It is an astonishing fact that the total volume of student loan debt in America is greater than the totality of mortgage debt. This fact surfaced in the context of the recent Congressional debate, when Republicans voted down an effort to reduce the interest rate on those student debts.

It is a sad, sad commentary but an enlightening insight into the extent of the debt enslavement of the U.S. population.

In fact, international financier interests have worked arduously to by and large revise earlier efforts at traditional forms of colonization with the socially-fracturing ideology and practice of so-called “post-modernism,” a radical form of relativism designed to eat away at any humanitarian expressions of moral impulses in the general population.

Populations under this system are reduced to their lowest common denominators by being encouraged to focus on alleged claims to cultural uniqueness and an attendant notion of self or tribally-centered entitlement. People battle, each against all, in this paradigm for their “entitled” shares of a pie that is administered by an “invisible hand.”

Only, the “invisible hand” is not of the forces of supply and demand among them, but of those forces as they apply to the investments of financier elites.

It can be said that traditional Keynesian solutions no longer apply. The issue of sufficient demand to stimulate an economy is really, in the present situation, one of demand by and for whom.

The financier interests do not wish for any legitimate attention to the demands of the general population to be paid. Enhancing the quality of life for the unwashed masses (that is to say, most of us) is hardly their objective. On the contrary, as they demand more and more for themselves, it is not enhancement but enslavement they seek for us.

Their tool of enslavement is debt. While some argue the economy needs a major infusion of monetary and investment stimulus to provide jobs and lift the nation out of its economic malaise, the now-captured GOP is in lock-step to place debt payment on the stature of a religious imperative.

If we don’t pay our debts, we are threatened, we won’t get our gruel, we won’t get the chance to owe even more.

Forget the level of interest rates that we are being charged that can top 30 percent for credit cards, enhanced further by late charges, penalty fees and annual dues.

The problem, for many Americans, is that they have a lot to cough up before they really feel the pinch. Not so for the populations of the already poverty-ridden nations on the perimeter of the Euro Zone, for example.

Our culture has stripped out any role for genuinely creative engagement in its public media as TV sitcoms rival middle school potty humor, outdoing each other for “naughtiness.” We cheer concussions on the football field and unintelligible grunts on the concert stage.

Meanwhile, you are told you have no chance at life without a decent college education (four years of instilling alcoholic habits) at a ridiculous cost that not only places your parents deep in the debt hole, but you as well.

So, there’s no choice but to get that job, any job, if you can, when you leave college. You have those debts to pay.

You are then channeled into incurring more debt. Yes, a mortgage. Yes, all the shallow amenities of a mind-numbing corporate mediocrity. Then the babies.

Who are the conspirators in all this? Aren’t we all? Aren’t the doting parents, their expectations from childhood, the desire to repeat the patterns of behavior we grew up with? Aren’t the teammates, the beat cop, the teacher, the coach, and everything you see on TV?

So ourselves thoroughly fleeced and enslaved, we rail against any suggestion that others not be held responsible for their actions, as if we have been for any of ours except to pay our debts. No handouts! Find a job!

Banking and credit weren’t intended to be like this. Such enterprises can be profitable without sucking the life blood, the spirit of life, out of an entire culture. This is the greatest threat ever to the life, liberty and pursuit happiness sought for everybody by the founders of our republic.