Sacred Economics

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Book: Charles Eistenstein. Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition. EVOLVER EDITIONS/North Atlantic Books, 2011

URL = http://www.realitysandwich.com/homepage_sacred_economics

Description

Charles Eisenstein:

1.

"Why is it that whenever I investigate the causes of any phenomenon that bothers me, whether it is nuclear waste, the prison industry, or the dissolution of community, I dig down one or two levels and I get to money? Why is money a force for evil in the world? And why has it so often been a force for evil in my own life, discouraging me from doing what I love, encouraging me to devote my gifts toward things I don't care about? I wrote this book, Sacred Economics, because I believe it doesn't have to be this way. Money doesn't have to be the enemy of art, of love, of beauty. However, it is not merely our attitudes toward money that have to change, as some self-help gurus proclaim, because the money system itself has built into its very design anxiety, scarcity, competition, and the endless growth of the realm of the owned. Within such a money system, our aspirations to create community, ecological health, social justice, and abundance for all face an upstream battle, fighting against the current of the money system.

Fortunately, as this book describes, the days of that system are numbered; indeed its collapse is built into its very design. Sacred Economics describes the dynamics of its collapse, reframing it as a birth crisis propelling humanity into a very different world. The book then describes the new money system and economy that will emerge afterward, an economy whose outlines we can already see today like a recessive gene hidden inside each institution of the old world, waiting the time for its expression. Its elements include negative-interest currency, resource-based economics, commons-based currency, peer-to-peer economics, gift economics, degrowth, local currency, mutual credit, and a new materialism -- embodied in the money system -- that sees the planet and every being on it as sacred.

Finally, the book explores the personal dimensions of this transition. The new world is not something we can passively await; it is something we can create and indeed that we can begin living right now. The days of the separate self, seeking to maximize financial self-interest in a hostile world, are drawing to a close. The intuitions of the connected self, tied to other beings through sacred relationships of giving and receiving, are becoming stronger. They draw us toward a new (and very ancient) way of being that is unfamiliar to us, though it strikes a deep chord. This book is part of its relearning."


2.

"The book is about how to make money as sacred as everything else in the universe. Some people think, well, everything’s sacred, and it should be, but if there’s one thing that isn’t today it’s money, and we experience that in our daily lives just making personal decisions. Like for me at least, my impulse is for generosity or to follow my passion, or to do something right even though it takes much longer. Money seems to block these impulses and to reward the things I really don’t want to do, the things that are really hurting the planet, that might be convenient, or the things that my rational mind calculates will be better for my self-interest.

Money is on the side of those things and not on the side of the beautiful things that I want to do. On a social level, too, I look into almost any problem, any terrible thing, like the prison industrial complex or the war on drugs or deforestation and climate change and I say ‘why is that happening?’ Then I take it down a few levels and it’s always money. So if anything isn’t sacred it’s money, and the question is why, because money is just an agreement that gives value to symbols really.

Physically it’s just bits and computers, so we’ve created an agreement that aligns money with pretty much everything people call evil, but why should we have agreed on that? The book goes into the nature of that agreement and describes what exactly it is about money that makes it into something unholy, and then says – ok, but what different agreements could we have that align with the things that are becoming sacred to us today? Like ecological healing, the preservation of indigenous cultures, all the things that we’re beginning to value today. In a way, you could say that money has always been sacred because in the past it’s been aligned with growth, the growth of the human realm, and the conquest of nature. That was sacred to us many years ago, but it’s not any more, so money needs to change." (http://transitionculture.org/2012/08/21/an-interview-with-charles-eisenstein-something-in-your-heart-knows-that-this-is-what-life-is-supposed-to-be-about/)

Contents

Introduction

Humanity is only beginning to awaken to the true magnitude of the crisis at hand. If the economic transformation I describe seems miraculous, that is because nothing less than a miracle is needed to heal our world.

Chapter 1. The Gift World

My intention is that by identifying the core features of the economics of Separation, we may be empowered to envision an economics of Reunion, an economics that restores to wholeness our fractured communities, relationships, cultures, ecosystems, and planet.

Excerpts:

  1. The World as Gift.
  2. Money for a Gift Economy

Chapter 2. The Illusion of Scarcity

It is said that money, or at least the love of it, is the root of all evil. But why should it be? After all, the purpose of money is, at its most basic, simply to facilitate exchange—in other words, to connect human gifts with human needs. What power, what monstrous perversion,has turned money into the opposite: an agent of scarcity?

Excerpt:

  1. Greed and Scarcity

Chapter 3. Money and the Mind

Money is woven into our minds, our perceptions, our identities. That is why, when a crisis of money strikes, it seems that the fabric of reality is unraveling, too—that the very world is falling apart. Yet this is also cause for great optimism, because money is a social construction that we have the power to change. What new kinds of perceptions, and what new kinds of collective actions, would accompany a new kind of money?

Chapter 4. The Trouble with Property

The realization that property is theft usually incites a rage and desire for vengeance against the thieves. Matters are not so simple. The owners of wealth play a role that is created and necessitated by the great invisible stories of our civilization that compel us to turn the world into property and money whether we are aware of doing so or not.

Excerpt: An Ideological History of the Urge to Own

Chapter 6. The Economics of Usury

See URL: http://www.realitysandwich.com/sacred_economics_ch_6_usury

Chapter 11: Currencies, Governments, and the Commons

Excerpt: Currencies, Governments, and the Commons.

Chapter 12. Introduction to Negative Interest Economics

Excerpt: Money, the Self, and Negative Interest Money

Review

By Devin Martin:

" I would like to offer a brief summary and commentary on four key ideas contained in his work. I highly recommend you investigate further. Whether or not one agrees with Eisenstein’s ideas is second to the fact that these are the conversations we need to be having. [All the quotes below are from Sacred Economics]

The Problem with Positive Interest

This relates to the issue of how money is created. The explanation that follows is a simplification of Eisenstein’s simplification. I highly recommend investigating the way our government creates money further. Nonetheless, the explanation that follows is sound, if lacking nuance.

The way that we create money today promises, even demands scarcity. Money is created when the Federal Reserve Bank purchases interest bearing securities (essentially investment contracts). Private banks use these bank reserves to loan businesses and indivuals money. Money comes into circulation when a bank declares to a customer “Here is $1million, please pay me back more than $1million” (i.e., the loan plus interest). This means that at any given time the amount of money in circulation is guaranteed to be less than the amount of money owed. For this to work, the GDP (Gross Domestic Product) must grow indefinitely. When growth falters (as in 2008), when suddenly mortgages, student loans and/or credit card debts are not being paid, and when “bubbles” burst, things begin to collapse. An injection of ‘new money’ is required. We can either create or borrow (e.g., from China) more money, but eventually this interest will come due as well. Because the current system produces interest bearing debt as a means of introducing currency, the economy ceases to function as soon as the GDP stops increasing. In other words, the need for endless growth has been institutionalized. In a world that has become increasingly concerned with sustainability, this seems incongruous.

In order to keep money flowing we require something to generate an increase in GDP. Currently the environment bears much of this burden. The environment can only have its bounty monetized so far. As natural resources dry up, we look to our social, cultural and spiritual capital demanding that none be finite and all be monetized. Sooner or later the hope for perpetual growth will collapse. In the meantime feelings of competition, insecurity and greed are natural within an interest based economy as we continue to seek growth where none can be found.

Is there another option?

The simplistic interpretations of Darwin's theme of survival of the fittest that once ruled popular thinking are beginning to be challenged with ideas of cooperation and mutual benefit in all realms of research and academia (*). The dogma of the “selfish gene” seems less and less tenable. Symbiosis exists in all levels of nature. We are each a collection of organisms. Your body is a sea of bacteria. You are enmeshed in a world of connection with all levels of life. How likely does it seem that we can sustain our parasitic dominator position before realizing we have always been symbiotic partners with all of nature? We have no choice but to feed as much as we are fed. An economic system that goes against nature and emphasises competition at the expense of cooperation and extraction at the expense of circulation seems increasingly less realistic. The flow of life has no top. We can no longer pretend to be above nature removing resources in the service of increasing GDP.

In a sustainable economy the flow of relationships is recognized as primary to sustaining life. We can now begin to search for ways to incentivize flow instead of hoarding and nurture our environment. Rather than systematically depleting our natural, social, cultural and spiritual capital, it is time to reconsider the assumed benefits of fiscal growth and our current means of creating money.

The Promise of Negative Interest

“Negative interest allows productive investment to continue, and money to circulate, even when the marginal return on capital is zero or less…”

Today we have positive interest rates, which implies that taking money out of circulation and storing it is remunerated. In other words, our current system rewards stagnation of capital/money unless the rate of economic growth is greater than the interest rate. The most recent recessions have caused some to question not just the rules, but the game itself. Globally there appears to be a dawning of the idea that the way we are currently attempting to perpetuate growth is not sustainable. Might seeking growth be the problem?

The current rules of the game allow the Fed to manipulate interest rates. In case of a recession, the Fed can go as far as to create near zero interest rates in order to temper the extreme consolidation of wealth (occupy Wall Street anyone?). Charles Eisenstein suggests we revive the centuries old (but not often implemented) tactic to lower rates even further. With negative interest rates, money loses value over time, which automatically penalizes the saving of money. This creates a convincing incentive to circulate money instead of saving it. Should wealthy people hold onto their fortune while others lose their jobs, their fortune automatically shrinks. With negative interest rates the way money flows mirrors the interconnectedness of all of existence.

