Limitlessness, Compound Interest, and the Suicidal Logic of Capital

Every civilization has known greed, but greed is old, local, and self-limiting: a body can eat only so much. The disease of money is something else. Power and prestige can also be desired without end, but money gives that limitlessness a form that is countable, portable, and exchangeable for nearly anything. It has no use that satisfies and no body that spoils. It converts appetite, which has a limit, into accumulation, which does not.

This essay traces this condition through four aspects:

• Aristotle distinguished acquisition bounded by the needs of the household from a boundless art of wealth-getting, in which “all getters of wealth increase their hoard of coin without limit.” He named usury, money born of money, the most unnatural form.
• Marx gave the distinction an equation. Simple exchanges run commodity–money–commodity and close after use; capital runs money–commodity–more money, a circuit with no terminus, enforced on each successive capitalist by competition.
• Simmel showed money becoming the absolute means, the instrument that swallows every other purpose.
• Freud, and later Keynes, called the love of money a morbidity. Keynes predicted that abundance would let us hand it “over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease.” The industrial nations grew rich, but the morbidity was institutionalized rather than cured.
• Frederick Soddy supplies the mechanism. Real wealth rots, rusts, and wears out. Debt obeys arithmetic and grows. When claims outrun the capacity to honor them, the gap closes through default, inflation, or liquidation of the living world.

Growth becomes compulsory because returns are endlessly reinvested, because competition demands it, and because debt-laden systems treat stagnation as an emergency. This is suicidal capitalism, an order whose condition of survival undermines the ecological, social, and psychological conditions it depends on.

Hawaiʻi supplies a case history. In the 1810s and 1820s, merchants pressed manufactured goods on the aliʻi and gave them credit against future deliveries of sandalwood. Those debts reached an estimated $300,000 by 1821.

Compound interest did not drive this. Repeated purchases, inflated prices, and coercive collection did. In 1826 American warships arrived to press the claims, and the kingdom’s first written tax law required every man to deliver half a picul of sandalwood and every woman a mat or kapa. Commoners were diverted from subsistence to the uplands. Some pulled up young trees so their children would not inherit the same labor. By about 1840 the commercial forests were gone, and the Māhele later turned ahupuaʻa into land, a commodity.

Buddhism’s hungry ghost, vast-bellied with a needle-thin throat, is the emblem of this disease: abundance that cannot be swallowed. Moralists locate the disease in the soul, but the medium is the disease. The cure lies in institutions that restore limits: debt release, commons that cannot be mortgaged and sold, value tied to living things.

It will cured only when enough is enough.

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