"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."
"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!'"
"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."
"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."
"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?"
"Separation is not an ultimate reality, but a human projection, an ideology, a story. As in all cultures, our defining Story of the People has two deeply related parts: a Story of Self, and a Story of the World. The first is the discrete and separate self: a bubble of psychology, a skin-encapsulated soul, a biological phenotype driven by its genes to seek reproductive self-interest, a rational actor seeking economic self-interest, a physical observer of an objective universe, a mote of consciousness in a prison of flesh. The second is the story of Ascent: that humanity, starting from a state of ignorance and powerlessness, is harnessing the forces of nature and probing the secrets of the universe, moving inexorably toward our destiny of complete mastery over, and transcendence of, nature. It is a story of the separation of the human realm from the natural, in which the former expands and the latter is turned progressively into resources, goods, property, and, ultimately, money."
"In moments of clarity, perhaps after a narrow brush with death, or upon accompanying a loved one through the death process, we know that life itself is a gift. We experience an overwhelming gratitude at being alive. We walk in wonderment at the riches, undeserved and freely available, that come with life: the joy of breathing, the delights of color and sound, the pleasure of drinking water to quench thirst, the sweetness of a loved one's face. This sense of mixed awe and gratitude is a clear sign of the presence of the sacred."
"In the beginning was the Gift: in the archetypal beginning of the world, at the beginning of our lives, and in the infancy of the human species. Gratitude therefore is natural to us, so primal, so elemental that it is very difficult to define. Perhaps it is the feeling of having received a gift, and the desire to give in turn. We might therefore expect primitive people, connected with this primal gratitude, to enact it in their social and economic relationships. Indeed, they did. Most accounts of the history of money begin with primitive barter, but barter is a relative rarity among hunter-gatherers. The most important mode of economic exchange was the gift."
"While today we clearly distinguish between a gift and a commercial transaction, in past times this distinction was by no means clear. Some cultures, such as the Toaripi and Namau, had but a single word to designate buying, selling, lending, and borrowing, while the ancient Mesopotamian word e1m meant both 'buy' and 'sell.' This ambiguity persists in many modern languages. Chinese, German, Danish, Norwegian, Dutch, Estonian, Bulgarian, Serbian, Japanese, and many others each have but a single term for borrowing and lending, perhaps a vestige of an ancient time when the two were not distinguished. It even persists in English among less-educated speakers, who sometimes use the word 'borrow' to mean 'lend,' as in 'I borrowed him twenty dollars.'"
"Today we put gifts and purchases into separate, exclusive categories; to be sure, different economics and psychology apply to each. But very ancient times bore no such dichotomy, nor was there today's distinction between a business relationship and a personal relationship. Economists, in telling the history of money, tend to project this modern distinction backward, and with it some deep assumptions about human nature, the self, and the purpose of life: that we are discrete and separate selves competing for scarce resources to maximize our self-interest. I won't say that these assumptions are not true. They are part of the defining ideology of our civilization, a Story of the People that is now drawing to a close."
"Notice how natural it is to describe our uniquely human attributes as gifts. In keeping with the gift's universal principles, our human gifts partake of their Giver as well. In other words, they are divine gifts. Mythology bears this intuition out, from the Promethean gift of fire to the Apollonian gift of music, to the gift of agriculture from the Chinese mythological ruler Shen Nong. In the Bible, too, we are given not only the world, but the breath of life and our capacity to create for we are made in the image of the Creator itself."
" Our purpose for being, the development and full expression of our gifts, is mortgaged to the demands of money, to making a living, to surviving. Yet no one, no matter how wealthy, secure, or comfortable, can ever feel fulfilled in a life where those gifts remain latent. Even the best-paid job, if it does not engage our gifts, soon feels deadening, and we think, 'I was not put here on earth to do this.'"
"Each organism and each species makes a vital contribution to the totality of life on earth, and this contribution, contrary to the expectations of standard evolutionary biology, need not have any direct benefit for the organism itself. Nitrogen-fixing bacteria don't directly benefit from doing so, except that the nitrogen they give to the soil grows plants that grow roots that grow fungi, which ultimately provide nutrients to the bacteria. Pioneer species pave the way for keystone species, which provide microniches for other species, which feed yet other species in a web of gifts that, eventually, circle back to benefit the pioneer species. Trees bring up water to water other plants, and algae make oxygen so that animals can breathe. Remove any being, and the health of all becomes more precarious."
"In nature, headlong growth and all-out competition are features of immature ecosystems, followed by complex interdependency, symbiosis, cooperation, and the cycling of resources."
"The war against evil imbues every institution of our society. In agriculture, it appears as the desire to exterminate wolves, to destroy all weeds with glyphosate, to kill all the pests. In medicine it is the war against germs, a constant battle against a hostile world. In religion it is the struggle against sin, or against ego, or against faithlessness or doubt, or against the outward projection of these things: the devil, the infidel. It is the mentality of purifying and purging, of self-improvement and conquest, of rising above nature and transcending desire, of sacrificing oneself in order to be good. Above all, it is the mentality of control. It says that once final victory over evil is won, we will enter paradise. When we eliminate all the terrorists or create an impenetrable barrier to them, we will be safe. When we develop an irresistible antibiotic and artificial regulation of body processes, we will have perfect health. When we make crime impossible and have a law to govern everything, we will have a perfect society. When you overcome your laziness, your compulsions, your addictions, you will have a perfect life. Until then, you are just going to have to try harder."
"Clearly, the paradigm of greed is rife with judgment of others, and with self-judgment as well. Our self-righteous anger and hatred of the greedy harbor the secret fear that we are no better than they are. It is the hypocrite who is the most zealous in the persecution of evil."
"Ultimately, greed is a red herring, itself a symptom and not a cause of a deeper problem. To blame greed and to fight it by intensifying the program of self-control is to intensify the war against the self, which is just another expression of the war against nature and the war against the other that lies at the base of the present crisis of civilization."
"The assumption of scarcity is one of the two central axioms of economics. (The second is that people naturally seek to maximize their rational self-interest.) Both are false; or, more precisely, they are true only within a narrow realm, a realm that we, the frog at the bottom of the well, mistake for the whole of reality. As is so often the case, what we take to be objective truth is actually a projection of our own condition onto the 'objective' world. So immersed in scarcity are we that we take it to be the nature of reality. But in fact, we live in a world of abundance. The omnipresent scarcity we experience is an artifact: of our money system, of our politics, and of our perceptions."
"I disagree with those environmentalists who say we are going to have to make do with less. In fact, we are going to make do with more: more beauty, more community, more fulfillment, more art, more music, and material objects that are fewer in number but superior in utility and aesthetics. The cheap stuff that fills our lives today, however great its quantity, can only cheapen life."
"For something to become an object of commerce, it must be made scarce first. As the economy grows, by definition, more and more of human activity enters the realm of money, the realm of goods and services. Usually we associate economic growth with an increase in wealth, but we can also see it as an impoverishment, an increase in scarcity. Things we once never dreamed of paying for, we must pay for today. Pay for using what? Using money, of course, money that we struggle and sacrifice to obtain."
"When everything is subject to money, then the scarcity of money makes everything scarce, including the basis of human life and happiness."
"For the animal, child, or hunter-gatherer, time is essentially infinite. Today its monetization has subjected it, like the rest, to scarcity. Time is life. When we experience time as scarce, we experience life as short and poor."
"We live in an abundant world, made otherwise through our perceptions, our culture, and our deep invisible stories. Our perception of scarcity is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Money is central to the construction of the self-reifying illusion of scarcity."
"It is no accident that ancient Greece, the place where symbolic money originated, also gave birth to the modern conception of the individual, to the notions of logic and reason, and to the philosophical underpinnings of the modern mind."