Why are we in a recession now? We lack neither goods, nor the ability to produce them, nor the money to buy them in this economy. There is no limit to the number of times a dollar can change hands. The money exists; it simply isn’t flowing quickly enough. We lack financial fluidity. Instead we need to encourage goods and services to change hands often enough so that everybody gets what he/she needs. Our current, positive interest, system rewards stagnation. It rewards removing money from circulation. Negative interest is one extremely potent way to encourage fluidity.

While this type of economic incentive is potentially great for the poor, it will likely feel damaging for the wealthy. Current definitions of wealth focus on fiscal power. However wealth could be redefined so as to include our social, spiritual and environmental capital. This reframing will in turn force us to recognize that the only good is the common good. Many will have a hard time shifting their mindset from a culture of extracting, hoarding and isolating themselves from the masses to one of generating, circulating and community building. Sacred Economics asks individuals to look for their true sources of happiness and well being. Money facilitates the fulfillment of core needs, but once food, shelter and other basic needs are met recent studies show that little to no increased happiness is correlated with luxury. For most people happiness seems to be linked to their connection with others and communities. Increasing the circulation of money will foster stronger community bonds.

Depreciating Money

Demurrage is an extension of negative interest. What happens when all money loses value over time? Consider how we might act differently? The only way to utilize its full value would be to spend it quickly. In many ways this would make money more like the commodities that it can purchase. Material goods require maintenance, storage and are expensive to transport, which has a cost. Their values depreciate over time. Currently, money is a unique abstraction that is a better store of value than most everything that it can be spent on. We could just as well conceive money in line with how everything in the natural and technological worlds actually work. It would be much more beneficial to circulate money, creating an outward flow that will continuously flow back to you, than to withdraw money from circulation and only circulate it if you can earn more money for it (i.e., interest). As Eisenstein points out, with any true good, it makes more sense to share than to hoard. If one has 100 loaves of bread, it is better to feed the community now and let them repay you in kind than to let 95 loaves of bread rot because you could not eat them yourself. You not only get repaid when your neighbors cook, you build that most cherished of commodities: community.

“I store meat in the belly of my brother”

On the other hand, positive interest makes money the one thing that never decays, but actually appreciates in value indefinitely. Therefore it makes sense to value money above all else.

“…while a commons-backed currency frees work to go toward consumptive purposes…”

This is a complex and underdeveloped topic. Currently we externalize much of the cost associated with the our unsustainable consumption. Whether through the extraction of natural resources or the subsidization of industries, the value of what we get is not clearly reflected in the monetary cost. We actually get much more than we pay for. Much of the hidden costs—whether in food, clothing, gas or our homes—result from the fact that nobody is held responsible for depleting the environment and other aspects of “the commons.” But our ability to deny the brutal impact of theses practices is running out.

Rather than having our money be backed by gold (as it once was) or nothing (as it now is) we could choose to back the dollar with the shared assets we all benefit from, which Eisenstein defines as the sum of our natural, social, cultural and spiritual capital. The metrics are not obvious, but I like the idea of rooting our actions and transactions as deeply as possible in the soil we all live on. Tying money to the sources of production would mean that anyone who taps these common goods (trees, water, land, cultural heritage, intellectual heritage, artistic heritage, and so on) would have to pay for using them. Hence, a commons-backed currency means that we internalize costs that are now denied.

Currently a company can pollute a river while extracting its resources without being responsible for the cost. But who owns the water? And should those downstream have less access to clean water? In an increasingly globally aware mind, natural resources belong to us all. Economic growth is limited by our resources and we can deny the limitations of shared resources for only so long. Overproduction (by nature unsustainable) is a result of disconnecting GDP from the resources it relies on for production. A commons-backed currency would promote respect for resources we all depend on while facilitating their circulation. It will anchor us in the understanding that endless growth is impossible in a finite world. We would be much less ready to degrade the environment if doing so had an economic cost.

Social Dividends

“…a third thread in the tapestry: the social dividend, which frees the purchasing power of the workers from the need for full employment in the money economy.”

Why has the much promised ‘age of leisure' never arrived? Why if ‘a diesel backhoe can do the work of 500 men with shovels, a bulldozer can do the work of 500 men with axes and a computer the work of 500 accountants with pens and paper….do most people on earth still live in a daily experience of scarcity?’ Prior to such technological improvements we saw promise for machines to carry the burden that was once on our backs freeing us to enjoy the fruits of the machines labor. What happens in reality is that one person runs the backhoe, bulldozer or computer and the other 499 are put out of a job. The solution? Create more jobs! Again, the economy must grow! Convert more natural resources into consumables! But we know now that this is not sustainable. Just as importantly, it does not seem to be making us any happier.

“Workers receive a shrinking share of revenues as industry becomes less labor-intensive and more capital-intensive – eventually leading to poverty, polarization of wealth, and economic depression due to falling demand.”

In the short term our current system allows improvements in efficiency to reward a few, but penalizes the rest. Large factories may become more profitable as their owners replace labor with technology. They increase the productivity. Yet this ‘progress’engenders the conditions of its own collapse insofar as the very people who would be purchasing the goods the factory supplies no longer earn the wages to do so. Eventually even the factory owners suffer. We are allowing technological innovation to make us poorer. Why do so many have less free time now than ever before? Because rather than making sure that the machine replacing 499 workers creates leisure for the working class, these 499 workers must now find a new job. Since perpetual growth is impossible in a finite world, eventually, we get unemployment. Welcome to our present time.

An important piece of Eisenstein’s perspective is that we don’t really need more stuff. We generate amazing amounts of waste and few of our purchases legitimately increase our enjoyment of life. Our survival (try: basic material) needs, those that the economy should provide, are finite, but, as Eisensteins puts it, “we do have certain needs that are in a sense infinite. The need for connection to nature, the need to love, play and create, the need to know and be known – none can be satisfied by buying more things. We are attempting to satisfy our need for the infinite through an accumulation of more and more of the finite. It is like trying to build a tower to heaven.”

Above all things, Eisenstein champions human connection, exposing the ways our current economic system discourages it and the ways that we could move towards encouraging it. Rediscovering gift economies is one potent avenue we could consider. Imbuing money with sustainable qualities instead of entrusting it with a merciless ability to grow is another. Tying the value of money to natural resources and removing hidden subsidies would bring us closer still. Leveraging technology to support us all instead of making jobs increasingly scarce (and yet still mandatory) is a potent option. (Eisenstein also suggests developing local and complementary currencies, which I will not discuss here for space constraint).

“The situation in America, the most highly monetized society the world has ever known, is this; some of our needs are vastly overfilled while others go tragically unmet. We in the richest societies have too many calories even as we starve for beautiful, fresh food; we have overlarge houses but lack spaces that truly embody our individuality and connectedness, media surrounds us everywhere, while we starve for authentic communication. We are offered entertainment every second of the day but lack the chance to play.”

A Social Dividend would offer all citizens a basic living payout from the public pool. I know, it sounds like welfare at its worst, and to be honest, that was my reaction at first. A deeper understanding of how this ties in with negative interest and a commons-backed currency is required to understand where all of this money would come from. Briefly, negative interest lowers the money supply, which requires creating new money to keep the money supply stable. Reissuing this money is one source of the social dividend. Another source is the revenue from leasing the commons to corporations. A commons-backed currency means that all corporations pay for the resources they use, but which all people truly own. Since we are all owners we all share in the proceeds. The amount would be minimal, but it would provide enough for those not compelled to contribute further.

This analysis of the economic conundrum we are in is complex. The three-pronged beginning of a solution that Eisenstein offers in Sacred Economics represents a radical departure from the current dominant economic principles. Neither of these make it untenable. What is needed is an honest appraisal of where we find ourselves and a willingness to consider radical alternatives. Nothing would be more detrimental than to continue business as usual and let the future choose us. Collapse is happening. The sooner we chart a new course the less painful the transition will be." (http://beamsandstruts.com/articles/item/1156-sacred-economic-summarized)

Excerpts

Full Introduction

Charles Eisenstein:

"The purpose of this book is to make money and human economy as sacred as everything else in the universe.

Today we associate money with the profane, and for good reason. If anything is sacred in this world, it is surely not money. Money seems to be the enemy of our better instincts, as is clear every time the thought "I can't afford to" blocks an impulse toward kindness or generosity. Money seems to be the enemy of beauty, as the disparaging term "a sellout" demonstrates. Money seems to be the enemy of every worthy social and political reform, as corporate power steers legislation toward the aggrandizement of its own profits. Money seems to be destroying the earth, as we pillage the oceans, the forests, the soil, and every species to feed a greed that knows no end.

From at least the time that Jesus threw the money changers from the temple, we have sensed that there is something unholy about money. When politicians seek money instead of the public good, we call them corrupt. Adjectives like "dirty" and "filthy" naturally describe money. Monks are supposed to have little to do with it: "You cannot serve God and Mammon."

At the same time, no one can deny that money has a mysterious, magical quality as well, the power to alter human behavior and coordinate human activity. From ancient times thinkers have marveled at the ability of a mere mark to confer this power upon a disk of metal or slip of paper. Unfortunately, looking at the world around us, it is hard to avoid concluding that the magic of money is an evil magic.

Obviously, if we are to make money into something sacred, nothing less than a wholesale revolution in money will suffice, a transformation of its essential nature. It is not merely our attitudes about money that must change, as some self-help gurus would have us believe; rather, we will create new kinds of money that embody and reinforce changed attitudes. Sacred Economics describes this new money and the new economy that will coalesce around it. It also explores the metamorphosis in human identity that is both a cause and a result of the transformation of money. The changed attitudes of which I speak go all the way to the core of what it is to be human: they include our understanding of the purpose of life, humanity's role on the planet, the relationship of the individual to the human and natural community; even what it is to be an individual, a self. After all, we experience money (and property) as an extension of our selves; hence the possessive pronoun "mine" to describe it, the same pronoun we use to identify our arms and heads. My money, my car, my hand, my liver. Consider as well the sense of violation we feel when we are robbed or "ripped off," as if part of our very selves had been taken.

