Author: Mustafa Eren Bozoklu
Once artificial desires and constructed needs are ignited, an infrastructure of corporate finance is also provided to ensure the uninterrupted satisfaction of this desire.
Consumer loans, credit cards, flexible payment plans, and “buy now, pay later” (BNPL) systems are financial structures engineered to enable extravagance and perpetual consumption. Today, household and consumer debt in the United States stands at an unprecedented level exceeding 17 trillion dollars. In Türkiye and other developing countries, individual credit card debt and consumer loans have reached the proportions of a structural crisis.
The operation of this system is remarkably subtle. Credit card interest rates and installment options are marketed under the guise of “convenience and accessibility.” A luxury consumption item is rendered “reachable” through installments. And the system is deliberately designed such that a debtor who pays only the minimum balance can almost never clear the principal amount. By making monthly payments, they roll over their debt; yet they can never escape financial dependency. “Whoever squanders falls captive to him and drops into his trap.” Nursi’s diagnosis serves as a technical definition of the 21st-century consumer economy. The trap (dâm) is set. However, this trap is entered voluntarily because the trap itself is adorned with promises of individual freedom, status, and comfort.
Another critical nuance in Nursi’s analysis is the phrase “seizing weak points.” This conceptualization implies that the system does not approach everyone in society equally. Individuals and masses with weak points—that is, those with high socio-economic, psychological, or cognitive vulnerabilities—are the primary targets of the system. High-interest consumer loans are marketed most heavily to low-income households. High-interest payday loan companies cluster deliberately in low-income neighborhoods. The age group most vulnerable to digital addiction mechanisms consists of children and youth whose impulse control has not yet matured. The gambling and betting industry generates the vast majority of its revenue from a small minority of addicts. The discourse of the system is democratic: “Freedom and access for all.” Yet its economic mechanism is highly selective; the highest profits are generated from the most fragile and weakest segments of society.
What is the ultimate objective of all these consumption, debt, and desire-engineering mechanisms? Nursi answers this question with “subjugation”: to bring to heel, make subservient, and deprive of the capacity to act. When a person is systematically indebted, surrounded by the fear of job loss, and left alone with the stress of monthly installments, they no longer possess the strength or time to question social justice, think critically, or oppose the system. They become a helpless subject imprisoned in thinking about how to pay the next debt installment.
Sociologist Guy Standing reveals this exact mechanism in his analysis of the Precariat: economic insecurity and continuous indebtedness are the most effective tools of political passivation and mass control. The indebted and precarious individual focuses not on changing the existing order, but on surviving within it. The prevailing new world order unites economic exploitation and political passivation into a single mutually reinforcing cycle: a modern form of voluntary servitude is produced—where individuals consume as they fall into debt, become dependent on the system as they incur debt, lose their capacity to resist as they become dependent, and seek refuge in consumption once more because they cannot resist.
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