"The whole story of money's evolution from barter assumes that it is fundamental human nature to want to maximize self-interest. In this, human beings are assumed to be identical. When there is no standard of value, different humans want different things. When money is exchangeable for any thing, then all people want the same thing: money."
"'How much is enough?' a friend once asked of a billionaire he knew. The billionaire was stumped. The reason that no amount of money can ever be enough is that we use it to fulfill needs that money cannot actually fulfill. As such it is like any other addictive substance, temporarily dulling the pain of an unmet need while leaving the need unmet. Increasing doses are required to dull the pain, but no amount can ever be enough. Today people use money as a substitute for connection, for excitement, for self-respect, for freedom, and for much else. 'If only I had a million dollars, then I'd be free!' How many talented people sacrifice their youth hoping for an early retirement to a life of freedom, only to find themselves, at midlife, enslaved to their money?"
"The unlimit of money implies that the realm of the owned can grow indefinitely, and therefore that the destiny of mankind is to conquer the universe, to bring everything into the human domain, to make the whole world ours. This destiny is part of what I have described as the myth of Ascent, part of our defining Story of the People. Today, that story is rapidly becoming obsolete, and we need to invent a money system aligned with the new story that will replace it."
"I once heard Martedn Prechtel, speaking of his village in Guatemala, explain, 'In my village, if you went to the medicine man with a sick child, you would never say, 'I am healthy, but my child is sick.' You would say, 'My family is sick.' Or if it were a neighbor, you might say, 'My village is sick.' No doubt, in such a society, it would be equally inconceivable to say, 'I am healthy, but the forest is sick.' To think anyone could be healthy when her family, her village, or indeed the land, the water, or the planet were not, would be as absurd as saying, 'I've got a fatal liver disease, but that's just my liver-I am healthy!'"
"Trapped in the logic of me and mine, we seek to recover some tiny fraction of our lost wealth by expanding and protecting the separate self and its extension: money and property."
"As the mystics have taught, the separate self can be maintained only temporarily, and at great cost. And we have maintained it a long time, and built a civilization upon it that seeks the conquest of nature and human nature. The present convergence of crises has laid bare the futility of that goal. It portends the end of civilization as we know it, and the instauration of a new state of human beingness defined by a more fluid, more inclusive sense of self."
"The urge to own diminishes as our sense of connectedness and gratitude grows, and we realize that our labor power is not our own, and what I make is not properly mine. Is not my ability to labor, and my life itself, a gift too? In that realization, we desire to give our creations to all that have contributed to our being and granted us the gift of life."
"'Property is robbery,' proclaimed Proudhon: tracing back the origin of any piece of property through a succession of 'legitimate' transfers, we eventually get to the first owner-the one who simply took it, the one who separated it off from the realm of 'ours' or 'God's' into the realm of 'mine.' Usually this happened by force, as in the seizure of the vast lands of all North America in the last three centuries. This story has played itself out in various forms for millennia all over the world. After all, before Roman times there was no such thing as a deed. Land was like the air and water; it could not be owned. The first owners therefore could not have acquired it legitimately. They must have taken it."
"If property is robbery, then a legal system dedicated to the protection of private property rights is a system that perpetuates a crime. By making property sacrosanct we validate the original theft. This should not be too surprising if the laws were made by the thieves themselves to legitimize their ill-gotten gains. Such was indeed the case: in Rome and elsewhere, it was the rich and powerful who both seized the land and made the laws."
"Let us not waste our psychic energy hating the rich, or even the original plunderers. Cast in their station, we would have enacted the same role. Indeed, most of us participate, in one way or another, in the ongoing theft of the commons. Let us not hate, lest we prolong the Age of Separation even further and lest we, like the Bolsheviks, perpetrate a revolution that is insufficiently deep, and so re-create the old order in a different, distorted form. Still, let us not lose sight of the nature and effects of the unconscious crime of property, so that we may return our world to its original and still-latent abundance."
" Land ownership (and indeed all forms of ownership) says more about our perception of the world than about the nature of the thing owned. The transition from the early days, when ownership of land was as unthinkable as ownership of the sky, sun, and moon, to the present day, when nearly every square foot of the earth is subject to ownership of one sort or another, is really just the story of our changing view of ourselves in relation to the universe."
"Some time ago I was driving with a woman from France down the country roads of central Pennsylvania. The gentle mountains and broad valleys beckoned to us, so we decided to walk them. It seemed as if the ground was begging for our feet, wanting to be tread. We decided to find a place to pull over and walk. We drove for an hour, but we never did find a field or forest that wasn't festooned with 'No Trespassing' signs. Every time I see one I feel a twinge, a loss. Any squirrel is freer than I am, any deer. These signs apply to humans only. Herein lies a universal principle: the regime of property, the enclosure of the unowned, has made us all poorer. The promise of freedom inherent in that broad, verdant landscape was a mirage."
"I have so far focused on the land, but nearly every other commons has suffered the same fate. Intellectual property offers the most obvious example, and the royalties that derive from owning it play a role similar to land rent. (If you think intellectual property differs from land because it is created by humans, read on!) But there is one form of ownership that contains and supersedes the rest: the ownership of money. In the realm of finance, interest plays the role of royalties and rents, ensuring that the wealth that flows from human creativity and labor flows primarily to those who own money. Money is just as criminal in its origins as are other forms of property-an ongoing robbery that both impels and embodies the expropriation of the commons."
"Money is the corpse of the commons, the embodiment of all that was once common and free, turned now into property of the purest form."
"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 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."
"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."
"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 colonists 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."
"'We don't really need each other.' What better description could there be of the loss of community in today's world? We don't really need each other. We don't need to know the person who grows, ships, and processes our food, makes our clothing, builds our house, creates our music, makes or fixes our car; we don't even need to know the person who takes care of our babies while we are at work. We are dependent on the role, but only incidentally on the person fulfilling that role. Whatever it is, we can just pay someone to do it (or pay someone else to do it) as long as we have money. And how do we get money? By performing some other specialized role that, more likely than not, amounts to someone paying us to do something for them."
"The necessities of life have been given over to specialists, leaving us with nothing meaningful to do (outside our own area of expertise) but to entertain ourselves. Meanwhile, whatever functions of daily living that remain to us are mostly solitary functions: driving places, buying things, paying bills, cooking convenience foods, doing housework. None of these demand the help of neighbors, relatives, or friends. We wish we were closer to our neighbors; we think of ourselves as friendly people who would gladly help them. But there is little to help them with. In our house-boxes, we are self-sufficient. Or rather, we are self-sufficient in relation to the people we know but dependent as never before on total strangers living thousands of miles away."
"Consumption calls upon no one's gifts, calls forth none of anyone's true being. Community and intimacy cannot come from joint consumption, but only from giving and cocreativity."
"When I ask people what is missing most from their lives, the most common answer is 'community.' But how can we build community when its building blocks-the things we do for each other-have all been converted into money? Community is woven from gifts. Unlike money or barter transactions, in which there are no obligations remaining after the transaction, gifts always imply future gifts. When we receive, we owe; gratitude is the knowledge of having received and the desire to give in turn. But what is there now to give? Not the necessities of life, not food, shelter, or clothing, not entertainment, not stories, not health care: everyone buys these. Hence the urge to get away from it all, to return to a more self-sufficient life where we build our own houses and grow our own food and make our own clothes, in community. Yet while there is value in this movement, I doubt that many people will start doing things the hard way again just in order to have community. There is another solution besides reversing the specialization of labor and the machine-based efficiency of the modern age, and it springs from the fact that money does not meet many of our needs at all. Very important needs go unmet today, and money, because of its impersonal nature, is incapable of meeting them. The community of the future will arise from the needs that money inherently cannot meet."
