Call this number and I will help become the terrorist on your personal debts.
Call this number and I will help become the terrorist of your personal debts. zabelin/gettyimages.com

Yesterday, JPMorgan Chase, the largest bank in the US, exposed one of its key ideologies by providing its broke customers with a "#MondayMotivation" message: You don't have any money in your bank account because you drink coffee at Starbucks, eat at restaurants while food rots in your fridge, and jump into an Uber when you should walk to your destinations. So, in short, you are broke and deep in debt because you lack discipline.

This kind of thinking is not in any way new. It goes all way back to the birth of political economy, which occurred in the second half of the 17th century and met this question: Why is there wealth in the first place? The answer came down to this: There is wealth because there are rich people. The logic: The working classes are hopeless due to the fact they are unable to save. And for a society to become rich, it must accumulate wealth, which is something only the rich can do. They have the moral fiber to abstain from the worldly pleasures that the feeble poor cannot resist. And so, though you may not like the rich, they are vital to what makes a country wealthy: the accumulation of capital.

The tweeted discussion (which Chase eventually deleted) between a bank account and a feeble/fickle customer was definitely on this tip. The customer has no money because they lack the discipline of the rich; unlike a rich person, he/she can't forego the immediate pleasures for the higher, more spiritual (capital growth) goals of life. This is, of course, a fiction.

We are so broke all of the damn time because of these reasons succinctly described by Melinda Cooper in a new issue of Theory and Event:

A more convincing explanation of the current economic malaise [is] four decades of wage suppression and government disinvestment from redistributive public spending... These politics have employed legal (labor and welfare law reform), constitutional (tax and expenditure limitations, balanced budget amendments), political (union busting), fiscal (human services retrenchment, tax regression) and monetary instruments (central bank independence and inflation targeting) with the precise objective of flattening wages and inflating returns to asset ownership.
But these are macroeconomic explanations for your sorry lot, and, therefore, may not be of much use in the immediate sense. As Nietzsche once put it, what is the use of knowing the chemical composition of water when you are in the middle of a storm. You need help right now—not tomorrow, or the next business cycle. How do you make your bank account high and your debts low?

Well, instead of taking advice from the polite algorithm of your bank account, why not to receive inspiration directly from a heart-hardened member of ISIS? Here we find the kind of character who can really make things happen for you, who can provide the kind of radical instruction that's needed to accomplish these very difficult goals. In the way an ISIS member is committed to death, he can offer you the path to a radical commitment to your debts.

Having a hotline to an ISIS militant in Syria would do the trick. He, for a fee of course, would always be there for you (24-7); there during your many moments of weakness—when you are considering calling an Uber or buying a Frappuccino—and demand that you get your act together and terrorize these temptations. See them in the way he, an ISIS member, would see a stadium filled with U2 fans. "Yumkinuk 'an tafeal dhlk"! Enter that Frappuccino temptation in your mind and self-explode it. Only that kind devotion would reduce your debt and transform your bank account into that paradise of plenty.