A transformation from profanity to sacredness in money-something so deep a part of our identity, something so central to the workings of the world-would have profound effects indeed. But what does it mean for money, or anything else for that matter, to be sacred? It is in a crucial sense the opposite of what sacred has come to mean. For several thousand years, the concepts of sacred, holy, and divine have referred increasingly to something separate from nature, the world, and the flesh. Three or four thousand years ago the gods began a migration from the lakes, forests, rivers, and mountains into the sky, becoming the imperial overlords of nature rather than its essence. As divinity separated from nature, so also it became unholy to involve oneself too deeply in the affairs of the world. The human being changed from a living embodied soul into its profane envelope, a mere receptacle of spirit, culminating in the Cartesian mote of consciousness observing the world but not participating in it, and the Newtonian watchmaker-God doing the same. To be divine was to be supernatural, nonmaterial. If God participated in the world at all, it was through miracles-divine intercessions violating or superseding nature's laws.

Paradoxically, this separate, abstract thing called spirit is supposed to be what animates the world. Ask the religious person what changes when a person dies, and she will say the soul has left the body. Ask her who makes the rain fall and the wind blow, and she will say it is God. To be sure, Galileo and Newton appeared to have removed God from these everyday workings of the world, explaining it instead as the clockwork of a vast machine of impersonal force and mass, but even they still needed the Clockmaker to wind it up in the beginning, to imbue the universe with the potential energy that has run it ever since. This conception is still with us today as the Big Bang, a primordial event that is the source of the "negative entropy" that allows movement and life. In any case, our culture's notion of spirit is that of something separate and nonworldly, that yet can miraculously intervene in material affairs, and that even animates and directs them in some mysterious way.

It is hugely ironic and hugely significant that the one thing on the planet most closely resembling the forgoing conception of the divine is money. It is an invisible, immortal force that surrounds and steers all things, omnipotent and limitless, an "invisible hand" that, it is said, makes the world go 'round. Yet, money today is an abstraction, at most symbols on a piece of paper but usually mere bits in a computer. It exists in a realm far removed from materiality. In that realm, it is exempt from nature's most important laws, for it does not decay and return to the soil as all other things do, but is rather preserved, changeless, in its vaults and computer files, even growing with time thanks to interest. It bears the properties of eternal preservation and everlasting increase, both of which are profoundly unnatural. The natural substance that comes closest to these properties is gold, which does not rust, tarnish, or decay. Early on, gold was therefore used both as money and as a metaphor for the divine soul, that which is incorruptible and changeless.

Money's divine property of abstraction, of disconnection from the real world of things, reached its extreme in the early years of the twenty-first century as the financial economy lost its mooring in the real economy and took on a life of its own. The vast fortunes of Wall Street were unconnected to any material production, seeming to exist in a separate realm.

Looking down from Olympian heights, the financiers called themselves "masters of the universe," channeling the power of the god they served to bring fortune or ruin upon the masses, to literally move mountains, raze forests, change the course of rivers, cause the rise and fall of nations. But money soon proved to be a capricious god. As I write these words, it seems that the increasingly frantic rituals that the financial priesthood uses to placate the god Money are in vain. Like the clergy of a dying religion, they exhort their followers to greater sacrifices while blaming their misfortunes either on sin (greedy bankers, irresponsible consumers) or on the mysterious whims of God (the financial markets). But some are already blaming the priests themselves.

What we call recession, an earlier culture might have called "God abandoning the world." Money is disappearing, and with it another property of spirit: the animating force of the human realm. At this writing, all over the world machines stand idle. Factories have ground to a halt; construction equipment sits derelict in the yard; parks and libraries are closing; and millions go homeless and hungry while housing units stand vacant and food rots in the warehouses. Yet all the human and material inputs to build the houses, distribute the food, and run the factories still exist. It is rather something immaterial, that animating spirit, which has fled. What has fled is money. That is the only thing missing, so insubstantial (in the form of electrons in computers) that it can hardly be said to exist at all, yet so powerful that without it, human productivity grinds to a halt. On the individual level as well, we can see the demotivating effects of lack of money. Consider the stereotype of the unemployed man, nearly broke, slouched in front of the TV in his undershirt, drinking a beer, hardly able to rise from his chair. Money, it seems, animates people as well as machines. Without it we are dispirited.

We do not realize that our concept of the divine has attracted to it a god that fits that concept, and given it sovereignty over the earth. By divorcing soul from flesh, spirit from matter, and God from nature, we have installed a ruling power that is soulless, alienating, ungodly, and unnatural. So when I speak of making money sacred, I am not invoking a supernatural agency to infuse sacredness into the inert, mundane objects of nature. I am rather reaching back to an earlier time, a time before the divorce of matter and spirit, when sacredness was endemic to all things.

And what is the sacred? It has two aspects: uniqueness and relatedness. A sacred object or being is one that is special, unique, one of a kind. It is therefore infinitely precious; it is irreplaceable. It has no equivalent, and thus no finite "value," for value can only be determined by comparison. Money, like all kinds of measure, is a standard of comparison.

Unique though it is, the sacred is nonetheless inseparable from all that went into making it, from its history, and from the place it occupies in the matrix of all being. You might be thinking now that really all things and all relationships are sacred. That may be true, but though we may believe that intellectually, we don't always feel it. Some things feel sacred to us, and some do not. Those that do, we call sacred, and their purpose is ultimately to remind us of the sacredness of all things.

Today we live in a world that has been shorn of its sacredness, so that very few things indeed give us the feeling of living in a sacred world. Mass-produced, standardized commodities, cookie-cutter houses, identical packages of food, and anonymous relationships with institutional functionaries all deny the uniqueness of the world. The distant origins of our things, the anonymity of our relationships, and the lack of visible consequences in the production and disposal of our commodities all deny relatedness. Thus we live without the experience of sacredness. Of course, of all things that deny uniqueness and relatedness, money is foremost. The very idea of a coin originated in the goal of standardization, so that each drachma, each stater, each shekel, and each yuan would be functionally identical. Moreover, as a universal and abstract medium of exchange, money is divorced from its origins, from its connection to matter. A dollar is the same dollar no matter who gave it to you. We would think someone childish to put a sum of money in the bank and withdraw it a month later only to complain, "Hey, this isn't the same money I deposited! These bills are different!"

By default then, a monetized life is a profane life, since money and the things it buys lack the properties of the sacred. What is the difference between a supermarket tomato and one grown in my neighbor's garden and given to me? What is different between a prefab house and one built with my own participation by someone who understands me and my life? The essential differences all arise from specific relationships that incorporate the uniqueness of giver and receiver. When life is full of such things, made with care, connected by a web of stories to people and places we know, it is a rich life, a nourishing life. Today we live under a barrage of sameness, of impersonality. Even customized products, if mass-produced, offer only a few permutations of the same standard building blocks. This sameness deadens the soul and cheapens life.

The presence of the sacred is like returning to a home that was always there and a truth that has always existed. It can happen when I observe an insect or a plant, hear a symphony of birdsongs or frog calls, feel mud between my toes, gaze upon an object beautifully made, apprehend the impossibly coordinated complexity of a cell or an ecosystem, witness a synchronicity or symbol in my life, watch happy children at play, or am touched by a work of genius. Extraordinary though these experiences are, they are in no sense separate from the rest of life. Indeed, their power comes from the glimpse they give of a realer world, a sacred world that underlies and interpenetrates our own.

What is this "home that was always there," this "truth that has always existed"? It is the truth of the unity or the connectedness of all things, and the feeling is that of participating in something greater than oneself, yet which also is oneself. In ecology, this is the principle of interdependence: that all beings depend for their survival on the web of other beings that surrounds them, ultimately extending out to encompass the entire planet. The extinction of any species diminishes our own wholeness, our own health, our own selves; something of our very being is lost.

If the sacred is the gateway to the underlying unity of all things, it is equally a gateway to the uniqueness and specialness of each thing. A sacred object is one of a kind; it carries a unique essence that cannot be reduced to a set of generic qualities. That is why reductionist science seems to rob the world of its sacredness, since everything becomes one or another combination of a handful of generic building blocks. This conception mirrors our economic system, itself consisting mainly of standardized, generic commodities, job descriptions, processes, data, inputs and outputs, and-most generic of all-money, the ultimate abstraction. In earlier times it was not so. Tribal peoples saw each being not primarily as a member of a category, but as a unique, enspirited individual. Even rocks, clouds, and seemingly identical drops of water were thought to be sentient, unique beings. The products of the human hand were unique as well, bearing through their distinguishing irregularities the signature of the maker. Here was the link between the two qualities of the sacred, connectedness and uniqueness: unique objects retain the mark of their origin, their unique place in the great matrix of being, their dependency on the rest of creation for their existence. Standardized objects, commodities, are uniform and therefore disembedded from relationship.

In this book I will describe a vision of a money system and an economy that is sacred, that embodies the interrelatedness and the uniqueness of all things. No longer will it be separate, in fact or in perception, from the natural matrix that underlies it. It reunites the long-sundered realms of human and nature; it is an extension of ecology that obeys all of its laws and bears all of its beauty.

Within every institution of our civilization, no matter how ugly or corrupt, there is the germ of something beautiful: the same note at a higher octave. Money is no exception. Its original purpose is simply to connect human gifts with human needs, so that we might all live in greater abundance. How instead money has come to generate scarcity rather than abundance, separation rather than connection, is one of the threads of this book. Yet despite what it has become, in that original ideal of money as an agent of the gift we can catch a glimpse of what will one day make it sacred again. We recognize the exchange of gifts as a sacred occasion, which is why we instinctively make a ceremony out of gift giving. Sacred money, then, will be a medium of giving, a means to imbue the global economy with the spirit of the gift that governed tribal and village cultures, and still does today wherever people do things for each other outside the money economy.