"When I was a child we had nothing like the freedom of generations before us, as you might read about in Tom Sawyer, yet still my friends and I would sometimes wander for miles, to a creek or an unused quarry pit, an undeveloped hilltop, the train tracks. Today, one rarely finds groups of kids roaming around, when every bit of land is fenced and marked with no-trespassing signs, when society is obsessed with safety, and when children are over-scheduled and driven to perform. Technology and culture have robbed children of something they deeply need-and then, in the form of video games, sold it back to them."
"A little reflection reveals that nearly every good and service available today meets needs that were once met for free. What about medical technology? Compare our own poor health with the marvelous health enjoyed by hunter-gatherers and primitive agriculturalists, and it is clear that we are purchasing, at great expense, our ability to physically function. Child care? Food processing? Transportation? The textile industry? Space does not permit me to analyze each of these for what necessities have been stolen and sold back to us. I will offer one more piece of evidence for my view: if the growth of money really were driving the technological and cultural meeting of new needs, then wouldn't we be more fulfilled than any humans before us?"
"Are people happier now, more fulfilled, for having films rather than tribal storytellers, MP3 players rather than gatherings around the piano? Are we happier eating mass-produced food rather than that from a neighbor's field or our own garden? Are people happier living in prefab units or McMansions than they were in old New England stone farmhouses or wigwams? Are we happier? Has any new need been met?"
"In fact, the achievements of science and technology do meet important needs, needs that are key drivers of sacred economics. They include the need to explore, to play, to know, and to create what we in the New Economy movement call 'really cool stuff.' In a sacred economy, science, technology, and the specialization of labor that goes along with them will continue to be among the agents for the meeting of these needs. We can see this higher purpose of science and technology already, like a recessive gene that crops up irrepressibly in spite of its endless commercialization. It is in the heart of every true scientist and inventor: the spirit of wonder, excitement, and the thrill of novelty."
"Every institution of the old world has a counterpart in the new, the same note at another octave. We are not calling for a revolution that will eradicate the old and create the new from scratch. That kind of revolution has been tried before, with the same results each time, because that mentality is itself part of the old world. Sacred economics is part of a different kind of revolution entirely, a transformation and not a purge. In this revolution, the losers won't even realize they have lost."
"Economic logic says that when a new good or service comes into being, the fact that someone is willing to pay for it means that it must be to someone's benefit. In a certain narrow sense, this is true. If I steal your car keys, it may be to your benefit to buy them back from me. If I steal your land, it may be to your benefit to rent it back so you can survive. But to say that money transactions are evidence of an overall rise in utility is absurd; or rather, it assumes that the needs they meet were originally unmet."
"If I babysit your children for free, economists don't count it as a service or add it to GDP. It cannot be used to pay a financial debt; nor can I go to the supermarket and say, 'I watched my neighbors' kids this morning, so please give me food.' But if I open a day care center and charge you money, I have created a 'service.' GDP rises and, according to economists, society has become wealthier. I have grown the economy and raised the world's level of goodness. 'Goods' are those things you pay money for. Money = Good. That has been the equation of our time."
"Any time someone pays for anything she once received as a gift or did herself, the world's 'goodness' level rises. Each tree cut down and made into paper, each idea captured and made into intellectual property, each child who uses video games instead of creating worlds of the imagination, each human relationship turned into a paid service, depletes a bit of the natural, cultural, spiritual, and social commons and converts it into money."
"To introduce consumerism to a previously isolated culture it is first necessary to destroy its sense of identity. Here\'s how: Disrupt its networks of reciprocity by introducing consumer items from the outside. Erode its self-esteem with glamorous images of the West. Demean its mythologies through missionary work and scientific education. Dismantle its traditional ways of transmitting local knowledge by introducing schooling with outside curricula. Destroy its language by providing that schooling in English or another national or world language. Truncate its ties to the land by importing cheap food to make local agriculture uneconomic. Then you will have created a people hungry for the right sneaker."
"Like a multicellular organism, humanity as a collective being needs organs, subsystems, and the means to coordinate them. Money, along with symbolic culture, communication technology, education, and so forth, has been instrumental in developing these. It has also been like a growth hormone, both stimulating growth and governing the expression of that growth. Today, it seems, we are reaching the limits of growth, and therefore the end of humanity's childhood. All of our organs are fully formed; some, indeed, have outlived their usefulness and may revert to vestigial form. We are maturing. Perhaps we are about to turn our newfound creative power of billions towards its mature purpose. Perhaps, accordingly, we need a different kind of money, one that continues to coordinate the vastly complex metahuman organism but no longer compels it to grow."
""What, exactly, is this 'money power'? It is not, as it sometimes may seem, an evil cabal of bankers controlling the world through the Bilderberg Council, the Trilateral Commission, and other instruments of the 'Illuminati.' In my travels and correspondence, I sometimes run into people who have read books by David Icke and others that make a persuasive case for an ancient global conspiracy dedicated to a 'New World Order,' symbolized by the all-seeing eye atop the pyramid, controlling every government and every institution, and run behind the scenes by a small, secret coterie of power-hungry monsters who count even the Rothschilds and Rockefellers among their puppets. I must be very naive, or very ignorant, not to comprehend the true nature of the problem.<br />
<br />
While I confess to being naive, I am not ignorant. I have read much of this material and come away unsatisfied. While it is clear that there is much more to such events as 9/11 and the Kennedy assassinations than we have been told, and that the financial industry, organized crime, and political power are closely interlinked, I find that generally speaking, conspiracy theories give too much credit to the ability of humans to successfully manage and control complex systems. Something mysterious is certainly going on, and the 'coincidences' that people like Icke cite defy conventional explanation, but if you'll allow a moment's indulgence in metaphysics, I think ultimately what is happening is that our deep ideologies and belief systems, and their unconscious shadows, generate a matrix of synchronicities that looks very much like a conspiracy. It is in fact a conspiracy with no conspirators. Everyone is a puppet, but there are no puppet-masters."
"Moreover, the appeal of conspiracy theories, which are usually nonfalsifiable, is just as much psychological as it is empirical. Conspiracy theories have a dark allure because they tap into our primal outrage and identify something onto which to channel it, something to blame and something to hate. Unfortunately, as numerous revolutionaries have discovered when they topple the oligarchs, our hatred is misplaced. The true culprit is much deeper and much more pervasive. It transcends conscious human agency, and even the bankers and oligarchs live under its thrall. The true culprit is the alien overlords that rule the world from their flying saucers. Just kidding. The true culprit, the true puppet-master that manipulates our elites from behind the scenes, is the money system itself: a credit-based, interest-driven system that arises from the ancient, rising tide of separation; that generates competition, polarization, and greed; that compels endless exponential growth; and, most importantly, that is coming to an end in our time as the fuel for that growth-social, natural, cultural, and spiritual capital-runs out."
"Usury is the very antithesis of the gift, for instead of giving to others when one has more than one needs, usury seeks to use the power of ownership to gain even more-to take from others rather than to give."
"Usury is built into the very fabric of money today, from the moment of its inception. Money originates when the Federal Reserve (or the ECB or other central bank) purchases interest-bearing securities (traditionally, Treasury notes, but more recently all kinds of mortgage-backed securities and other financial junk) on the open market. The Fed or central bank creates this new money out of thin air, at the stroke of a pen (or computer keyboard). For example, when the Fed bought $290 billion in mortgage-backed securities from Deutsche Bank in 2008, it didn't use existing money to do it; it created new money as an accounting entry in Deutsche Bank's account. This is the first step in money creation. Whatever the Fed or central bank purchases, it is always an interest-bearing security. In other words, it means that the money created accompanies a corresponding debt, and the debt is always for more than the amount of money created."
