Debt and the Moral Paradox: Can Humanity Progress Without Borrowing the Future?

November 05, 2025 (MLN): Debt built the modern world, but in doing so, it mortgaged the future. The real question now is not how to escape debt, but how to restore its morality.

Before money, there was trust, and with it, the first forms of debt emerged. It built the modern world by allowing humanity to borrow from the future to improve the present.

Nations rose, industries expanded, and cities reached for the sky because someone, somewhere, believed tomorrow would be better than today.

John Maynard Keynes once wrote that the engine which drives enterprise is not thrift, but investment. Over time, debt assumed that role. It became an engine of growth and a symbol of hope.

Debt gave us speed, the power to burn tomorrow’s resources for today’s comfort, to build faster, consume faster, and expand beyond balance.

It mobilized imagination, but mortgaged the planet. Even the United Nations warns that the global financial system, once a vehicle of prosperity, is now undermining the Sustainable Development Goals and humanity itself.

The same force that once built bridges is now burning through boundaries of sustainability and justice. Indeed, without it, human progress might have been slower, but perhaps it would also have been wiser.

 It raises a question: can something that once built the world now be trusted to sustain it?

The morality of debt has always been like a double-edged sword. Debt can liberate or it can enslave. It can be the promise that binds society together, or the chain that divides it.

When credit flows to innovators, farmers, and builders, it spreads opportunity. When concentrated in the hands of a few, it becomes an instrument of control, a system that rewards speculation while punishing genuine need.

As the late anthropologist David Graeber observed, ‘Debt is the perversion of a promise.’ It turns a moral bond into a mathematical formula. Perhaps the challenge of our time is not to abolish debt, but to restore its morality, to make finance human again.

Imagine a world where sharing, not speculation, is the organizing principle of the economy. A world where banks are not empires of profit but custodians of trust, safe houses for people’s hopes and governments’ plans. In that world, finance is not a casino but a bridge of purpose, connecting savers and seekers, dreamers and doers.

Banks rediscover purpose, not extracting value, but nurturing it, standing beside governments to turn plans into progress.  They thrive not on debt, but on development. It is not a utopia. It’s what finance was meant to be before it lost its soul.

It is time for finance to rediscover humanity.

If the world were built on sharing, trust, and fairness, what would a human do?

Perhaps, for the first time, humans would not just survive, they would truly live. Free from the burden of endless repayments, they would have time to read the universe to think, to create, to explore more.

It will also calm the fear surrounding artificial intelligence. In that world, AI and robots would perform the tasks humanity needs, while humans would teach machines wisdom, not greed. Technology would serve knowledge, not consumption.

Wealth would circulate like light, illuminating, not blinding. Without it, progress might have been slower, but perhaps wiser, a civilization where humanity finally learns not just to build, but to be.

That world will not come overnight. It will begin quietly, in communities that choose cooperation over competition, in banks that rediscover duty, in governments that measure success by inclusion, not inflation.

At first, it will seem slow. Because sharing takes time, and trust takes generations. But once it begins to roll, it will gain momentum like a snowball powered by goodwill, not greed.

And when it does, it will no longer be a movement; it will be a new moral economy, one that grows slower at first, but deeper and stronger with every turn. Because what grows slowly endures.

Disclaimer: The views and analysis in this article are the opinions of the author and are for informational purposes only.