened in everybody. However, he or she is simply not yet the same as the real, existing person.
STEINGART/RIECKE: But isn’t the same attitude there at both ends – at one end the bank employees, who rely on their bonus and have the feeling they are owed something; and at the other end those who believe they are owed part of the national income without doing any kind of work for it?
SLOTERDIJK: The welfare system is indispensable, but it also spreads disinformation that leads to false attitudes. The Americans took a more courageous route in the Clinton era. They took the vague idea that society owes us support when we’re in need and reworked it into the precise idea of welfare state credits with a time limit, which every citizen has a right to.
STEINGART/RIECKE: The programme was called ‘Welfare to Work’ . . .
SLOTERDIJK: And it meant that every citizen going through a bad patch could rely on support. The side effect of this was a sharp reduction in the intentional propagation of poverty within the welfare system. Before then, after giving birth to her fourth child a woman could get a secure position in the welfare system, rather like a public servant.
STEINGART/RIECKE: Ronald Reagan actually spoke of the ‘welfare queen’ who strutted through the ghettos because she boasted an astonishingly high income.
SLOTERDIJK: This phenomenon is also related to the false psycho-political construction of our fiscal affairs. When money first enters the fiscal system it is just a factor to be used, without charac- teristics. It doesn’t show the imprint of the donor group any longer. The recipient shouldn’t be able to trace the donors’ input at all. We used to call it ‘state dough’, neutralized money. This confuses the recipients because they can’t feel the warm current reaching them in a material sense from the donor side. On the contrary, there is often a kind of recipient anger because the clients are annoyed, thinking it could easily be more. We don’t know much about the real processes in the transfer.
STEINGART/RIECKE: That brings us back to the politicians
250 Mortgaging the Air: The Financial Crisis
again. You talked about the need to create an employers’ movement symbolically modelled on the workers’ movement. What can that achieve?
SLOTERDIJK: An employers’ movement is very meaningful if you use a metaphorical concept of the employer. Nowadays I would express it differently. We are looking at a new start in which each taxpayer is seen as a future sponsor. Only then will the com- munity be on the right psycho-political track. Everybody who fills the national coffers has the right to the title of sponsor. Sponsoring, in any case, demonstrates an interesting analogy to the relationship between taxpayers and the tax state because it is based on the idea of service in return. This should also apply to the situation between the fiscal system and citizens in a democracy. At the time I first proposed this idea, it was interpreted as an argument in support of universal patronizing arrogance. It’s actually about something very different, namely, that we should develop a universal sponsoring consciousness by which everybody who contributes to the com- munal economy should be recognized as a donor. In immensely big societies like ours, the currency of recognition is the psycho-political fluid that remains the only halfway reliable medium for democratic coherence.
STEINGART/RIECKE: Can you describe this in detail?
SLOTERDIJK: We can look back today on 3,000 years of high culture in which the coherence of the many was almost always created by phobocratic means: with the rule of fear, even in the churches. The great structures were integrated by fear of the Lord and consolidated with mechanisms of paranoid integration based on the idea of common enemies. We seem to have largely overcome all that. In present-day societies, which are primarily communities for shared concerns and entertainment, social coherence can’t be achieved with purely phobocratic methods. Threats don’t get us very far nowadays. From this perspective the Germans are amiable folk. For the past three or four years, they have been threatened daily with horror stories by climate theorists and tax or finance scaremongers. But what have the Germans done at Christmas time for the past three or four years? They have proved that people can’t be bullied in relation to their feeling about life. They have broken one consumer record after another. This tells us something that has far-reaching significance.
STEINGART/RIECKE: There are evidently social tendencies for immunization against scaremongering.
SLOTERDIJK: Your profession is getting more difficult too, isn’t it?
STEINGART/RIECKE: But we journalists are also working
Mortgaging the Air: The Financial Crisis 251
in the field of the quest for meaning. After all, newspaper readers aren’t only looking for shock and horror; they are looking for orien- tation as well. In this respect, we are all registering rising circulation and more website visits in this crisis, because people are looking for orientation and Mr Ackermann clearly can’t provide it on his own. 7
SLOTERDIJK: We are heading for a time when people will become aware of the experimental character of politics in general. More and more people are also starting to understand the experi- mental character of economic decisions at the highest level. That is very disturbing because there should be things that aren’t experi- mented with. That’s what the Pope says as well. But he’s more concerned with sex and the family.
STEINGART/RIECKE: Are you thinking about the state and the rules of the game for society?
SLOTERDIJK: Yes. Sometimes I think if Montesquieu came back, he would have to say to himself: I didn’t understand the dis- tribution of powers properly. I only mentioned the judicative, the legislative and the executive, but I didn’t take note of the speculative.
STEINGART/RIECKE: Habermas doesn’t even try to look for the psycho-social level, but says we should remove these things from the jurisdiction of the nation-state. He says we need new European institutions. He acts as if he were the new constructor of an extra supranational level that is supposed to use new institutions to solve our problems in this area, which is actually more pre-democratic than democratic. He is building a new Europe for himself. What do you think of that?