"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."
"Suppose you go to the bank and say, 'Mr. Banker, I would like a $1 million loan so I can buy this forest to protect it from logging. I won't generate any income from the forest that way, so I won't be able to pay you interest. But if you need the money back, I could sell the forest and pay you back the million dollars.' Unfortunately, the banker will have to decline your proposal, even if her heart wants to say yes. But if you go to the bank and say, 'I'd like a million dollars to purchase this forest, lease bulldozers, clear-cut it, and sell the timber for a total of $2 million, out of which I'll pay you 12 percent interest and make a tidy profit for myself, too,' then an astute banker will agree to your proposal. In the former instance, no new goods and services are created, so no money is made available. Money goes toward those who create new goods and services. This is why there are many paying jobs to be had doing things that are complicit in the conversion of natural and social capital into money, and few jobs to be had reclaiming the commons and protecting natural and cultural treasures."
"Let me put it simply: a portion of the interest rate says, 'I have money and you need it, so I am going to charge you for access to it-just because I can, just because I have it, and you don't.' In order to avoid polarization of wealth, this portion must be lower than the economic growth rate; otherwise, the mere ownership of money allows one to increase wealth faster than the average marginal efficiency of productive capital investment. In other words, you get rich faster by owning rather than producing. In practice, this is nearly always the case, because when economic growth speeds up, the authorities push interest rates higher. The rationale is to prevent inflation, but it is also a device to keep increasing the wealth and power of the owners of money."
"In the old days, military power and forced tribute were the instruments of empire; today it is debt. Debt forces nations and individuals to devote their productivity toward money. Individuals compromise their dreams and work at jobs to keep up with their debts. Nations convert subsistence agriculture and local self-sufficiency, which do not generate foreign exchange, into export commodity crops and sweatshop production, which do. Haiti has been in debt since 1825, when it was forced to compensate France for the property (i.e., slaves) lost in the slave revolt of 1804. When will it pay off its debt? Never. When will any of the Third World pay off its debt and devote its productivity to its own people? Never. When will most of you pay off your student loans, credit cards, and mortgages? Never."
"Why is inflation bad? No one likes to see rising prices, but if incomes are rising just as fast, what harm is done? The harm is done only to people who have savings; those who have debts actually benefit. What ordinary people fear is price inflation without wage inflation. If both prices and wages rise, then inflation is essentially a tax on idle money, redistributing wealth away from the wealthy and counteracting the effects of interest."
"When New Age teachers tell us to 'release our limiting beliefs around money,' to 'shed the mentality of scarcity,' to 'open to the flow of abundance,' or to become rich through the power of positive thinking, they are ignoring an important issue. Their ideas draw from a valid source: the realization that the scarcity of our world is an artifact of our collective beliefs, and not the fundamental reality; however, they are inherently inconsistent with the money system we have today."
"One of the principles of 'prosperity programming' is to let go of the guilt stemming from the belief that you can only be wealthy if another is poor, that more for me is less for you. The problem is that under today's money system it is true! More for me is less for you. The monetized realm grows at the expense of nature, culture, health, and spirit. The guilt we feel around money is quite justified. Certainly, we can create beautiful things, worthy organizations, and noble causes with money, but if we aim to earn money with these goals in mind, on some level we are robbing Peter to pay Paul."
"Today's money system rests on a foundation of Separation. It is as much an effect as it is a cause of our perception that we are discrete and separate subjects in a universe that is Other."
"Here is an extreme example that illustrates the flaw in 'prosperity programming' and, indirectly, in the present money system. Some years ago, a woman introduced me to a very special organization she had joined, called 'Gifting.' Basically, the way it worked is that first, you 'gift' $10,000 to the person who invites you. Then you find four people to each 'gift' you with $10,000, and then each of them goes out and brings the gifting concept to four more people, who each 'gift' them with $10,000. Everyone ends up with a net $30,000. The program literature explained this as a manifestation of universal abundance. All that is required is the right expansive attitude. Needless to say, I jumped at the opportunity. Just kidding. Instead I asked the woman, 'But aren't you just taking money from your friends?'<br />
<br />
'No,' she replied, 'because they are going to end up making $30,000 too, as long as they fully believe in the principles of gifting.'<br />
<br />
'But they are going to make that money from their friends. Eventually we're going to run out of people, and the last ones who joined will lose $10,000. You are essentially taking it from them, stealing it, and using a language of gifting to do so.'<br />
<br />
You may be surprised to learn that I never heard from that woman again. Her indignation and denial mirror that of the beneficiaries of the money economy as a whole, which itself bears a structural similarity to her pyramid scheme. To see it, imagine that each $10,000 entrance fee were created as an interest-bearing debt (which in fact it is). You have to bring in more people under you, or you lose your property. The only way those 'at the bottom' can avoid penury is to find even more people to draw into the money economy, for example through colonization-ahem, I mean 'opening up new markets to free trade'-and through economic growth: converting relationship, culture, nature, and so on into money. This delays the inevitable, and the inevitable-an intensifying polarization of wealth-rears its ugly head whenever growth slows. The people who have been left holding the debt bag have no way to pay it off: no one else to take the money from, and nothing to convert into new money. That, as we shall see, is the root of the economic, social, and ecological crisis our civilization faces today."<br />
"The financial crisis we are facing today arises from the fact that there is almost no more social, cultural, natural, and spiritual capital left to convert into money. Centuries of near-continuous money creation have left us so destitute that we have nothing left to sell. Our forests are damaged beyond repair, our soil depleted and washed into the sea, our fisheries fished out, and the rejuvenating capacity of the earth to recycle our waste saturated. Our cultural treasury of songs and stories, of images and icons, has been looted and copyrighted. Any clever phrase you can think of is already a trademarked slogan. Our very human relationships and abilities have been taken away from us and sold back, so that we are now dependent on strangers, and therefore on money, for things few humans ever paid for until recently: food, shelter, clothing, entertainment, child care, cooking. Life itself has become a consumer item."
"The continuation of capitalism as we know it depends on an infinite supply of these new industries, which essentially must convert infinite new realms of social, natural, cultural, and spiritual capital into money. The problem is that these resources are finite, and the closer they come to exhaustion, the more painful their extraction becomes. Therefore, contemporaneous with the financial crisis we have an ecological crisis and a health crisis. They are intimately interlinked. We cannot convert much more of the earth into money, or much more of our health into money, before the basis of life itself is threatened."
"The credit bubble that is blamed as the source of our current economic woes was not a cause of them at all, but only a symptom. When returns on capital investment began falling in the early 1970s, capital began a desperate search for other ways to maintain its expansion. When each bubble popped commodities in the late 1970s, S&L real estate investments in the 1980s, the dotcom stocks in the 1990s, and real estate and financial derivatives in the 2000s, capital immediately moved on to the next, maintaining an illusion of economic expansion. But the real economy was stagnating. There were not enough needs to meet the overcapacity of production, not enough social and natural capital left to convert into money."
"To maintain the exponential growth of money, either the volume of goods and services must be able to keep pace with it, or imperialism and war must be able to escalate indefinitely. All have reached their limit. There is nowhere to turn."