Sacred Economics describes this future and also maps out a practical way to get there. Long ago I grew tired of reading books that criticized some aspect of our society without offering a positive alternative. Then I grew tired of books that offered a positive alternative that seemed impossible to reach: "We must reduce carbon emissions by 90 percent." Then I grew tired of books that offered a plausible means of reaching it but did not describe what I, personally, could do to create it. Sacred Economics operates on all four levels: it offers a fundamental analysis of what has gone wrong with money; it describes a more beautiful world based on a different kind of money and economy; it explains the collective actions necessary to create that world and the means by which these actions can come about; and it explores the personal dimensions of the world-transformation, the change in identity and being that I call "living in the gift."

A transformation of money is not a panacea for the world's ills, nor should it take priority over other areas of activism. A mere rearrangement of bits in computers will not wipe away the very real material and social devastation afflicting our planet. Yet, neither can the healing work in any other realm achieve its potential without a corresponding transformation of money, so deeply is it woven into our social institutions and habits of life. The economic changes I describe are part of a vast, all-encompassing shift that will leave no aspect of life untouched.

Humanity is only beginning to awaken to the true magnitude of the crisis on hand. If the economic transformation I will describe seems miraculous, that is because nothing less than a miracle is needed to heal our world. In all realms, from money to ecological healing to politics to technology to medicine, we need solutions that exceed the present bounds of the possible. Fortunately, as the old world falls apart, our knowledge of what is possible expands, and with it expands our courage and our willingness to act. The present convergence of crises-in money, energy, education, health, water, soil, climate, politics, the environment, and more-is a birth crisis, expelling us from the old world into a new. Unavoidably, these crises invade our personal lives, our world falls apart, and we too are born into a new world, a new identity. This is why so many people sense a spiritual dimension to the planetary crisis, even to the economic crisis. We sense that "normal" isn't coming back, that we are being born into a new normal: a new kind of society, a new relationship to the earth, a new experience of being human.

I dedicate all of my work to the more beautiful world our hearts tell us is possible. I say our "hearts," because our minds sometimes tell us it is not possible. Our minds doubt that things will ever be much different from what experience has taught us. You may have felt a wave of cynicism, contempt, or despair as you read my description of a sacred economy. You might have felt an urge to dismiss my words as hopelessly idealistic. Indeed, I myself was tempted to tone down my description, to make it more plausible, more responsible, more in line with our low expectations for what life and the world can be. But such an attenuation would not have been the truth. I will, using the tools of the mind, speak what is in my heart. In my heart I know that an economy and society this beautiful are possible for us to create-and indeed that anything less than that is unworthy of us. Are we so broken that we would aspire to anything less than a sacred world?" (http://www.realitysandwich.com/sacred_economics_introduction)

Motivation:

"Today we associate money with the profane, and for good reason. If anything is sacred in this world, it is surely not money. Money seems to be the enemy of all our better instincts, as is clear every time the thought "I can't afford to" blocks an impulse toward kindness or generosity. Money seems to be the enemy of beauty, as the disparaging term "a sellout" demonstrates. Money seems to be the enemy of every worthy social and political reform, as corporate power steers legislation toward the aggrandizement of its own profits. Money seems to be destroying the earth, as we pillage the oceans, the forests, the soil, and every species to feed a greed that knows no end.

From at least the time that Jesus threw the moneychangers from the temple, we have sensed that there is something unholy about money. When a politician seeks money instead of the public good, we call him corrupt. Adjectives like "dirty" and "filthy" naturally describe money. Monks are supposed to have little to do with it: "You cannot serve God and Mammon."

At the same time, no one can deny that money has a mysterious, magical quality as well, the power to alter human behavior and coordinate human activity. From ancient times thinkers have marveled at the ability of a mere mark to confer this power upon a disk of metal or slip of paper. Unfortunately, looking at the world around us, it is hard to avoid concluding that the magic of money is an evil magic.

Obviously, if we are to make money into something sacred, nothing less than a wholesale revolution in money will suffice, a transformation of its essential nature. It is not merely our attitudes about money that must change, as some self-help gurus and "prosperity programming" teachers would have us believe; rather, we will create a new kind of money that embodies and reinforces our changed attitudes. Sacred Economics describes this new money and the new economy that will coalesce around it. It also explores the metamorphosis in human identity that is both a cause and a result of the transformation of money. The changed attitudes of which I speak go all the way to the core of what it is to be human: they include our understanding of the purpose of life, humanity's role on the planet, the relationship of the individual to the human and natural community; even what it is to be an individual, a self. This should not be surprising, since we experience money (and property) as an extension of our selves; hence the possessive pronoun "mine" to describe it, the same pronoun we use to identify our arms and heads. My money, my car, my hand, my liver. Consider as well the sense of violation we feel when we are robbed or "ripped off," as if part of our very selves had been taken.

A transformation from profanity to sacredness in money, something so deep a part of our identity, something so central to the workings of the world, would have profound effects indeed. But what does it mean for money, or anything else for that matter, to be sacred? It is in a crucial sense the opposite of what sacred has come to mean. For several thousand years, increasingly, the concepts of sacred, holy, and divine have referred to something separate from nature, the world, and the flesh. Three or four thousand years ago the gods began a migration from the lakes, forests, rivers, and mountains into the sky, becoming the imperial overlords of nature rather than its essence. As divinity separated from nature, so also it became unholy to involve oneself too deeply in the affairs of the world. The human being changed from a living soul to a mere receptacle of spirit, a profane envelope for a sacred soul, culminating in the Cartesian mote of consciousness observing the world but not participating in it, and the Newtonian watchmaker God doing the same. To be divine was to be supernatural, non-material. If God participated in the world at all, it was through miracles -- divine intercessions violating or superseding nature's laws.

Yet, paradoxically, this separate, abstract thing called spirit is supposed to be what animates the world. Ask the religious person what has changed when a person dies, and she will say the soul has left the body. Ask her who makes the rain fall and the wind blow, and she will say it is God. To be sure, Galileo and Newton appeared to have removed God from these everyday workings of the world, explaining it instead as the clockwork of a vast machine of impersonal force and mass, but even they still needed the Clockmaker to wind it up in the beginning, to imbue the universe with the potential energy that has run it ever since. This conception is still with us today as the Big Bang, a primordial event that is the source of the "negative entropy" that allows movement and life. In any case, our culture's notion of spirit is that of something separate and non-worldly, that yet can miraculously intervene in material affairs, and that even animates and directs them in some mysterious way.

It is hugely ironic and hugely significant that the one thing on the planet most closely resembling the forgoing conception of the divine is money! It is an invisible, immortal force that surrounds and steers all things, omnipotent and limitless, an "invisible hand" that, it is said, makes the world go 'round. Yet, money today is an abstraction, at most symbols on a piece of paper, but usually mere bits in a computer. It exists in a realm far removed from materiality. In that realm, it is exempt from nature's most important laws, for it does not decay and return to the soil as all other things do, but is rather preserved, changeless, in its vaults and computer files, even growing with time thanks to interest. It bears the properties of eternal preservation and everlasting increase, both of which are profoundly unnatural. The natural substance that comes closest to these properties is gold, which does not rust, tarnish, or decay. Early on, gold was therefore used both as money and as a metaphor for the divine soul, that which is incorruptible and changeless.

Money's divine property of abstraction, of disconnection from the real world of things, reached its extreme in the early years of the 21st century as the financial economy lost its mooring in the real economy and took on a life of its own. The vast fortunes of Wall Street were unconnected to any material production, seeming to exist in a separate realm.

Looking down from Olympian heights, the financiers called themselves "masters of the universe," channeling the power of the god they served to bring fortune or ruin upon the masses, to literally move mountains, raze forests, change the course of rivers, cause the rise and fall of nations. But money soon proved to be a capricious god. As I write these words, it seems that the increasingly frantic rituals that the financial priesthood uses to placate the god money are in vain. Like the clergy of a dying religion, they exhort their followers to greater sacrifices while blaming their misfortunes either on sin (greedy bankers, irresponsible consumers) or on the mysterious whims of God (the financial markets). Soon, perhaps, we will blame the priests themselves.

What we call deflation, an earlier culture might have called, "God abandoning the world." Money is disappearing, and with it a third property of spirit, the animating force of the human realm. At this writing, all over the world machines stand idle. Factories have ground to a halt, construction equipment sits derelict in the yard. Yet all the human and material inputs to operate them still exist. There is still fuel, there are still raw materials, and there are still human beings in abundance who know how to operate the machines. It is rather something immaterial, that animating spirit, which has fled. What has fled is money. That is the only thing missing, so insubstantial (in the form of electrons in computers) that it can hardly be said to exist at all, yet so powerful that without it, human productivity grinds to a halt. It is as if God had forsaken the world. Even beyond the mechanical realm, we can see the demotivating effects of lack of money. Consider the stereotype of the unemployed man, nearly broke, slouched in front of the TV in his undershirt, drinking a beer, hardly able to rise from his chair. Money, it seems, animates people as well as machines. Without it we are dispirited.

We do not realize that our concept of the divine has attracted to it a god that fits that concept, and given it sovereignty over the earth. By divorcing the soul from the flesh, spirit from matter, and God from nature, we have installed a ruling power that is soulless, alienating, ungodly and unnatural. So when I speak of making money sacred, I am not invoking a supernatural agency to infuse sacredness into the inert, mundane objects of nature. I am rather reaching back to an earlier time, a time before the divorce of matter and spirit, when sacredness was endemic to all things.