SLOTERDIJK: Habermas has evidently not thought through some of the assumptions of his theses properly. The fundamental thrust of his ideas is quite plausible and has a certain appeal. But the basic analysis is missing, because what he doesn’t see is that nation-states continue to exist today not only because of their slug- gishness, their traditions and their cultural attributes. They remain alive and have a future because their system of solidarity continues to be organized on a national scale. That means nobody today is a national socialist, but everybody is a social nationalist. Now, and for the foreseeable future, we are living in real social national- ism because the great majority of generational contracts are still concluded in a national format, with the exception of an ongoing but rather marginal tendency towards integrating migrants into
7 Swiss banker Josef Ackermann was chief executive officer of Deutsche Bank, Germany’s biggest banking group, from 2006 to 2012.
252 Mortgaging the Air: The Financial Crisis
national social budgets. However, we are still light years away from a supranational social state.
STEINGART/RIECKE: Wouldn’t a European transfer union create something like that?
SLOTERDIJK: No. We would achieve that if all Europeans were to receive their pensions from Brussels – that’s the way a united Europe would work. We can’t construct it from the other end, from the parliaments and the commissions. The social nationalist reflex is already there, and we can say, ‘Ubi bene, ibi patria’. I am at home where my retirement pension is guaranteed. The people who give me my homeland are those who calculate my pension. As long as that happens through the auspices of the good old Federal German Employment Agency or my public service pension scheme, I will keep my national ties and remain securely in the social insurance system. We could only think about the things Habermas is talking about if we could give that up. But, as always, he starts building from the top down.
STEINGART/RIECKE: Democracy appears too rarely in what constructivists are propagating now in terms of institutions and fiscal union – all the slogans all along the line from Habermas to Chancellor Merkel. 8 Not only do they fail to include the social insur- ance system, but the idea of democracy is also completely absent.
SLOTERDIJK: The very grand coalition of post-democrats that negotiates destinies in Europe has existed for a long time. Naturally it is a benevolent post-democracy, but of the kind that wants to force citizens to take part in all the procedures as always, only in this undignified form of compulsory fiscal behaviour that goes back to absolutism. In Habermas’s scheme there would be more parliamen- tary business and more elections, but his Europe would basically be the same monster consisting of twenty-seven states operating compulsory taxation that already completely bewilders citizens, only with more symbolic superstructure. If Europeans had more pride it wouldn’t be possible to keep playing this game with them. But as I have already pointed out, people have been trained for centuries in the deprivation of their dignity – the training of death and taxation – and that can’t be shaken off quickly. If a free spirit like Benjamin Franklin mentioned both things in one breath, then it is easy to understand why a social democrat today can only speak
8 Angela Merkel, a leading Conservative German politician and chair- person of the German Christian Democratic Party, served as Federal Chancellor of Germany from 2005.
Mortgaging the Air: The Financial Crisis 253
fatalistically about the topic of taxes, with an added twist: we’ll give fatalism a helping hand by increasing the highest tax rate.
STEINGART/RIECKE: So far we have talked a great deal about the state and its institutions. Could you please say something about capitalism and the money business: where do you think changes, changed thinking patterns and changed processes have to be imple- mented? Or is the state the main engine of events as a whole?
SLOTERDIJK: I think the state has made capital errors with its mad central-bank policy in the last twenty years, and now that people can see the results of those errors they want to correct them by repeating them on an even bigger scale. You only have to look fairly carefully at the effect of flooding the markets. The result is that most of that money – up to around 80 or 90 per cent – doesn’t go into the real economy but into financial speculation. We are dealing with purely technical central-bank mistakes, which you can easily understand if you read Walter Bagehot’s book Lombard Street, which is on my desk over there. It is the central bank errors that have opened the floodgates to speculation. That’s why I don’t believe a word of the greed psychology that is so fashionable right now. Of course people have the ‘I want’ reflex, particularly in the form of ‘I want as well’. There is women’s urge to collect, and men’s expectation of booty, and in our hermaphroditic age these two acquisition reflexes constantly get mixed up with each other. But who has left easy money lying around where anybody passing by would have to be an idiot not to take it? In the end it is the central bankers who have made speculation possible.
STEINGART/RIECKE: Show us the way out of this stupid situation.
SLOTERDIJK: The possibility for the real economy to obtain credit has to be decoupled from the shady, speculative world of commercial banks, funds and other institutions. In other words, if the state really wants to function usefully as a lender of last resort, in emergencies it should offer short cuts for genuine credit-seekers in the economy instead of throwing eight-tenths of smart money at speculators at low interest rates. A short cut of that kind between the highest-level bank and the real economy must be tried out, and there are clever institution designers around who understand such things. That would be a simple measure to restrain the financial market branch, which has become too powerful, to its limits within the system.
STEINGART/RIECKE: We began by acquitting the bankers as creditors. When it comes to guilt, are we going further now and saying that the central bankers are guilty?
SLOTERDIJK: Given the premise that the basic mistake has
254 Mortgaging the Air: The Financial Crisis
already been made, many banks have acted correctly – but, as we know, ‘There is no right life in a false life. ’9 Besides, the banking sector had its black sheep who are guilty above and beyond their role in that wicked game.