"There is no more room for economic growth as we have known it; that is, no more room for the conversion of life and the world into money. Therefore, even if we follow the more radical policy prescriptions from the left, hoping by an annulment of debts and a redistribution of income to ignite renewed economic growth, we can only succeed in depleting what remains of our divine bequest of nature, culture, and community. At best, economic stimulus will allow a modest, short-lived expansion as the functions that were demonetized during the recession are remonetized. For example, because of the economic situation, some friends and I cover for each other\'s child care needs, whereas in prosperous times we might have sent our kids to preschool. Our reciprocity represents an opportunity for economic growth: what we do for each other freely can be converted into monetized services. Generalized to the whole society, this is only an opportunity to grow back to where we were before, at which point the same crisis will emerge again."
"It is not only the Wall Street casino economy that is an unsustainable pyramid scheme. The larger economic system, based as it is on the eternal conversion of a finite commonwealth into money, is unsustainable as well. It is like a bonfire that must burn higher and higher, to the exhaustion of all available fuel. Only a fool would think that a fire can burn ever-higher when the supply of fuel is finite. To extend the metaphor, the recent deindustrialization and financialization of the economy amount to using the heat to create more fuel. According to the second law of thermodynamics, the amount created is always less than the amount expended to create it. Obviously, the practice of borrowing new money to pay the principal and interest of old debts cannot last very long, but that is what the economy as a whole has done for ten years now."
"In the face of the impending crisis, people often ask what they can do to protect themselves. 'Buy gold? Stockpile canned goods? Build a fortified compound in a remote area? What should I do?' I would like to suggest a different kind of question: 'What is the most beautiful thing I can do?' You see, the gathering crisis presents a tremendous opportunity. Deflation, the destruction of money, is only a categorical evil if the creation of money is a categorical good. However, you can see from the examples I have given that the creation of money has in many ways impoverished us all. Conversely, the destruction of money has the potential to enrich us. It offers the opportunity to reclaim parts of the lost commonwealth from the realm of money and property."
"In the meantime, before the collapse of the current system, anything we do to protect some natural or social resource from conversion into money will both hasten the collapse and mitigate its severity. Any forest you save from development, any road you stop, any cooperative playgroup you establish; anyone you teach to heal themselves, or to build their own house, cook their own food, or make their own clothes; any wealth you create or add to the public domain; anything you render off-limits to the world-devouring Machine will help shorten the Machine's life span. And when the money system collapses, if you already do not depend on money for some portion of life's necessities and pleasures, then the collapse of money will pose much less of a harsh transition for you."
"Resisting or postponing the collapse will only make it worse. Finding new ways to grow the economy will only consume what is left of our wealth. Let us stop resisting the revolution in human beingness. If we want to outlast the multiple crises unfolding today, let us not seek to survive them. That is the mind-set of separation; that is resistance, a clinging to a dying past. Instead, let us shift our perspective toward reunion and think in terms of what we can give. What can we each contribute to a more beautiful world? That is our only responsibility and our only security."
"We can engage in conscious, purposeful money destruction in place of the unconscious destruction of money that happens in a collapsing economy. If you still have money to invest, invest it in enterprises that explicitly seek to build community, protect nature, and preserve the cultural commonwealth. Expect a zero or negative financial return on your investment-that is a good sign that you are not unintentionally converting even more of the world to money. Whether or not you have money to invest, you can also reclaim what was sold away by taking steps out the money economy. Anything you learn to do for yourself or for other people, without paying for it; any utilization of recycled or discarded materials; anything you make instead of buy, give instead of sell; any new skill or new song or new art you teach yourself or another will reduce the dominion of money and grow a gift economy to sustain us through the coming transition. The world of the Gift, echoing primitive gift societies, the web of ecology, and the spiritual teachings of the ages, is nigh upon us. It tugs on our heartstrings and awakens our generosity. Shall we heed its call, before the remainder of earth's beauty is consumed?"
"It is not without reason that our financial elites have been called a priesthood. Donning ceremonial garb, speaking an arcane language, wielding mysterious inscriptions, they can with a mere word, or a mere stroke of a pen, cause fortunes and nations to rise and fall."
"Some would scoff at primitive cave-dwellers who imagined that their representations of animals on cave walls could magically affect the hunt. Yet today we produce our own talismans, our own systems of magic symbology, and indeed affect physical reality through them. A few numbers change here and there, and thousands of workers erect a skyscraper. Some other numbers change, and a venerable business shuts its doors. The foreign debt of a Third World country, again mere numbers in a computer, consigns its people to endless enslavement producing commodity goods that are shipped abroad. College students, ridden with anxiety, deny their dreams and hurry into the workforce to pay off their student loans, their very will subject to a piece of paper with magical symbols ('Account Statement') sent to them once every moon, like some magical chit in a voodoo cult. These slips of paper that we call money, these electronic blips, bear a potent magic indeed!"
"Before we become too alarmed about the giveaways of trillions upon trillions of dollars to the wealthy, let us touch back again on the reality of money. What actually happens when this money is given away? Almost nothing happens. What happens is that bits change in computers, and the few people who understand the interpretations of those bits declare that money has been transferred. Those bits are the symbolic representation of an agreement about a story. This story includes who is rich and who is poor, who owns and who owes. It is said that our children and grandchildren will be paying these bailout and stimulus debts, but they could also simply be declared into nonexistence. They are only as real as the story we agree on that contains them. Our grandchildren will pay them only if the story, the system of meanings, that defines those debts still exists. But I think more and more people sense that the federal debt, the U.S. foreign debt, and a lot of our private mortgage and credit card debts will never be repaid."
"When money evaporates as it is doing in the current cycle of debt deflation, little changes right away in the physical world. Stacks of currency do not go up in flames; factories do not blow up; engines do not grind to a halt; oil wells do not run dry; people's economic skills do not disappear. All of the materials and skills that are exchanged in human economy, upon which we rely for food, shelter, transportation, entertainment, and so on, still exist as before. What has disappeared is our capacity to coordinate our activities and focus our common efforts. We can still envision a new airport, but we can no longer build it. The magic talisman by which the pronouncement 'An airport shall be built here' crystallizes into material reality has lost its power. Human hands, minds, and machinery retain all their capacities, yet we can no longer do what we once could do. The only thing that has changed is our perceptions."
"The story that is ending in our time, then, goes much deeper than the story of money. I call this story the Ascent of Humanity. It is a story of endless growth, and the money system we have today is an embodiment of that story, enabling and propelling the conversion of the natural realm into the human realm. It began millennia ago, when humans first tamed fire and made tools; it accelerated when we applied these tools to the domestication of animals and plants and began to conquer the wild, to make the world ours. It reached its glorious zenith in the age of the Machine, when we created a wholly artificial world, harnessing all the forces of nature and imagining ourselves to be its lords and possessors. And now, that story is drawing to a close as the inexorable realization dawns that the story is not true. Despite our pretenses, the world is not really ours; despite our illusions, we are not in control of it. As the unintended consequences of technology proliferate, as our communities, our health, and the ecological basis of civilization deteriorate, as we explore new depths of misery, violence, and alienation, we enter the story's final stages: crisis, climax, and denouement. The rituals of our storytellers are to no avail. No story can persist beyond its ending."
"Just as life does not end with adolescence, neither does civilization's evolution stop with the end of growth. We are in the midst of a transition parallel to an adolescent's transition into adulthood. Physical growth ceases, and vital resources turn inward to foster growth in other realms."
"I remember as a teenager reading Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, whose black-and-white characters, hyperrationality, and moral absolutism appealed strongly to my adolescent mind. The book is a manifesto of the discrete and separate self, the mercenary ego, and it appeals to adolescent minds to this day. The book devoted its most vitriolic ridicule to the phrase 'From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs,' painting a picture of people outdoing each other in their postures of neediness so as to be allotted a greater share of resources, while producers had no motivation to produce. This scenario, which was in certain respects played out in the Communist block, echoes a primal fear of the scarcity-conditioned modern self, what if I give and receive nothing in return? This desire of an assurance of return, a compensation for the risk of generosity, is the fundamental mind-set of interest, an adolescent mind-set to be superseded by a more expansive adult self that has matured into full membership in the community of being. We are here to express our gifts; it is among our deepest desires, and we cannot be fully alive otherwise."