My understanding of sacredness is secondary to my feeling of sacredness, or to put it better, to the feeling of being in the presence of the sacred. I cannot define that feeling, nor need I define it, because I am sure that you have felt it as well. In the presence of the sacred, we are moved to the very core of our being, we feel reverence and awe, humility and amazement, and a profound sense of gratitude. Even though, intellectually, I know that I am in the presence of the sacred all the time, only rarely do I actually feel its fullness. When I do, I feel like I have returned to a home that was always there and to a truth that has always existed. It can happen when I observe an insect or a plant, hear a symphony of birdsongs or frog calls, feel mud between my toes, gaze upon an object beautifully made, apprehend the impossibly coordinated complexity of a cell or an ecosystem, witness a synchronicity or symbol in my life, watch happy children at play, am touched by a work of genius. Extraordinary though these experiences are, they are in no sense separate from the rest of life. Indeed, their power comes from the glimpse they give of a realer world, a sacred world that underlies and interpenetrates our own.

What is this "home that was always there, this truth that has always existed"? It is the truth of the unity or the connectedness of all things, and the feeling is that of participating in something far greater than oneself, yet which also is oneself. In ecology, this is the principle of interdependence: that all beings depend for their survival on the web of other beings that surrounds them, ultimately extending out to encompass the entire planet. The extinction of any species diminishes our own wholeness, our own health, our own selves: something of our very being is lost. We can feel this sense of loss directly, as an emotion, as well as indirectly through the multiplying health crises of our time. This book will draw from ecology to help describe a sacred economy. For example, in the planetary ecosystem there is no such thing as waste: the waste of one creature is the food of another, creating a sacred gift circle. For an economy to be sacred, it must be the same.

If the sacred is the gateway to the underlying unity of all things, it is equally a gateway to the uniqueness and specialness of each thing. A sacred object is one-of-a-kind; it carries a unique essence that cannot be reduced to a set of generic qualities. That is why reductionistic science seems to rob the world of its sacredness, since everything becomes one or another combination of a handful of generic building blocks. This conception mirrors our economic system, itself consisting mainly of standardized, generic commodities, job descriptions, processes, data, inputs and outputs and, most generic of all, money, the ultimate abstraction. In earlier times it was not so. Tribal peoples saw each being not primarily as a member of a category, but as a unique enspirited individual. Even rocks, clouds, and apparently identical drops of water were thought to be sentient, unique beings. The products of the human hand were unique as well, bearing through their distinguishing irregularities the signature of the maker. Here was the link between the two qualities of the sacred, connectedness and uniqueness: in their uniqueness, objects retain the mark of their origin, their place in the great matrix of being, their dependency on the rest of creation for their existence.

In this book I will describe a vision of a money system and an economy that is sacred. In other words, I will describe an economy that is no longer separate, in fact or in perception, from the natural matrix that underlies it. I will describe a reunion of the long-sundered realms of human and nature. The human economy will no longer be something separate from nature; it will be an extension of nature that obeys all of its laws and bears all of its beauty, wholeness, and enchantment.

Within every institution of our civilization, no matter how ugly or corrupt, there is the germ of something beautiful: the same note at a higher octave. Money is no exception: its original purpose is simply to connect human gifts with human needs, so that we might all live in greater abundance. How instead money has come to generate scarcity rather than abundance, competition rather than sharing, is one of the threads of this book. Yet despite what it has become, in that original beauty of money we can catch a glimpse of what will one day make it sacred again. We intuitively recognize the exchange of gifts as a sacred occasion, which is why we instinctively make a ceremony out of gift-giving. Sacred money, then, will be a medium of gifting, a means to recreate the gift economy of a hunter-gatherer or village society on a planetary level. A sacred economy will be an economy of the Gift.

Sacred Economics describes this future and also maps out a practical way to get there. Long ago I grew tired of reading books that criticized some aspect of our society without offering a positive alternative. Then, I grew tired of books that offered a positive alternative that seemed impossible to reach: "We must reduce carbon emissions by 90%." Then I grew tired of books that offered a plausible means of reaching it, that did not describe what I, personally, could do to create it. Sacred Economics operates on all four levels: it offers a fundamental analysis of what has gone wrong with money; it describes a more beautiful world based on a different kind of money and economy; it explains the collective actions necessary to create that world and the means by which these actions can come about; and it explores the personal dimensions of the world-transformation, the change in identity and being that I call "living in the Gift."

The economic crisis we face today is just one of many crises that are converging upon us all at once: crises in energy, education, health, water, soil, climate, politics, and the environment. My previous book, The Ascent of Humanity, traced the origin of each to a common root, millennia old, that I call Separation. Their convergence is a birth crisis, in which we are expelled from the old world into the new. Unavoidably, these crises invade our personal lives, our world falls apart, and we too are born into a new world, a new identity. This is why so many people sense a spiritual dimension to the planetary crisis.

I dedicate all of my work to the more beautiful world our hearts tell us is possible. I say our "hearts", because our minds tell us it is not possible. Our minds doubt that things will ever be much different than experience has taught us. You may, as you read the forgoing encomium to a sacred economy, have felt a wave of cynicism, contempt, or despair. You might have felt an urge to dismiss my words as hopelessly idealistic. Indeed, I myself was tempted to tone down my description, to make it more plausible, more responsible, more in line with our low expectations for what life and the world can be. But such an attenuation would not have been the truth. I will, using the tools of the mind, speak what is in my heart. In my heart I know that an economy and society this beautiful is possible for us to create, and indeed, that anything less than that is unworthy of us. Are we so broken, that we would aspire to anything less than a sacred world?" (http://www.realitysandwich.com/sacred_economics)

Why talk about sacred economics?

From Chapter 10:

Charles Eisenstein:

"A sacred economy is an extension of the ecology and obeys all of its rules, among them the law of return. Specifically, that means that every substance produced through industrial processes or other human activities is either used in some other human activity or, ultimately, returned to the ecology in a form, and at a rate, that other beings can process.1 It means there is no such thing as industrial waste. Everything cycles back to its source. As in the rest of nature, our waste becomes another's food.

Why do I call such an economy "sacred" rather than natural or ecological? It is because of the sacredness of gifts. To obey the law of return is to honor the spirit of the Gift because we receive what has been given us, and from that gift, we give in turn. Gifts are meant to be passed on. Either we hold onto them for a while and then give them forward, or we use them, digest them, integrate them, and pass them on in altered form. That this is a sacred responsibility is apparent from both a theistic and an atheistic perspective.

From the theistic perspective, consider the source of this world we have been given. It would be a grave error to say, as some evangelicals have told me, that it is fine to use nature destructively, because after all God gave it to us. To squander a gift, to use it poorly, is to devalue the gift and insult the giver. If you give someone a present and he trashes it right in front of your face, you might feel insulted or disappointed; certainly you'll stop giving gifts to that person. I think that anyone who truly believes in God wouldn't dare treat Creation that way but would instead make the most beautiful use possible of life, earth, and everything on it. That means we treat it as the divine gift that it is. In gratitude, we use it well and give in turn. That is the theistic reason why I call a zero-waste economy sacred.

From an atheistic perspective, a zero-waste economy is the economic realization of the interconnectedness of all beings. It embodies the truth that as I do unto the other, so I do unto myself. To the extent that we realize oneness, we desire to pass our gifts forward, to do no harm, and to love others as we love our selves.

On a very practical level, this vision of sacred economy requires eliminating what economists refer to as "externalities." Externalized costs are costs of production that someone else pays." (http://www.realitysandwich.com/sacred_economics_chapter_10)

Cultural and Spiritual Capital

Charles Eisenstein:

"Natural capital is one of four broad categories of the commonwealth that also comprises social, cultural, and spiritual capital. Each consists of things that were once free, part of self-sufficiency or the gift economy, that we now pay for. The robbery then is not from mother earth, but from mother culture.

The most familiar of these other forms of capital in the economic discourse is cultural capital, which goes by the term intellectual property. In former times, the vast fund of stories, ideas, songs, artistic motifs, images, and technical inventions formed a commons that everyone could draw upon for pleasure and productivity, or incorporate into yet other innovations. In the Middle Ages, minstrels would listen to each other’s songs and borrow new tunes that they liked, modify them, and circulate them back into the commons of music. Today artists and their corporate sponsors scramble to copyright and protect each new creation, and vigorously prosecute anyone who tries to incorporate those songs into their own. The same happens in every creative sphere.1

The moral justification for intellectual property is, again, “If I am my own, and my labor power belongs to me, then what I make is mine.” But even granting the premise that “I am my own,” the implicit assumption that artistic and intellectual creations arise ex nihilo from the mind of the creator, independent of cultural context, is absurd. Any intellectual creation (including this book) draws on bits and pieces of the sea of culture around us, and from the fund of images, melodies, and ideas that are deeply imprinted upon the human psyche, or perhaps even innate to it. As Lewis Mumford puts it, “A patent is a device that enables one man to claim special financial rewards for being the last link in the complicated social process that produced the invention.”2 The same is true of songs, stories, and all other cultural innovations. By making them private property, we are walling off something that is not ours. We are stealing from the cultural commons. And because, like land, pieces of the cultural commons are themselves productive of continued wealth, this theft is an ongoing crime that contributes to the divide between the haves and the have-nots, the owners and the renters, the creditors and the debtors.


The Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin made this general point eloquently:

Every machine has had the same history—a long record of sleepless nights and of poverty, of disillusions and of joys, of partial improvements discovered by several generations of nameless workers, who have added to the original invention these little nothings, without which the most fertile idea would remain fruitless. More than that: every new invention is a synthesis, the resultant of innumerable inventions which have preceded it in the vast field of mechanics and industry. Science and industry, knowledge and application, discovery and practical realization leading to new discoveries, cunning of brain and of hand, toil of mind and muscle—all work together. Each discovery, each advance, each increase in the sum of human riches, owes its being to the physical and mental travail of the past and the present. By what right then can any one whatever appropriate the least morsel of this immense whole and say—This is mine, not yours?

Such considerations inform my desire to make my books freely available online and to forgo some of the normal copyrights. I could not have written this book outside a vast organic matrix of ideas, a commonwealth of cultural capital that I cannot rightfully enclose.

Spiritual capital is more subtle. It refers to our mental and sensuous capacities, for example, the ability to concentrate, to create worlds of the imagination, and to derive pleasure from experiencing life. When I was young, in the very last days before television and video games came to dominate American childhood, we created our own worlds with intricate story lines, practicing the psychic technologies that adults can use to fashion their lives and their collective reality: forming a vision, telling a story around that vision that assigns meanings and roles, playing out those roles, and so on. Today, those worlds of the imagination come prefabricated from TV studios and software companies, and children wander through cheap, gaudy, often violent worlds created by distant strangers. These come with prefabricated images as well, and the ability to form their own images (we call this ability imagination) atrophies. Unable to envision a new world, the child grows up accustomed to accepting whatever reality is handed her. Could this, perhaps, be contributing to the political passivity of the American public?

Another depletion of spiritual capital comes via the intense sensory stimulation of electronic media. Modern action films, for instance, are so fast-paced, so loud, so grossly stimulating, that older movies seem boring in comparison, not to mention books or the world of nature. Despite my best efforts to limit their exposure to modern excesses, my children can barely stand to watch any film made before 1975. Once habituated to intense stimulation, in its absence we get the withdrawal symptom we call boredom. We become dependent, and therefore must pay to acquire something that was once available simply by virtue of being alive. A baby or a hunter-gatherer will be fascinated by the slow processes of nature: a twig floating on the water, a bee visiting a flower, and other things that are beyond the anemic attentiveness of modern adults. Just as the Roman coloni had to pay to use the land they needed to survive, so also must most people today pay the owners of the processes, media, and capital necessary to create the extreme sensory stimulation that they need to feel alive.

It may not be readily apparent that spiritual capital constitutes a commons. What has really been appropriated here is a locus of attention. The capabilities of the human mind that I call spiritual capital do not exist in isolation; it is our upbringing, our nurture, our cultural surroundings that foster and direct them. Our ability to imagine and to obtain sensory fulfillment is to a great degree a collective ability, one today that we can no longer exercise from the freely available sources of mind and nature, but must purchase from their new owners.

The collective attention of the human race is a commons like the land or the air. Like them, it is a raw material of human creativity. To make a tool, to do any work, to do anything at all requires that one place attention on that task rather than on some other. The ubiquity of advertising and media in our society is a co-optation of the collective human attention, and a depletion of our divine bequest. On the road, everywhere my eyes turn, there is a billboard. On the subway, on the internet, on the street, commercial messages reach out to “capture” our attention. They infiltrate our very thoughts, our narratives, our inner dialog, and via these, our emotions, desires, and beliefs, turning all toward the making of product and profit. Our attention is hardly our own anymore, so easily do the powers of politics and commerce manipulate it.

After it has been so long manipulated, chopped up, habituated to intense stimuli, and jerked around from one lurid but empty object to another, our attention is so fragmented we cannot sustain it long enough to create anything independent of the programs that surround us. We lose our capacity to sustain thought, understand nuance, and put ourselves in another person’s shoes. Susceptible to any simplistic narrative with immediate emotional appeal, we are easy targets not just for advertising, but for propaganda, demagoguery, and fascism. In various ways, all of these serve the money power."


See also, an excerpt from chapter 5, on the Enclosure and Depletion of Spiritual Capital

Mutual Credit

Charles Eisenstein:

" In any mutual-credit system, members have access to credit without the involvement of a bank. Instead of paying money to use money, as in an interest-based credit system, credit is a free social good available to all who have earned the trust of the community. Essentially, today’s credit system is an example of the privatization of the commons I discussed earlier in the book, in this case the “credit commons”—a community’s general judgment of the creditworthiness of each of its members. Mutual-credit systems reclaim this commons by issuing credit cooperatively rather than for private profit.

Mutual credit is not so much a type of currency as a means of issuing that currency. In the dominant system, it is primarily banks that grant access to money by extending credit. In a mutual-credit system, this power goes to the users themselves.

The development of mutual-credit systems is extremely significant, for credit essentially represents a society’s choice of who gets access to money and how much of it. Mutual credit replaces the traditional functions of banks. People with a negative credit balance are under social pressure, and the pressure of their own conscience, to offer goods and services that will bring their account back into positive territory. But I’m sure you can see a potential problem with this system when applied on a large scale. What is to prevent one of the participants from running up a higher and higher negative balance, in essence receiving goods for nothing? The system needs a way to prevent this and eliminate participants who abuse it.

Without negative-balance limits, a mutual-credit currency can be created in unlimited amounts simply by the will to make a transaction. This might seem like a good thing, but it won’t work if that currency is used to exchange scarce goods.1 Ultimately, money represents a social agreement on how to allocate labor and materials. Not everyone can have access to enough credit, say, to construct a multibillion-dollar semiconductor plant or buy the world’s largest diamond.

More sophisticated mutual-credit systems have flexible credit limits based on responsible participation. Global Exchange Trading System (GETS; a proprietary credit-clearing system) and Community Exchange System (CES) use complicated formulas in which credit limits rise with time according to how much or how well one has participated in the system. Those who have fulfilled their negative-balance obligations in the past get a larger credit limit. This formula functions just like a conventional credit rating.

The real world, however, does not always conform to a formula. Different kinds of businesses have different credit needs, and sometimes exceptional circumstances arise that merit a temporary increase in credit. Some mechanism is needed to set these limits and to grant or reject requests for credit. This might require research, familiarity with industries and markets, and knowledge of the borrower’s reputation and circumstances. It could also encompass the social and ecological effects of the investment. Whatever entity performs this function, be it a traditional bank, cooperative, or P2P community, must have a good general understanding of business and must be willing to assume responsibility for its evaluations.

New forms of P2P banking run up against the same general problem of determining creditworthiness over the anonymous gulf of cyberspace. One could imagine a system in which a database connects you, who have $5,000 you want to lend for six months, to a distant person who wants to borrow it for six months. You don’t know her. How do you know she is creditworthy? Perhaps some user rating system à la eBay could provide a partial solution, but such systems are easily gamed. What you really need is a trustworthy institution that knows her better than you do to assure you of her creditworthiness. You lend your money to that institution, and that institution lends it to her. Sound familiar? It’s called a bank.

Banking, like money, has a sacred dimension: a banker is someone who finds beautiful uses for money. If I have more money than I can use, I can say, “Here, Ms. Banker, please find someone who can use this money well until I need it back.” Decaying currency, described in Chapter 12, aligns this conception of banking with self-interest. It will continue to be a necessary function even when “better” no longer means “to increase my personal wealth.”

Whether it is through social consensus, formulas, or the decisions of specialists, there must be some way to allocate credit. Banking functions, whether implicit or explicit, will always exist. Today, a banking cartel has monopolized these functions, profiting not only from its expertise in allocating credit toward its most remunerative use but also from its monopoly control over the former credit commons. Ultimately, a new banking system might arise from the ground up, starting with small mutual-credit cooperatives that form exchange agreements with each other. Convertibility among different mutual-credit systems is a hot topic in the field, with prototypes being developed by CES and the Metacurrency Initiative. The challenge is to strike a balance between convertibility, in order to allow long-distance trade, and insulation of the members’ internal economy from outside predation or financial shocks. These are essentially the same issues that face small sovereign currencies today.

Mutual-credit systems reclaim the functions of banking for a local community, a business community, or a cooperative entity. They foster and protect the internal economy of their members, insulating it from external shocks and financial predation in the same way that local currencies do. Indeed, local currencies will never be able to expand beyond marginal status unless they have a credit mechanism that protects them from the speculative runs that numerous national currencies have suffered in the last twenty years. Local and regional credit-clearing organizations can exercise capital control functions similar to those that wiser nations imposed when developing their economies through import substitution. The most famous mutual-credit system, Switzerland’s WIR, provides a rather extreme model for this principle: once you buy into it, you are not permitted to cash out. On a local level, this would force foreign investors to source components locally. Less extreme but similar measures were applied by Taiwan, Japan, Singapore, and South Korea in the 1950s and 1960s, when they restricted foreign companies’ repatriation of profits."

Disintermediation and the P2P Revolution

"Another source of economic shrinkage is the disintermediation that the internet has made possible. Disintermediation refers to the elimination of intermediaries: agents, brokers, middlemen, and so forth. Consider the example of Craigslist, which according to one estimate has destroyed $10 billion of annual revenue from classified ads, replacing it with only $100 million of its own revenues.1 Google has also made advertising more efficient (cheaper), not only seizing ad revenue from existing media but also reducing total industry-wide advertising expenditures. (Total “adspend” across all media fell by 9 percent in 2009.) Of course, as advertising has become cheaper, it has also become more ubiquitous; even so, the total size of the ad industry has peaked. Yes, we are passing through the time of “peak advertising” as the commons of the public attention has been saturated. I hope you aren’t too sad about the end of growth in advertising, which has been a major contributor to GDP growth. Meanwhile, many of the traditional functions of advertising and marketing which were once paid services are now being met for free through social networking. Similarly, the blogosphere has taken over many of the functions of traditional news distribution, but again at much less cost. The same is true of travel agency, stock brokerage, and many other industries where brokers and agents are no longer necessary. All of these factors contribute to economic deflation.

