I love Elizabeth Warren.

In the face of almost complete indifference from Treasury, the Federal Reserve, and even Congress (despite the fact that she works for Congress), Warren continues to doggedly root out facts and speak truth to power about the infamous financial bail outs of 2008, no matter what.

Today, in her capacity as the head of the Congressional Oversight Panel (investigating the bailouts), Warren announced that the 2008 bailout of AIG was a mistake, a big one, and that it looked likely to leave the American taxpayers on the hook for about $36 billion even in the best case scenario.

AIG did carry private insurance on many of the investments that went south, and Warren pointed out that AIG’s private insurance coverage could have been exhausted—that is, a private bailout could have and should been sought—before the U.S. government rushed in to offer up American tax dollars to a global private corporation. A private bailout was never attempted of course, nor was the American public ever consulted about whether we all wanted to spend $2500 per household to bailout AIG.

In doing what it did with such urgency and so little consideration, Warren says that Treasury dramatically changed the rules of Wall Street and poisoned global financial markets in much the same way that BP is poisoning the Gulf waters even as I write this.

This is not news to any of us working stiffs (or formerly working stiffs). I mean, duh.

I’m just grateful at least ONE high profile person in government is saying it publicly, out loud, to their faces.

Margaret Atwood, another one of my all-time favorite brilliant women, wrote a nonfiction book inspired by the debt crisis and published it as the meltdown was taking place in late 2008 (see interview clip below). Entitled Payback, Atwood’s book examines the meaning of debt historically, metaphorically, and psychologically, all the way back to ancient times.

If that sounds boring, trust me, it isn’t. The book deserves a LOT more attention than it got. If you have a free afternoon, I highly recommend it: It’s short, it’s fascinating, and you can check it out for free at the public library.

What Atwood discovers in the course of writing about debt is that human beings (and many other social mammals like dogs and monkeys) have an innate sense of fairness that may be biological, not rational. This sense of fairness is tied in large part to social pecking orders and hieracrchies of dominance, and it has natural limits built right in. It’s not always pretty and it’s not always kind. In humans, this sense of fairness is often tied uncomfortably to the concept of ‘sin’ and even to the concept of ‘original sin’.

Atwood talks about a famous psychology experiment in which monkeys were given slices of cucumber for cooperating on a task. A single monkey could only be awarded a cucumber slice if another monkey helped with the task. This was an easy game for the monkeys to learn, and quickly all of them were voluntarily working together so that cucumbers could be had all around.

But then the experimenters added a new wrinkle.

When the monkey initiating the task got the others to help him, he got a grape instead of a cucumber—a food much more highly prized by monkeys—while the helpers kept getting their standard cucumber slice.

Within only one trial there was insurrection. The monkeys getting the cucumbers stopped helping the monkey who was getting the grapes. Violence eventually broke out among the research subjects—strange, considering all the monkeys except one were still getting what they’d gotten all along for the same amount of effort. The reaction was intense and nearly instantaneous, and all out of proportion to the perceived ‘crime’.

The study is widely cited today as evidence than even animals recognize unfairness when they see it—something that anyone who owns both a cat and a dog knows (without benefit of psychology experiments) when biscuit time rolls around, and all parents know when it comes time to decide who gets the corner piece of cake with the most frosting.

Atwood notes that a complex web of unspoken rules always underlie human attitudes toward debt and money whether we recognize them or not, and that although these rules might seem irrational in some respects and although we might not like them all that much, as long as societies stick fairly closely to the standard script, everything hums along as usual.

However, when these rules are broken and a few humans begin to award themselves grapes while everyone else is getting cucumbers (or worse), the response from the cucumber gallery is usually all out of proportion to the crime of the grape eaters.

That is, people tend to respond to perceived unfairness around issues of debt not just by rationally recommending this unfairness stop or change (as Warren does in this month’s COP report)—Instead, populist rage ignites quickly and leads people to seek violent revenge. She points out case after case in which this happens both in literature and historically.

Like the popular saying goes, “Payback’s a bitch.”

Living well might be the best revenge, but when people can’t live well, or perceive that others are living unfairly and unnecessarily well while the rest of the group is not, things tend to get ugly.

The value of money is purely symbolic. You can’t eat it, wear it, or heat your house with it. Money means whatever we say it means.

In Payback, Atwood makes the argument that much of what money means is encoded more deeply into our bodies and spirits that we generally admit. A baseline sense of fairness underlies and supports the complex web of human relationships that define financial systems. This sense of fairness runs so deep that it may even be a part of our animal nature, not our rational nature; and violation of these unspoken rules frequently leads to bloody insurrection.

Once you break a basic social contract, beyond a certain threshold it’s hard to glue it back together again. Past that threshold, people no longer want to be paid back, they want payback; they want bloodly revenge.

So, that’s where we are now with this mess. Plus, we have an ocean filled with combustible poison oil and gas.

All we need now is one lit match.