"Usury-money is the money of growth, and it was perfect for humanity\'s growth stage on earth and for the story of Ascent, of dominance and mastery. The next stage is one of cocreative partnership with earth. The Story of the People for this new stage is coming together right now. Its weavers are the visionaries of fields like permaculture, holistic medicine, renewable energy, mycoremediation, local currencies, restorative justice, attachment parenting, and a million more. To undo the damage that the Age of Usury has wrought on nature, culture, health, and spirit will require all the gifts that make us human, and indeed is so impossibly demanding that it will take those gifts to a new level of development."
"We are here to create something beautiful; I call it 'the more beautiful world our hearts tell us is possible.' As the truth of that sinks in, deeper and deeper, and as the convergence of crises pushes us out of the old world, inevitably more and more people will live from that truth: the truth that more for you is not less for me; the truth that what I do unto you, so I do unto myself; the truth of living to give what you can and take what you need. We can start doing it right now. We are afraid, but when we do it for real, the world meets our needs and more. We then find that the story of Separation, embodied in the money we have known, is not true and never was. Yet the last ten millennia were not in vain. Sometimes it is necessary to live a lie to its fullest before we are ready to take the next step into the truth. The lie of separation in the age of usury is now complete. We have explored its fullness, its farthest extremes, and seen all it has wrought, the deserts and the prisons, the concentration camps and the wars, the wastage of the good, the true, and the beautiful. Now, the capacities we have developed through this long journey of ascent will serve us well in the imminent Age of Reunion."
"As our sojourn of separation comes to an end and we reunite with nature, our attitude of human exceptionalism from the laws of nature is ending as well. For decades, the environmental movement has been telling us, 'We are not exempt from nature's laws.' Increasingly, painfully, we are experiencing the truth of that. A child takes from his mother, blissfully heedless of her sacrifices and her pain; and so we have taken from earth during the long infancy of the human species. Our money system, our economic ideology, has for better or worse been an agent of that taking. Now, as our relationship to earth shifts toward that of a lover, we become acutely aware of the harm we are doing. In a romantic partnership, what you do to your partner bounces back to you; her pain is your pain."
"Whatever backs money becomes sacred: accordingly, growth has occupied a sacred status for many centuries. In various guises of the story of Ascent-progress, harnessing natural forces, conquering final frontiers, mastering nature, we have carried out a holy crusade to be fruitful and multiply. But growth is sacred to us no longer."
"Gold's association with money encourages the continued (and very environmentally destructive) effort to mine more gold. To dig holes in the ground and fill them back up again is the epitome of wasted work, yet that is essentially what gold mining does. At huge effort, we dig gold ore out of the ground, transport it, refine it, and eventually put it into other holes in the ground called vaults. This effort, and the scarcity of gold, is one (very haphazard) way to regulate the money supply, but why not regulate it through purposeful social and political agreements, or through some more organic process, and save all that hole digging?"
"What if money were 'backed' by clean water, unpolluted air, healthy ecosystems, and the cultural commons? Is there a way to encourage the creation of more and more of these in the same way that the social agreement of gold's value drives us to mine more and more of it? Just as the monetization of gold causes us to covet it and seek to produce more of it, and to relinquish it only to meet a real, pressing need, so also might the use of these things for money cause us to create more of them, to create a more beautiful planet, and to sacrifice them only for a well-considered reason, only in response to a real need, only to create something as valuable as what has been destroyed. We destroy many things today for the sake of money, but we do not willingly destroy money itself. And so it shall be."
""I am not surprised that ancient people worshiped the sun, the only thing we know that gives without expectation or even possibility of return. The sun is generosity manifest. It powers the entire kingdom of life, and, in the form of fossil fuels, solar, wind, and hydroelectric power, can power the technosphere as well. Marveling at this virtually limitless source of free energy, I can touch upon the utter, almost infantile, gratitude that ancient sun-worshipers must have felt."
"But there is more to the story. A vein runs through spiritual tradition that says that we, too, give back to the sun; indeed that the sun only continues to shine through our gratitude. Ancient sun rituals weren't only to thank the sun, they were to keep it shining. Solar energy is the light of earthly love reflected back at us. Here, too, the circle of the gift operates. We are not separate from even the sun, which is why, perhaps, we can sometimes feel an inner sun shining from within us, irradiating all others with the warmth and light of generosity."
"What is property but a social agreement that a certain person has certain rights to use something in certain prescribed ways? Property is not an objective feature of reality, and to reify it and make it into something elemental, as both capitalistic and communistic theory do, is to unconsciously enslave ourselves to the story that contains it."
"Another consequence of commons-based currency is that we would pay a lot more for many things that are cheap today because their prices would embody costs that we now pass on to other people or future generations. Goods would become more expensive in comparison to services, providing an economic incentive for repairing, reusing, and recycling. Gone would be the skewed economics that makes it cheaper to buy a new television set than repair an old one. Gone would be the present financial incentive for planned obsolescence. A new business model (emerging already in some industries) would blossom: extremely durable, easily repairable machines that are leased rather than sold to consumers."
"It was only two generations ago that appliances as humble as a toaster would be taken to repair shops. Even shoes and clothes were mended. Not only are such services inherently local, thus helping to invigorate local economies, but they also contribute to an attitude of caring toward our material things, and by extension toward materiality in general. A life full of throwaway stuff is not a rich life. How can we have a sacred economy if we don't treat its subjects, the things that people create and exchange, with reverence? I find it very satisfying that a money system based on a protective reverence for nature induces, on the individual level, the same reverent attitude toward the things we make from natural raw materials."
"War is an unavoidable accompaniment to an economic system that demands growth. Whether through the colonization of lands or the subjugation of peoples, we have a constant need to access new sources of social and natural capital to feed the money machine. Wars also increase consumption, alleviating the crisis of overcapacity described earlier. Competition for resources and markets was thus a primary driver of the wars of the twentieth century, both among the great powers, and against anyone who resisted colonization and imperialism. Limiting resource consumption is one of the pillars of a steady-state or degrowth economy, which short-circuits this primary driving force for war and frees up vast resources to turn toward the goal of healing the planet."
"In a world where the things we need and use go bad, sharing comes naturally. The hoarder ends up sitting alone atop a pile of stale bread, rusty tools, and spoiled fruit, and no one wants to help him, for he has helped no one. Money today, however, is not like bread, fruit, or indeed any natural object. It is the lone exception to nature's law of return, the law of life, death, and rebirth, which says that all things ultimately return to their source. Money does not decay over time, but in its abstraction from physicality, it remains changeless or even grows with time, exponentially, thanks to the power of interest."
" It is no accident that the first highly monetized society, ancient Greece, was also the birthplace of the modern concept of the individual."
"After all, if interest causes competition, scarcity, and polarization, then might not its opposite create cooperation, abundance, and community? And if interest represents the proceeds from the ancient and ongoing robbery of the commons, might not its opposite replenish it?"
"Why does 'decay' seem negative, and 'preservation' a virtue? This attitude arises again from the story of Ascent, in which humanity's destiny is to transcend nature; to triumph over entropy, chaos, and decay; and to establish an ordered realm: scientific, rational, clean, controlled. Complementary to it is a spirituality of separation, in which a nonmaterial, eternal, deathless, divine soul inhabits an impermanent, mortal, profane body. So we have sought to conquer the body, conquer the world, and arrest the processes of decay. Unfortunately, by so doing we also arrest the larger process of which decay is part: renewal, rebirth, recycling, and the spiraling evolution toward more vastly integrated complexity. Thankfully, the stories of Separation and Ascent are drawing to a close. It is time to reclaim the beauty and necessity of decay, both in our thinking and in our economics."