Disintermediation and open source software are both part of a more general phenomenon: the peer-to-peer (P2P) revolution. The older hierarchical and centralized structures of distribution, circulation, and production required a lot of money and human effort to administer. Moreover, their very nature isolated people from each other within narrow specialties, making gift exchange impossible.

Disintermediation is even affecting the credit system and subverting banks’ traditional role as financial intermediaries connecting investors and borrowers. Corporations bypass banks by obtaining financing directly from money markets, while new P2P lending websites such as LendingClub and Prosper.com now allow individuals to borrow directly from each other. Commercial credit-clearing rings, mutual factoring systems, and commercial barter networks, which I will discuss later, are other ways that information technology is reducing the role of centralized intermediary institutions. All of these developments will reduce GDP by lowering spending on “financial services.”

Because these ever-cheaper “information economy” services are a factor of production in nearly every other sector, degrowth here is contagious. This is true even in industries that we think of as growth industries. In 2000, for example, $371 billion was spent on PC hardware, including printers, servicing, and data storage. By 2009, this had shrunk to $326 billion. Obviously, this drop is not because we are buying fewer computers; it is because costs have fallen dramatically.

The commonest profit model on the internet is to run ads, essentially limiting the size of the entire digital economy to what level of advertising the physical economy can support. But the internet cannibalizes even itself: websites that offer free product reviews and price comparison searches render the very advertising that supports them obsolete.

What is happening is that the business model that has worked for all human history (find something people do for themselves or each other in a gift economy, take it away from them, and then sell it back) is being reversed. The internet is allowing people once again to do things for themselves and each other without paying for it. Eric Reasons comments,

Maybe the reason we’re having such a hard time finding out ways to monetize various internet services like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, is that they can’t be monetized … or at least not at replacement rates to the industries and services that they’re supplanting. This is exactly what the print media is finding out the hard way as it tries to shift to an online model.2

The internet is a participatory gift economy, a P2P network in which there is no consistent distinction between a producer and a consumer. When we share news, product recommendations, songs, and so forth with our online networks, we do not charge anyone for our “information services.” It is a gift economy. The content of most websites is free as well. Reasons concludes,

We’re told to believe in our future in a knowledge-based economy, but nobody has really figured out how to make real money of it. Of those who are making money off of it (Craigslist, Google), they are making pennies per dollar in the old markets that they’ve upset or practically eliminated with their innovation. This isn’t because we haven’t found the right monetization scheme yet. It is because innovation is leading to efficiency and not growth, and that is exerting deflationary pressure on bloated industries. Moreover, it is largely being done by us, the end user, in our free time, because we want to create and share, not just consume.

While a redirection toward a participatory gift economy is new, the threat of overcapacity and underemployment has bedeviled capitalism for centuries, indicating that we don’t need to work as hard as we do to support human life. Indeed, the imminent advent of an age of leisure has been before us ever since the first industrial machines came into use, machines that could “do the work of a thousand men.” Yet the implied promise, that soon we would all have to work only one-thousandth as hard, shows no signs of manifesting. And here I am promising it again. Will this vision likewise prove to be a mirage? No. The key difference is that we won’t rely on technological improvements in efficiency alone to enable greater leisure. The key is degrowth, not efficiency. It seems very counterintuitive: that degrowth—economic recession—will be what ushers in true affluence for the many.

In a growth economy, the labor that could be freed up through technological progress is devoted instead to producing more and more stuff. If in 1870 it took ten labor-hours to produce the necessities of life for a household, and today it takes one labor-hour to produce the same quantity of things, then our system conspires to make us consume as much as ten households did in 1870. We hear talk about the American consumer, the engine of global economic growth. Implicit is a vision of wealth identified with endlessly accelerating consumption. A new computer every month, a new car every year, a bigger house every five years—new, more, bigger, better. It seems insane, but it is economically necessary in our present system because deflation dynamics lurk close at hand, awaiting the day when consumption lags behind productivity growth.

I do not foresee an abrupt transition to the economy I describe. Let us indulge our gentle disposition and allow that the habits of slavery are of long standing and may need some time to unwind. I foresee a degrowth rate of around 2 percent, so that our use of raw materials, our pollution of the air and water, and our time spent working for money not love falls by about half with each generation, until eventually the pace of degrowth slows as the economy approaches an equilibrium relationship with the planet a couple hundred years from now.

The system I have described offers an alternative to this future of bigger, better, and more followed by catastrophic collapse. Negative interest allows productive investment to continue, and money to circulate, even when the marginal return on capital is zero or less, while a commons-backed currency frees work to go toward nonconsumptive purposes. Next I will describe a third thread in the tapestry: the social dividend, which frees the purchasing power of workers from the need for full employment in the money economy."

An Ideological History of the Urge to Own

An excerpt from chapter four is here: An Ideological History of the Urge to Own.

Read also: Thinking about propertization and the commons, an excerpt from chapter 5:

“Despite land’s obvious independence of human effort for its existence, land is not so different from any other kind of property. Let us first consider material property — anything made of metal, wood, plastic, plants or animals, minerals, and so on. Are these anything other than pieces of the earth, altered through the application of human effort? The distinction between land and improvements thereupon — the distinction between that which already exists and that which human effort creates — is no more or less valid for land than for any other material good. All that we use and all that we own consists of modified bits of earth. Together they are “natural capital” — the wealth and goodness that nature has bequeathed upon us.

Originally none of it was property; it came into that realm as technology lengthened our grasp and the mentality of separation intensified our will to own. Today, forms of natural capital that we barely knew existed have become property: the electromagnetic spectrum, sequences of DNA, and, indirectly, ecological diversity and the earth’s capacity to absorb industrial waste.

Whether it has been made into a direct subject of property, as in land, oil, and trees, or whether it is still a commons that we draw on to create other property, such as the open sea, the original Great Commons has been sold off: converted first into property and then into money. It is this final step that confirms that something has indeed completed its metamorphosis into property. To be able to freely buy and sell something means that it has been dissociated from its original matrix of relationships; in other words, that it has become “alienable.” That is why money has become a proxy for land and all other property, and why charging rental (interest) for its use bears the same effects and partakes of the same ancient injustice as does charging rent on land.

Natural capital is one of four broad categories of the commonwealth that also comprises social, cultural, and spiritual capital. Each consists of things that were once free, part of self-sufficiency or the gift economy, that we now pay for. The robbery then is not from mother earth, but from mother culture.

The most familiar of these other forms of capital in the economic discourse is cultural capital, which goes by the term intellectual property. In former times, the vast fund of stories, ideas, songs, artistic motifs, images, and technical inventions formed a commons that everyone could draw upon for pleasure and productivity, or incorporate into yet other innovations. In the Middle Ages, minstrels would listen to each other’s songs and borrow new tunes that they liked, modify them, and circulate them back into the commons of music. Today artists and their corporate sponsors scramble to copyright and protect each new creation, and vigorously prosecute anyone who tries to incorporate those songs into their own. The same happens in every creative sphere.

The moral justification for intellectual property is, again, “If I am my own, and my labor power belongs to me, then what I make is mine.” But even granting the premise that “I am my own,” the implicit assumption that artistic and intellectual creations arise ex nihilo from the mind of the creator, independent of cultural context, is absurd. Any intellectual creation (including this book) draws on bits and pieces of the sea of culture around us, and from the fund of images, melodies, and ideas that are deeply imprinted upon the human psyche, or perhaps even innate to it. As Lewis Mumford puts it, “A patent is a device that enables one man to claim special financial rewards for being the last link in the complicated social process that produced the invention.” The same is true of songs, stories, and all other cultural innovations. By making them private property, we are walling off something that is not ours. We are stealing from the cultural commons. And because, like land, pieces of the cultural commons are themselves productive of continued wealth, this theft is an ongoing crime that contributes to the divide between the haves and the have-nots, the owners and the renters, the creditors and the debtors.

The Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin made this general point eloquently:

Every machine has had the same history — a long record of sleepless nights and of poverty, of disillusions and of joys, of partial improvements discovered by several generations of nameless workers, who have added to the original invention these little nothings, without which the most fertile idea would remain fruitless. More than that: every new invention is a synthesis, the resultant of innumerable inventions which have preceded it in the vast field of mechanics and industry. Science and industry, knowledge and application, discovery and practical realization leading to new discoveries, cunning of brain and of hand, toil of mind and muscle-all work together. Each discovery, each advance, each increase in the sum of human riches, owes its being to the physical and mental travail of the past and the present. By what right then can any one whatever appropriate the least morsel of this immense whole and say — This is mine, not yours.

Such considerations inform my desire to make my books freely available online and to forgo some of the normal copyrights. I could not have written this book outside a vast organic matrix of ideas, a commonwealth of cultural capital that I cannot rightfully enclose.” (http://www.realitysandwich.com/sacred_economics_ch_5_corpse_commons)

On the necessity to internalize costs

From chapter 10:

Charles Eistenstein:

"Externalized costs are costs of production that someone else pays. For example, one reason vegetables from California's Central Valley are cheaper to buy in Pennsylvania than local produce is that they don't reflect their full cost. Since producers are not liable to pay the current and future costs of aquifer depletion, pesticide poisoning, soil salinization, and other effects of their farming methods, these costs do not contribute to the price of a head of lettuce. Moreover, the cost of trucking produce across the continent is also highly subsidized. The price of a tank of fuel doesn't include the cost of the pollution it generates, nor the cost of the wars fought to secure it, nor the cost of oil spills. Transport costs don't reflect the construction and maintenance of highways. If all these costs were embodied in a head of lettuce, California lettuce would be prohibitively expensive in Pennsylvania. We would buy only very special things from faraway places.

