Debts are contractual obligations expressed in monetary terms.
We should expect in a balanced system that debt should be proportional to the rate of production.
The rational utilization of debt and its counterpart consumer credit allows consumers to balance their consumption over their lifetimes. It allows them, for example, to live in a house or drive a car, right now, and pay for them over their lifetimes as their incomes are increasing.
For entrepreneurs, it allows them to recoup current investment from future sales. This facilitates the organization of the developing factors of production into their most efficient combination, as judged ultimately by final consumers in free markets. The availability of investment credit not constrained by the prior existence of monetary hoards was the great financial innovation that made possible the Industrial Revolution.
The expectation, then, for both consumers and entrepreneurs, is that their future income will increase proportionately to their current spending, which will enable them to amortize or repay their respective debts as they become due. Expressed mathematically, the expectation, as a statistical matter for the economy as a whole, is that income plotted as a curve against time is a tracking curve to spending.
There is a way to explain the "debt virus" without recourse to the stupid fallacy that interest on bank loans is its root cause. In that explanation the "debt virus" will manifest even if the interest on bank loans could somehow become zero.
If the period of production is lengthening - which is what is happening with industrialization - it can be demonstrated that the costs of production are increasing disproportionately compared to the disbursement of income.
The reason for this is that with industrialization the account balances held by firms are increasing quantitatively in ratio to the account balances held by consumers, yet the account balances held by firms represents costs that are being charged against production for consumption [*].
If the costs of production are increasing disproportionately compared to consumer income, it is impossible for the reflux from consumer income to proportionately amortize debt all the way up the chain of production.
The result is debt that is increasing exponentially to production.
It is a dilemma in accounting and nothing more.
As such it is amenable to conscious adjustment.
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[*] Two curves are converging. There is the debt amortization schedule - keyed to depreciation - which plots a limiting function. The period of depreciation is increasing to a limit - say thirty years - at which point the costs of production are charged against sales into final consumption in their totality. There is the curve that plots the lengthening in the period of production which is unlimited with continuous improvement in process. That is to say, consumer income will fall as compared to the costs of production without limit. The curves converge making it impossible to amortize debt.