As Wall Street and Bay Street stagnate, our collective outlook on wealth (or lack thereof) is taking a beating. We are bombarded with evidence of our excesses and forced to confront red ink in the ledger. We are paying for our greed, and the price tag is hefty — and quantifiable.

The numbers suggest we approach debt with cavalier detachment: a study by the Vanier Institute for the Family found that in 2007, the average Canadian household debt was $80,000 — or 131 per cent of net household income (that’s up from 90 per cent in 1990). Now bankruptcies and foreclosures are piling up, and roughly 35 per cent of Canadians plan to carry up to $100,000 of debt into retirement, according to a poll by Investors Group. Only 28 per cent of those say it will be for a mortgage. Curling up on our silk bed sheets at night, we lie awake sweating about how to pay it all back.

There couldn’t be a more suitable time for famed Canadian author Margaret Atwood to deliver her musings on debt — a topic, she admits, she knows little about. Originally conceived for the 2008 Massey Lectures, Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth is not a primer on money management, or a dissection of the demise of financial kingpins. Rather, Atwood traces the origins of our attitudes toward debt in mythological, theological, literary and anthropological terms.

Centred on the idea that debt is a human construct, Atwood examines the concepts of fairness and balance through the dynamic of the creditor and debtor, and how this bond has manifested itself in the Bible, western literature and everyday discourse. Atwood illuminates a pattern in these stories, beginning with the characters and themes in Egyptian and Greek mythology. Guiding us from ancient beginnings into contemporary literature, we witness the reinvention of these icons. It is through this examination that we begin to understand how the concept of debt has not just coloured but defined human interaction, and transcended religious and cultural boundaries.

Payback explores the association of debt with sin and the evolution of this relationship through various eras. The book also delves into the “shadow” side of owing, when no sum of money is enough to balance the scales.

In the closing chapter, Atwood paints a utopian vision of a society that remained cognizant of what it owed Mother Nature (think back to the rituals of human and animal sacrifice as payment to the gods). While it’s easy to be turned off by this idealistic vision of man, that would be missing the point. It is here where Atwood reminds us that we’ve lost sight of maintaining the balance, of making the human sacrifice, and instead choose only to focus on taking as much as we can.

Nature has a way of self-correcting, and maybe the financial apocalypse is simply a foreshadowing of the larger events that loom when we fail to acknowledge what we owe.