They taught you performance without teaching you meaning.
They taught you to obey without ever teaching you to contradict.
You lose your lives earning your survival, while others enjoy theirs at the expense of life itself.
This is not a law of physics. It is not a natural order carved in the rock of centuries. Money is a social creation — something invented by people, shaped by contexts, beliefs, ideologies, and above all, interests. And like all human creations, it can be reinvented. But first, it must be understood. And that is precisely what has been denied to you.
Debt: the most sophisticated form of servitude
The slave of old wore visible chains. The master had to feed, watch, and coerce. It was costly. Inefficient. Too visible.
Debt is perfected slavery.
The master no longer tires himself whipping the slave. The slave whips himself. And the greater the debt, the heavier the chain.
He works. Repays. Goes into debt again to survive. Exhausts himself. Ages. Then passes the chain to his children — and calls it an "inheritance".
If the master knows he is the master, the slave does not know he is a slave. The system holds as long as this remains so.
This system is not the result of chance. It is the product of a meticulously constructed architecture, layer upon layer, decade after decade, by those who took the time to shape its workings.
What you don't know: money is born from a ledger entry
The misunderstanding of the monetary question often stems from assimilating money to gold or precious metal. We culturally trust money because we know that gold cannot be created, duplicated, or destroyed. But where the alchemists of old failed to turn lead into gold, bankers have succeeded in creating money from nothing.
Magic? No — once you understand that money is no longer bound by the immutable laws of physics, but by a set of social conventions and a game of accounting rules.
Money is created by the banker's pen and destroyed by his eraser.
Perhaps you believe that banks lend out their depositors' money? That money is a scarce resource that must be found somewhere before it can be distributed?
That is false. And this idea is not trivial: it lies at the foundation of your servitude. Aldous Huxley put it well: the most enduring servitude is one that succeeds in making slaves believe they are free.
The reality is both simpler and more dizzying: when a bank grants you credit, it creates money from nothing. It records a claim on its assets, credits your account on its liabilities — and there, money exists where there was none before.
Magic? No... just accounting.
This is not a conspiracy theory. It is the documented, recognised and explained operation of central banks themselves.
"Loans make deposits." This formula by the economist Hartley Withers sums up in a few words what has been concealed from you for decades: money is not found. It is manufactured.
By decision. By writing. And above all: by private interests.
But if banks have the privilege of creating money through credit, they also have the obligation to destroy it upon repayment. When you repay a loan, that money is destroyed. It disappears from balance sheets — this is the law of reflux.
Modern money is therefore a temporary creation, born of debt, condemned to die with debt repayment. Everything else follows from this.
The great dismantling: when the state surrendered its monetary sovereignty
There was a time — not so long ago — when the French state did not depend on financial markets to finance its projects.
A time when post-war reconstruction, major public infrastructure, national education, and hospitals were not conditional on the approval of foreign pension funds. That time was called the Treasury circuit. Born in the urgency of the 1940s, this system allowed the state to collect national savings and redirect them toward the public interest without submitting to the permanent constraint of the markets.
Commercial banks were required to hold a share of their deposits in Treasury bonds. The Banque de France granted direct advances at preferential rates. It was public investment that guided the private sector, not the reverse.
It was not perfect. It was administered. But it was sovereign.
Then, methodically, this system was dismantled. Not through a brutal rupture — brutal ruptures make noise — but through a succession of technical reforms, regulatory unravellings, and quiet adjustments.
Maastricht, or servitude constitutionalised
The real turning point, the one that poured concrete around the chains, was the Maastricht Treaty.
Its Article 104 — now Article 123 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union — prohibits the ECB and national central banks from directly granting credit to states or purchasing their bonds on the primary market.
In plain terms: eurozone states can no longer create their own money. They must borrow it on financial markets — from the same private banks that create that money ex nihilo.
The result: billions of euros in interest are extracted each year from collective labour to remunerate capital holders, the great bondholders. Billions that finance neither hospitals, nor schools, nor ecological transition. Billions that serve to maintain a monetary architecture structurally dependent on debt.
Sovereign debt is so high precisely because it is a profitable business. And debt is not unrelated to ecological destruction: a debt is a promise of future extraction. The higher it is, the more it compels us toward endless extraction. We are therefore slaves condemned to destroy the planet.
The left also put on the handcuffs
It would be too comfortable to frame this as a simple opposition between right and left.
In the 1980s, under Pierre Bérégovoy, France accelerated its financial deregulation to attract international capital. Markets gradually became the supreme arbiters of economic efficiency. Public debt was restructured to meet the expectations of global investors. Private banks became central intermediaries in state financing.
This was probably not a conscious betrayal.
It was a belief — neoliberalism. The belief that markets were more rational than democracy. We are living today with the consequences of that belief.
What this architecture forbids you to think
Public debt, as it is presented today, is not merely an economic figure — it is a political instrument for controlling the possible.
When every democratic debate reduces to "How do we repay?", it becomes impossible to ask:
- How do we want to live?
- How do we want to care for one another?
- How do we want to inhabit the world?
- How do we want to navigate the ecological crisis without further destroying the living world?
Austerity is not a physical necessity — it is a political choice disguised as an accounting constraint. And this disguise is maintained daily by ratings agencies, certain commentators, dominant economic models, and institutions that repeat that "there is no alternative".
There is always an alternative. The real question is: who has an interest in ensuring you never imagine it?
Toward another architecture: money as a tool of the living
If monetary history demonstrates anything clearly, it is that monetary systems are not natural laws — they are human constructions.
The Treasury circuit existed and was dismantled. The current system exists and can — must — be changed.
But the problem is not only "Who creates money?" It is also "Why is it created?" and "Under what conditions?" Today, money is born primarily from debt and mechanically drives more growth, more extraction, more destruction of ecological balances.
The NEMO IMS system proposes a radical inversion of this logic: money — part of it — would no longer be created in exchange for debt and extraction, but in exchange for the regeneration of living systems.
These monetary creations would correspond to real improvements in ecological and social robustness: regenerated soils, restored forests, protected wetlands, resilient infrastructure, strengthened commons, sanctuarised biodiversity.
Money would then become a tool of systemic robustness rather than an engine of economic entropy.
What to do now?
Understanding is already an act of resistance. Not because understanding is enough — it never is. But because ignorance is the first pillar of consent.
They master the workings of money. You can master them too. Not to become like them, but to build something else.
Étienne de La Boétie wrote in the sixteenth century that voluntary servitude is not fate: it is a habit sustained by fear, comfort and ignorance. The modern tyrant no longer necessarily has a face — he has an interest rate, a treaty, an accounting convention, a line on a balance sheet.
But he is no more eternal than the feudalism, mercantilism or legal slavery that preceded him. Monetary history is a history of ruptures.
We are probably at the moment of choosing a new one.
Jean-Christophe Duval