"Today we are at the brink of a similar crisis and face a similar choice between temporarily shoring up the old world through an intensification of centralized control or letting go of control and stepping into the new. Make no mistake: the consequences of a free-money system would be profound, encompassing economic, social, psychological, and spiritual dimensions. Money is so fundamental, so defining of our civilization, that it would be naive to hope for any authentic civilizational shift that did not involve a fundamental shift in money as well."
"Contrary to orthodox belief, the heart does not pump blood through the system, but rather receives it, listens to it, and sends it back out again. It is an organ of perception. According to what it senses about the blood, the heart produces a vast array of hormones, many of them only recently discovered, that communicate with other parts of the body, just as its own cells are affected by exogenous hormones. This listening, modulating role of the heart offers a very different perspective on the role of a central monetary authority: an organ to listen and respond to the needs of the system, rather than to pump money through it. The Fed is supposed to listen to the pulse of the economy to regulate the money supply in order to maintain interest rates at the appropriate level. The injection of new money into the economy could be done the same way it is today 'open market operations' or through government spending of fiat money, depending on which version of commons-use rents are employed. Generally speaking, money lost to demurrage must be injected back into the economy; otherwise the level of reserves would shrink every year, regardless of the need for money to facilitate economic activity. The result would be the same pattern of defaults, scarcity, and concentration of wealth that threatens us today. Therefore, we still need a financial heart that listens to the blood and signals for the creation of more (or less) of it."
"As a practical matter, everything in the material and social world has carry costs, as Gesell pointed out with his examples of newspapers, potatoes, and so on. Machinery and equipment break down, require maintenance, and become obsolete. Even the very few substances that don't suffer oxidation, such as gold and platinum, must be transported, guarded, and insured against theft; precious metal coinage can also be scraped or clipped. That money is an exception to this universal law, the law of return, is part of the broader ideology of human exceptionalism relative to nature. Decaying currency is therefore no mere gimmick: it is an acknowledgment of reality. The ancient Greeks, unconsciously drawing on the qualities of this new thing called money, created a conception of spirit that was similarly above nature's laws, eternal, abstract, nonmaterial. This division of the world into spirit and matter, and the consequent treatment of the world as if it were not sacred, is coming to an end. Ending along with it is the kind of money that suggested this division in the first place. No longer will money be an exception to the universal law of impermanence."
"The opportunity we had in 2008 will repeat itself, because the debt crisis won't go away (without miraculously high economic growth). Each time, the solution has been yet more debt, which is shifted from individuals and corporations to nations, and back again, always growing. For example, when Ireland's banks were on the verge of failure in 2010, the government bailed them out, transferring the problem onto its own balance sheet and engendering a sovereign debt crisis. To avert catastrophe, the IMF and ECB gave Ireland new loans at 6 percent interest to pay the old. Unless the Irish economy grows by more than 6 percent a year (impossible given the harsh austerity measures upon which the loans were conditioned), the problem will reappear in a few years and be even worse. We are merely kicking the problem into the future."
"At some point, we as a society will say, 'Enough!' A bailout will still be necessary, for the consequences of a sudden system-wide default would be catastrophic. But when it happens, and it could happen simultaneously in many debt categories, let us face the truth. The concentration of wealth, and the usury behind it, must end. We may have no choice but to rescue the wealthy, for each part of the global economy is connected to all the others, but let that rescue come at a price: the gradual freeing of society from debt."
"Whereas interest promotes the discounting of future cash flows, demurrage encourages long-term thinking. In present-day accounting, a forest generating $1 million dollars a year sustainably forever is more valuable if clear-cut for an immediate profit of $50 million. (The 'net present value' of the sustainable forest calculated at a discount rate of 5 percent is only $20 million.) This discounting of the future results in the infamously short-sighted behavior of corporations that sacrifice (even their own) long-term well-being for the short-term results of the fiscal quarter. Such behavior is perfectly rational in an interest-based economy, but in a demurrage system, pure self-interest would dictate that the forest be preserved. No longer would greed motivate the robbing of the future for the benefit of the present. As the exponential discounting of future cash flows implies the 'cashing in' of the entire earth, this feature of demurrage is highly attractive."
"This mentality pervades our culture. You must delay gratification. You must restrain your desires with the thought of future rewards. Pain now is gain later. Do your homework for the grade. Go to work for the salary. Do the workout to be healthy. Go on a diet to be thin. Devote your life to something that pays well, even if it isn't your passion, so that you can have an enjoyable retirement. In all of these things we apply a regime of threat and incentive designed to overcome our laziness, our selfishness. Interest becomes a motivator in the war against the self, the overcoming of our wanton improvidence."
"But is this really human nature? Is it really our nature to consume and over-consume without thought for other people, other beings, or our own future? No. The ancient Greeks, not given to overly charitable views of human nature, had it right. As Aristophanes said, in all things, bread, wine, sex, and so on, there is satiety. Our needs are limited, and when we have fulfilled them, we turn to other things and are moved to generosity. 'But of money, there is no satiety.' It is not the propensity to consume that bears no limit; to the contrary, limitless desire arises with money. After attaining a surfeit of consumables, people covet money itself, not what it can buy, and this desire has no limit."
"Of course, for some people, food addicts, sex addicts, alcohol addicts, there is indeed no satiety in those things Aristophanes listed. Does this prove that human beings are greedy after all? Actually, the example of addiction illuminates what is wrong with money. Addiction happens when we use something as a substitute for what we really want or need, food, for example, as a substitute for connection; sex as a substitute for emotional intimacy; and so on. Money as universal end becomes a substitute for many other things, including those very things that the money economy has destroyed: community, connection to place, connection to nature, leisure, and more."
""Free-money reintroduces the economic mind-set of a hunter-gatherer. In today's system, it is much better to have a thousand dollars than it is for ten people to owe you a hundred dollars. In a negative-interest system, unless you need to spend the money right now, the opposite is true. Since money decays with time, if I have money I'm not using, I am happy to lend it to you, just as if I had more bread than I could eat. If I need some in the future, I can call in my obligations or create new ones with anyone within my network who has more money than he or she immediately needs. Similarly, when a primitive hunter killed a large animal, he or she would give away most of the meat according to kinship status, personal affection, and need. As with decaying money, it was much better to have lots of people 'owe you one' than it was to have a big pile of rotting meat, or even of dried jerky that had to be transported or secured. Why would you even want to, when your community is as generous to you as you are to it? Security came from sharing. The good luck of your neighbor was your own good luck as well. If you came across an unexpected large source of wealth, you threw a huge party. "
"As a member of the Pirah tribe explained it when questioned about food storage, 'I store meat in the belly of my brother.' Or consider the !Kung concept of wealth explored in this exchange between anthropologist Richard Lee and a !Kung man, !Xoma: I asked !Xoma, 'What makes a man a kaiha [rich man], if he has many bags of beads and other valuables] in his hut?'<br />
<br />
'Holding kai does not make you a kaiha,' replied !Xoma. 'It is when someone makes many goods travel around that we might call him kaiha.'<br />
<br />
What !Xoma seemed to be saying was that it wasn't the number of your goods that constituted your wealth; it was the number of your friends. The wealthy person was measured by the frequency of his or her transactions and not by the inventory of goods on hand."<br />
"Can you imagine a society where the greatest prestige, power, and leadership accord to those with the greatest inclination and capacity to give? Such was the situation in archaic societies. Status came through generosity, and generosity created gratitude and obligation. To be a lord or king, you had to hold sumptuous feasts and give lavish gifts to peers and underlings. We have an especially clear example of this in the Nibelungen, the great German saga of the high middle ages that draws on source material from much earlier. When Kriemhild, widow of the great hero Siegfried, starts lavishly giving away the hoard she inherited from him, the king feels so threatened that he has her murdered and the treasure dumped into the Rhine (where it remains to this day!). The king\'s authority was sustained by gifts, and that authority was undermined when someone else started giving greater gifts than he."
