Reading Path
declarativeDebt, Credit, and the Economic
The economy as disguised debt structure — money, capital, and the tributary as originary categories.
Introduction
There is no economy. This is not a polemical claim but a theoretical one: the "economy" as a self-regulating system of exchange between autonomous individuals is an ideological representation that conceals the debt structure it rests on. This path builds the positive account: what is really going on when we exchange, borrow, invest, and price things. The foundation path is required; the political path is helpful.
The Sequence — 4 texts
The originary debt relation — each participant's obligation to the center that enabled the scene — as the foundational economic fact. Then: how that originary debt is institutionalized in historical economies.
The Big Man's out-gifting as the origin of hierarchical debt — the mechanism by which egalitarian communities become hierarchical ones through the acceptance of asymmetric obligation. Then: how money carries this sacred credit forward.
The systematic argument that money is a sign of recognition — credit drawn on the sacred — not a medium of exchange invented to solve barter's inefficiencies. The "economy" as ideological concealment of the tributary structure.
Where This Path Arrives
The economic path arrives at the question that liberal economics never asks: what is the center against which all this credit is being drawn? Modern financial crises are center crises — failures of the originary credit structure that money represents. The scenic design path develops how institutions might be designed to make this visible and manageable.