Many industries today can only operate because their costs are externalized. For example, statutory caps on liability for oil spills and nuclear meltdowns make offshore drilling and nuclear power profitable for their operators, even as the net effect on society is negative. Even if BP goes bankrupt trying, there is no way the company will, or can, pay the full costs of the spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Society will pay the costs, in effect transferring wealth from the public to the company's investors.2 Any industry with the potential for catastrophic losses is essentially enacting a transfer of wealth from public to private hands, from the many to the few. Those industries operate with free insurance. They get the profits, we assume the risks. It is also so in the financial industry, where the largest operators can take huge risks knowing that they will be bailed out if those risks fail. Externalized costs render economical things that are actually uneconomical, such as deep-sea oil drilling and nuclear power.

The elimination of externalities thwarts the business plan of the ages: "I keep the income and someone else pays the costs." I fertilize my field with nitrogen fertilizer, and the shrimp fishermen pay the cost of eutrophication downriver. I burn coal to make electricity, and society pays the medical costs of mercury emissions and the environmental costs of acid rain. All of these strategies are variations on a theme I've already described: the monetization of the commons. The capacity of the earth to absorb various kinds of waste is a form of commonwealth, as is the richness of the soil, the seas, and the aquifers. The collective leisure time of society might be considered a commons as well, which is depleted when polluters make messes for everyone else to clean up.

"I keep the income, and someone else pays the costs" reflects the mind-set of the separate self, in which your well-being is fundamentally disconnected from mine. What does it matter what happens to you? If you are poor, or sick, or in prison, what does that matter to me, as long as I sufficiently insulate myself from the social and environmental toxicity out there? What does it matter to me if the Gulf of Mexico is dying under an oil slick? I'll just live somewhere else. What does it matter to me that there is a thousand-mile-wide gyre of plastic in the Pacific Ocean? From the perspective of separation, it doesn't matter -- in principle we can insulate ourselves from the effects of our actions. Profiting by externalizing costs is part and parcel of that perspective. But from the perspective of the connected self, connected to other people and to the earth, your well-being is inseparable from my own because you and I are not fundamentally separate. The internalization of all costs is simply the economic embodiment of that principle of interbeingness: "As I do unto others, so I do unto myself."

Internalizing costs also reflects the perceptions of a gift culture. In the circle of the gift, your good fortune is my good fortune, and your loss is my loss, because you will have correspondingly more or less to give. From that worldview, it is a matter of common sense to include damage to society or nature on the balance sheet. If I depend on you for the gifts you give me, then it is illogical to enrich myself by impoverishing you. In such a world, the best business decision is the one that enriches everybody: society and the planet. A sacred economy must embody this principle, aligning profit with the common weal.

Understanding this principle, some visionary businesspeople have attempted to realize it voluntarily through concepts like the "triple bottom line" and "full-cost accounting." The idea is that their company will act to maximize not just its own profits, but the aggregate of people, planet, and profit -- the three bottom lines. The problem is that these companies must compete with others who do the opposite: export their costs onto people and the planet. The triple bottom line and full-cost accounting are useful as a way to evaluate public policy (because they include more than just economic benefits) but when it comes to private enterprise, the first two Ps often run counter to the third. If I am a fisherman trying to fish sustainably, competing with industrial trawlers with hundred-mile-long nets, my higher costs will render me unable to compete. That is why some means is needed to force the internalization of costs and integrate the triple bottom line into a single bottom line that includes all three. We cannot merely hope that people "get it." We must create a system that aligns self-interest with the good of all.

One way to bring externalized costs (and externalized benefits) onto the balance sheet is through cap-and-trade systems and other tradable emissions allowances.3 Although such systems have borne mixed results in practice (sulfur dioxide ceilings have been relatively successful, while the EU's carbon credits have been a disaster), in principle they allow us to implement a collective agreement on how much is enough. "Enough" depends on the capacity of the planet or the bioregion to assimilate the substance in question. For sulfur dioxide, Europe and America might have separate ceilings to control acid rain; Los Angeles might have its own ozone or nitrous oxide ceiling; the planet might have a single CO2 and CFC ceiling. Enforcing aggregate ceilings circumvents Jevon's paradox, which says that improvements in efficiency don't necessarily lead to less consumption but can even lead to greater consumption by reducing prices and freeing capital for yet more production." (http://www.realitysandwich.com/sacred_economics_chapter_10)

How Usury Drives Infinite Growth

Charles Eistenstein:

"Because of interest, at any given time the amount of money owed is greater than the amount of money already existing. To make new money to keep the whole system going, we have to breed more chickens-in other words, we have to create more "goods and services." The principal way of doing so is to begin selling something that was once free. It is to convert forests into timber, music into product, ideas into intellectual property, social reciprocity into paid services.

Abetted by technology, the commodification of formerly nonmonetary goods and services has accelerated over the last few centuries, to the point today where very little is left outside the money realm. The vast commons, whether of land or of culture, has been cordoned off and sold-all to keep pace with the exponential growth of money. This is the deep reason why we convert forests to timber, songs to intellectual property, and so on. It is why two-thirds of all American meals are now prepared outside the home. It is why herbal folk remedies have given way to pharmaceutical medicines, why child care has become a paid service, why drinking water has been the number-one growth category in beverage sales.

The imperative of perpetual growth implicit in interest-based money is what drives the relentless conversion of life, world, and spirit into money. Completing the vicious circle, the more of life we convert into money, the more we need money to live. Usury, not money, is the proverbial root of all evil." (http://www.realitysandwich.com/sacred_economics_ch_6_usury)

Principles as defined by Chris Lindstrom

Chris Lindstrom:

"Here are a few principles of sacred economics. It is a concept and practice I am still evolving, and I would love your feedback on it.

Giving and Receiving

Life is a constant act of giving and receiving. In order for life to thrive, energy must circulate. It is a general principle that in any system the energy that goes out of that system must be replenished. This is true for our breath when we breathe in oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide, and it is true when we consume food and drink and expel human waste. This ecological reciprocity is key to life. In nature, every bit of waste becomes the food of another organism. In our rape and pillage economy, we have overloaded the environment with wastes that it cannot use, so they become toxic and destructive. And so it must be with money, if indeed, money remains a part of human society. Money must be made to account in some way or another for the generosity of the sun, the air, the waters. It must be real reflection of nature, and it must be sure that all things that we extract from nature go back in a way that nature can assimilate in a life-sustaining way.

Land

Chief Seattle said in a famous speech, “How can you buy or sell the sky, the warmth of the land? The idea is strange to us. If we do not own the freshness of the air and the sparkle of the water, how can you buy them?” This principle is shared amongst all indigenous peoples and is central to an economics of the sacred. Putting land, or the rights to land, in the marketplace creates a cultural disconnection from nature, because people become preoccupied with an artificiallyprescribed monetary value, rather than understanding that land’s real value cannot be measured, only experienced by relating to it with gratitude and reverence. ‘Property-fication’ also forces us to relate to land in terms of ‘plots’ and artificially created borders, thereby negating the natural seamless-ness and interconnectedness of ecology.

Knowledge

Information is only scarce, when people make it scarce. If I have knowledge, sharing it does not deprive me of it; it only makes everyone better off. Unfortunately, the modern education system operates on the opposite principle: putting a price on knowledge, so only a few can access it, thereby keeping it scarce. Part of Sacred Economics will be dismantling this scarcity of learning in our lives. It will mean breaking out of the monopoly of schooling, and instead exploring and creating a myriad of learning spaces to connect to the passions, dreams, needs, questions, of each person and community.

Usury

Sacred Economics cannot have interest as the principle means by which money is created. Very few people know this, but the fact is, all money is created as interest-bearing debt. This creates a fundamental burden on society to work under stress, to keep ahead of the compounding of compound interest. If you think about it, the mathematics of interest dictate that those who have more money earn greater profits on their money than those with less. This very simple yet profound reality is at the core of our social woes. Nearly all religions have in them some prohibition against usury. Islamic countries, in fact, have instituted this prohibition into their laws. Yet, these warnings have been completely ignored in western society. The recent financial bubble bursts are simply what is destined to happen when we base our system on usury. The bubbles of debt, financial speculation, and real estate grow so big that they overwhelm the physical economy, essentially eating away at it, just like cancer depletes the life force of the body until it collapses completely.

Oneness

The modern economy is very good at making people feel separate and alone. By creating an intrinsic wealth gap into the system, it tends to build resentment and depression into the minds of those who have less, and it creates a fear of that resentment in the minds of those with excess wealth. It also compels people to exploit the land, so as to get ahead in the market. The result is social and ecological alienation and degradation. This way of being is illusory and pathological. Einstein once said,

“A human being is a part of the whole that we call the universe, a part limited in time and space. And yet we experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest — a kind of optical illusion of our consciousness. This illusion is a prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for only the few people nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living beings and all of nature.”

I believe that this task is the only thing that will allow human beings to continue living on this earth. To be here, to be alive, is a blessing that needs to be appreciated through the way we interact with one another, by bringing forth generosity and love, consciously, into all dimensions of life. Dismantling the systems of domination that perpetuate the illusion of separation, most notably, the neo-liberal system of economics, but also religion and politics, is the most important step in the liberation of humanity.

However, this cannot be done by any activities that oppose the system. We must do it through dis-engaging from it. We can do this gradually by creating new systems, new social organisms, that, like the emergence of a butterfly out of a caterpillar, will feed off of the energy, resources and knowledge generated by the old system. Once this process begins, it will be unstoppable. I believe that it has, indeed, already begun." (http://taoofmoney.wordpress.com/2008/10/14/sacred-economics-101/)

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Neotraditional Economics