An Obligation is the opposite of a Right. It requires an individual to do something at some future date. For an Obligation to be worth something, the buyer has to trust that I will follow through on my Obligation.



Some people think credit and obligations are new, but as David Graeber says in Debt: The First 5,000 Years . It has probably been around longer than money and may be one of the tools that allowed us to build civilizations.



A simple, modern form of obligation is paying with a credit card. Your obligation is written right on the slip you sign “I, the cardholder, promise to pay” and so on.