The Constellation Method
Finnish debt traps, the Paisley Underground, and the invisible bonds that connect us all
Sunday morning, scrolling through Bluesky, and there's this thread about Finland's debt enforcement system that stops me cold. Half a million Finns - that's 10% of adults - trapped in something called ulosotto proceedings that can last decades. A woman bought a bed to help her medical condition and barely avoided a years-long financial purgatory.
I chime in on that thread with proportional math: that would be 33 million Americans in debt enforcement, which sounds apocalyptic. But Finland? Finland tops the UN World Happiness Report every year. Finland has saunas and social democracy and sensible Nordic policies. How do you reconcile that unexpected contradiction?
The thread keeps unspooling. Someone mentions that Finnish debt enforcement is run by the state, not private collection agencies, which somehow makes it more thorough and implacable. They'll chase down a €100 overdue cell phone bill with the patience of Lutheran saints and the efficiency of Swiss clockwork. Meanwhile, I'm thinking about that dusty copy of The Bonds of Debt on my shelf - the one I've started reading twice and abandoned both times somewhere in the theoretical thickets.
Richard Dienst, the author, was trying to map what he called the "regime of indebtedness" - how debt had become the organizing principle of contemporary life, replacing older forms of social control. "Man is no longer the enclosed man," he wrote, borrowing from Deleuze, "but the indebted man." Instead of locking people up to discipline them, you trap them in permanent financial obligation. It's more flexible, more efficient, and it feels like freedom right up until you try to escape.
[we pause the record and jump into The Wayback Machine]
Richard introduced my wife to The Three O'Clock when they were in collage and later bequeathed her a mind-blowing collection of indie vinyl rarities. He also appears in their iconic "Jet Fighter" video, one of the rare, independent productions to get MTV airtime.
Small world, or maybe just the kind of overlapping cultural networks that make sense when you're dealing with people who care about both oblique economic theory and Paisley Underground bands. There's something simple and majestic about that trajectory: from the last moment when "alternative" culture felt genuinely alternative to theorizing how capitalism had absorbed all possible alternatives.
[playback resumes]
I've got what I call the Mark Fisher screwdriver in my theoretical toolkit - everything looks like a symptom of capitalist realism when you're holding it. Fisher wrote about how capitalism had colonized the unconscious, making alternatives literally unthinkable. Combine that with my POSIWID hammer (the Purpose Of a System Is What It Does), and suddenly the Finnish happiness/debt paradox becomes readable: the system isn't broken, its outputs are its design. The happiness index and the debt enforcement aren't contradictory - they're complementary readouts on the dashboard of social control.
Finland hasn't solved the problem of poverty, although it's outperforming the vast majority of the globe, our portion included. Along the way, it did master the management of indebted populations through cultural programming. Lutheran tradition frames debt default as personal failing. The national emblem of sisu trains people to accept suffering as a fundamental virtue. The welfare state provides moral legitimation: "We gave you free healthcare and education, so if you can't honor your debt, then that's on you."
Given the shit show of private (and national) debt in America, this is the grungy cast iron pot calling the gently scorched nonstick pan black. That said, it makes a kind of sense. Other countries have to deal with debt resistance, debtors' unions, foreclosure protests. Finland has created a system where people exercise the sort of extreme ownership over their financial predicament that would make Jocko Willink jealous.
But then I remember I'm supposed to be writing about this constellation of connections, not constructing academic arguments about Nordic social control. The real story isn't the debt enforcement system - it's how I discovered it, through a network of friendships and cultural references that stretches back decades. The book recommendation, the vinyl collection, the music video, the social media thread - they're all part of the same web of relationships and obligations that Dienst was trying to understand.
And maybe that's the point. We're all embedded in these networks of debt - financial, cultural, emotional - that bind us to each other and to systems we barely understand. The Finnish woman buying the therapeutic bed, the future economic theorist appearing in music videos then later passing along rare records, all of us scrolling through social media looking for connections - we're all trying to navigate the same basic problem of how to live in relation to others without being crushed by those relationships.
So instead of ending with grand theoretical conclusions, I find myself humming The Three O'Clock's "Jet Fighter":
Protect the land that fills my hand
With nothing to show
Airplanes, flying yet I feel so low
That disconnect between the machinery of power and individual experience - that's the real subject here. The airplanes keep flying overhead while we're down here trying to figure out what we owe to each other, and whether any of those debts are worth honoring.