"You should feel guilty": Etymological redundancy
"The German words for "guilt" and "debt" are the same, Schulden...."
@dredmorbius One can even trace the practice of imprisonment (and especially forced labour) to the practice of slavery as a means of paying debts. And the Anglo-Saxon (or earlier) criminal codes that established reparation prices for crimes. Presumably if you couldn't pay the *penalty*, you'd be sold into servitude until it was paid by your labour.
And we still use those words: "Penal servitude".
(Much European Christian theology is structured around those legal concepts of "paying a debt").
@dredmorbius Also... I kind of wonder if the Roman practice of invading/enslaving foreign nations wasn't structured under a financial/legal flag of convenience: the idea that the foreign tribes were *rebelling* against the Empire, were therefore *breaking* a prior commercial arrangement for protection, and as rebels could then be legitimately enslaved "to pay their debt".
Not a classics expert, but I think maybe the whole Empire thing was a bit more subtle (and familiar) than we moderns think
@dredmorbius Certainly modern sex-work slavery appears to be based on a commercial debt model: human traffickers offer jobs in a foreign country, then seize passports and claim the women have "incurred a debt" and must "pay it back to earn their freedom" dollar by dollar by working in a brothel.
Debt, legal judgment, prison, and slavery all seem to go together.
@natecull Yonatan Zunger has an /excellent/ piece at Medium on just that topic: The History of Court Costs.
https://medium.com/@yonatanzunger/the-history-of-court-costs-34a65781899b
@dredmorbius it's not the same guilt= Schuld debt= Schulden
@XiongShui The roots are identical.
@dredmorbius That was logical as the guilty party owed Wergeld (english Weregild). Guilt resulted in debt. If you could or would not pay, a blood feud was the result.
@dredmorbius And indeed, the metaphor carries over: the English word "forgiveness" literally means "to release from owing a debt", and is used legally/financially in that sense.
And in some translations of the Lord's Prayer: "forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors".