Abolishing Interest Slavery
Gottfried Feder explains how he arrived at the view that interest on debts must be abolished
Introduced and translated by Hadding Scott
THE GENERAL PURPOSE of this short essay is similar to that of the first half of Mein Kampf: to show how the author arrived at his views.
It is interesting to observe in Feder’s account how he values instinct over expertise. This attitude shows up also later in Hitler’s writing and meshes nicely with National-Socialism’s friendliness toward hereditary psychology. The valuation of instinct over reason is something found much earlier in Schopenhauer, who regarded reason as a very flawed and unreliable faculty.
* * *
Inner History of the Abolition of Interest-Slavery
by Gottfried Feder
Völkischer Beobachter, 1920, No. 72
Translation by Hadding Scott, 2012
Fortunate is he who recognizes the deep causes of things.
— Vergil
Gottfried Feder
“HOW DID you really arrive at the abolition of interest-slavery?” is a question now often posed to me. I know not whether Columbus too was often asked: How did you really arrive at the discovery of America? The answer to such a question can and will turn out very differently, depending on the position that the questioner takes in regard to the matter and in regard to the person. In any case I want to try to give an answer that satisfies the questioner and — what I consider more important in such cases — satisfies in best conscience the one who was asked.
In recognizing utterly important, perhaps the most important connections in the world’s great questions, it is probably always a matter of a lightning-like intuition, of creative insight into hitherto obscure relationships, illumined by exciting prospects for the future. This birth of an idea, this sudden, clear cognizance of a truth, stands at the intersection of the inner and outer history of the idea.
The inner history is often obscure and hidden; it runs part of its course entirely in the subconscious. In all cases however evidence for the psychological development of an idea can be found by thorough investigation of inner experiences; concomitantly of course a certain mental orientation is the prerequisite for correctly evaluating the experiences of the soul.
This mental prerequisite however cannot be in any way based in the effect of specialized training, but lies much more generally in the correct instinct for certain relationships.
In my case a good sense of relative magnitude was perhaps the prerequisite for the final assembly of the, at first correctly sensed, and then scientifically verified, array of facts. And in my specialized work as an engineer this sure sense for the order of magnitude has always been for me more important and more dependable for results of calculations, or for the dimensioning of construction-components, than the results of the slide-rule and the table of logarithms, which of course produce numerically much more precise results, but do not give the correct “decimal point.” It is upon the correct “decimal point” however, in other words upon the order of magnitude — whether ones, tens, hundreds, or thousands — that solutions to the most significant questions of economic policy depend, not upon the second, third, or fourth position in the number-series. The key consideration is not whether the German fixed-interest debt-burden amounts to 275 or 320 billion, and not whether the total capital of all German joint-stock companies amounts to 13.8 or 14.6 billion; the key consideration rather is that fixed-interest certificates demand an interest-payment of about 15 billion, whereas the total dividends of German industry in the best year amounted to only about one billion; thus it is a matter of the order of magnitude of 1:15, in regard to the proportion of the two most familiar forms of value-papers, fixed-interest assets and dividend-papers.
The impact of not-always-easy experiences in life and career upon the orientation of the soul — unlike the comfortable life based on income from mere possession of money, from interest and dividends — caused heightened attention to general economic and social affairs. As a young engineer and entrepreneur with too little capital for my wide-ranging entrepreneurial ambition, I soon became acquainted with the iron, pitiless grip of the impersonal Money-Power that first offers and gives the desired “credit,” but then in every economic crisis proceeds exclusively in accord with the self-serving interests of capital. I then saw outside of Germany how the need of smaller states for credit was carefully nurtured and then the credit was “generously” given, for example the Disconto-Gesellschaft’s 600 million given to Bulgaria in 1913-1914;[2] but then what demoralizing conditions of dependence of every kind also resulted from that. This is how…
Full article:
https://nationalvanguard.org/2020/10/abolishing-interest-slavery/
