Credit: A Powerful Fiction
Credit is there any word that brings up such simultaneous feelings among consumers of dread, worry, and despair, mingled with hope and that unique feeling that one can simply ask for and receive anything on the planet? Few other concepts can bring forth such strong, opposing emotions as the ability to borrow untold sums of money with the simple swipe of a credit card, or a meaningless signature on an equally meaningless piece of paper. For many, though, this pleasurable godsend soon becomes a necessity for consumers, much like water and shelter.
In fact, it is when one begins using credit to pay for such basic necessities as food, water, and shelter, that credit rears its uglier head and slowly begins to drown the consumer in higher and higher mounds of interest. Homeowners may use high-interest credit cards to pay back their high-interest mortgage, or finance a month of groceries on their credit cards, or may even borrow money to pay for the gas they use to get to work. Once this happens on a continual basis, consumers can find themselves in serious financial trouble. And getting back on top of the situation becomes more and more remote a possibility.
In this situation, all that is needed to push the consumers into bankruptcy, foreclosure, or worse is one financial hardship. A loss of job, unexpected medical expense, or major necessary home improvement can make the difference between the homeowners falling further into the danger zone and simply falling right over the edge into ruin.
Usually, by the time the financial hardship occurs, the consumers have begun falling behind on one bill or another, using credit to pay back credit, or attempting to open new lines of credit to sustain their unsustainable consumption. They know it cannot last, and that they are toeing the line between bad decision and financial devastation, but they continue their spending/borrowing cycle until their creditors finally pull the plug on the free money machine. Rather than using logic and common sense, in order to keep their expenses as low as possible, while understanding that borrowing money makes them slaves to the creditor, these consumers procrastinate facing reality until they are at the grocery store and find out that none of their colorful credit cards will any longer be exchanged for real goods and services.
Of course, this is not all the consumers' fault, although they bear nearly all of the responsibility for their own lives and financial decisions. Consumers, though, are bred and trained to conform to the culture of consumption. From a school system which teaches children to be bored unless a superior gives them something to do and discourages critical thinking, to a television which tells people to purchase the newest thing and borrow money if they cannot afford it, to a culture of glorified instant millionaires who did nothing of substance to earn their wealth, the average person is simply overwhelmed with a lack of choices.
Either consume or be left behind. Get version 1.5.7.987 instead of 1.5.7.986 or else you will be out of date and unable to keep up with everyone else. Increase your ability to borrow by 2,000% and finance a new car with a piece of plastic. Treat your home and everything else you own as an ATM and just keep borrowing forever.
Through this Hegelian gauntlet of credit and financial woes, it would be expected that people long ago would have learned from the horrorific stories of others. But with the prevailing attitude of consumers and message of advertisers being "Bad things can't happen to me -- I'm going to be a millionaire by the middle of next week," it is little wonder that so few learn that credit can be the most dangerous trap of all, creating wage slaves for life. And to think -- none of the credit even existed until the consumers agreed that they would pay it back. Credit is a mirage powerful enough to make willing slaves of people. What else has that power?