"Whereas security in an interest-based system comes from accumulating money, in a demurrage system it comes from having productive channels through which to direct it, that is, to become a nexus of the flow of wealth and not a point for its accumulation. In other words, it puts the focus on relationships, not on 'having.' It accords with a different sense of self, affirmed not by enclosing more and more of the world within the confines of me and mine, but by developing and deepening relationships with others. It encourages reciprocation, sharing, and the rapid circulation of wealth."
"Think about it. Is it from an attitude of scarcity or abundance that someone buys fifty pairs of shoes? Is it the secure person or the insecure person who buys a third sports car and a 10,000-square-foot house? Whence this urge to own, to dominate, to control? It comes from a lonely, destitute self in a hostile, ungiving world."
"My dear reader, think about it: is it really who you are to say, 'I will lend you money, but only if you give me even more in return?' When we need money to live, is that not a formula for slavery? Significantly, the forgiveness of debts for which Solon was famous was prompted in part by the indebted servitude of a growing proportion of the population. Today, young people feel enslaved to their college loans, householders to their mortgages, and entire Third World nations to their foreign debt. Interest is slavery. And since the condition of slavery demeans the slaveholder as much as the slave, in our hearts we want none of it."
"I have long been impatient with 'sustainability,' as if that were an end in itself. Isn't it more important to think about what we want to sustain, and therefore what we want to create? Many beautiful, necessary things are not sustainable: pregnancy, for example. I am heartened by the recent shift of thinking away from sustainability and toward transition. What we are transitioning to will be far more sustainable than our current way of life, but that is not the ultimate goal, just as the ultimate goal of life is not merely to stay alive."
"A core concept of sacred economics is that it is an extension of ecology rather than an exception to it. So we have to ask, is nature fundamentally stable, sustainable, or harmonious? Does it have the characteristics that we want in a society? Some people dismiss the idea that nature is harmonious or balanced, emphasizing instead its cruel, competitive, and wasteful aspects. This position has deep ideological implications, for it justifies the program of Ascent: to dominate and master nature through science and technology. Usually, people sympathetic to this view also carry a Hobbesian view of primitive society and human nature and see civilization with its various methods of social control to be a great improvement over brutal, primitive times. This is part of the story of Ascent, to rise above our animal nature into an exclusively human realm."
"Unsustainable processes do happen in nature, and they are not aberrations. They too serve a purpose: to propel systems from one phase to another."
"It is true that positive-feedback loops such as the Precambrian oxygen catastrophe exist in nature. They come at special moments, though, moments of transformation. It is, for example, a positive feedback cascade of self-reinforcing, self-augmenting hormones that triggers the childbirth process. Childbirth labor is unsustainable, it would kill the mother if it continued too long, but once its goal is accomplished, the mother returns to homeostasis. Positive feedback phases take an organism or ecosystem from an old steady-state phase to a new one."
"Phases of rapid growth driven by competition, followed by a phase transition into a steady state, are quite common in nature. Think of an immature ecosystem with weeds and saplings racing for sunlight. This is but a phase of a larger process that culminates in a symbiotic, complex, nonlinear, and stable forest. Immersed in an economy and ideology corresponding to the immature ecosystem, we have seen its headlong competition as nature's way. Perhaps humanity too is maturing, self-organizing into mutualistic wholes in which competition and growth are no longer primary."
" Obviously, the word 'recession' has negative connotations today, though it really just means a time of receding. I am most emphatically not saying that we must make some sacrifices to our quality of life for the good of the planet. Rather, we need but reduce the role of money. If our future includes a diversification in the modes of human sharing, then economic growth no longer has the same meaning it has today. We don't need to become more altruistic and self-sacrificing, forgoing our own benefit for the good of others. How tightly we hold to the equation of money and self-interest! But it shall be so no longer."
"Today already there is a vast software industry that operates using very little money. I wrote this book on OpenOffice, a software package available for a voluntary donation that was written mostly by a community of unpaid programmers. One might say that those programmers are 'paid' not in money, but in the esteem of their fellows, a kind of social currency. I prefer to see their productivity as a gift economy, which naturally generates respect and gratitude among community members. Either way, this mode of production does not show up in GDP statistics. We could easily have a shrinking 'economy' that offers more and more, better and better, products like these. And the more there are, the less we need money; the less we need money, the more leisure time we have; the more leisure time we have, the more we can afford to make our own offerings to the gift economy."
"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."
"Under the current system, growth in leisure is impossible without some kind of wealth redistribution. Imagine what would happen if, all of a sudden, a magical technology were found that could double the productivity of every worker. Now the same amount of goods is available with half the labor. If (as in a steady-state or degrowth economy) demand does not increase, then half the workers are now superfluous. To stay competitive, firms must fire half their workers, make them part-time, or pay them less. Aggregate wages will fall by half since no one will pay workers more than the revenues they are generating for the employer. The laid-off workers no longer have the money to buy the products, even though they are about 50 percent cheaper. In the end, despite more goods being available with less effort, the money to buy those goods doesn't get to the people who could use them. Leisure has increased all right; it is called 'unemployment', and the results are catastrophic: a rapid concentration of wealth, deflation, bankruptcies, and so on."
"In the past we always had a choice of what to do with gains in efficiency: work less or consume more. Compelled by a growth-dependent money system, we consistently chose the latter. Instead of working less hard to meet existing needs more easily, we have constantly created new needs to meet or, more often, transferred needs from the gift into the money realm or sought to fulfill infinite needs with finite things. Such has driven our ascent, the development of our gifts of hand and mind. Though the cost to nature, culture, spirit, and humanity has been high, this development is not without its rightful purpose. Today, as the natural and cultural commonwealth is exhausted, the context of our choice 'work less or consume more' is changing. The age of ascent is winding to a close, and we seek to apply the gifts we have developed toward their true purpose in a new relationship to Earth. The age of growth is over."
"The easy affluence made possible by technology, and by the natural wealth of the earth, is the collective treasure of the entire human race; merely by being born, each person is entitled to a share of it."
"The assumption that people do not want to work runs very deep in economics and taps into a yet deeper source: the story of the separate self. If more for you is less for me, if your well-being is irrelevant or inimical to my own, why should I desire to give anything to anyone? The 'selfish gene' of biology, seeking to maximize its reproductive self-interest, is congruent to the 'rational actor' of economics, seeking to maximize its financial self-interest. We supposedly don't want to do any work that contributes to the benefit of others unless there is something in it for us. We don't really desire to give; we must be forced to, paid to.<br />
<br />
Economics textbooks speak of the 'disutility' of work, assuming that if not 'compensated' with wages, people will naturally prefer to, prefer to do what? Prefer to consume? Prefer to do nothing? To be entertained? The justification for a scarcity-based economic system is built into its premises, which include deep prejudices about human nature. This book assumes a different human nature: that we are fundamentally divine, creative, generous beings; that to give and to create are among our deepest desires. To embody this understanding in the money system, we must find ways to richly reward gifts to society, without those rewards becoming a form of pressure or slavery."<br />
"I have a more selfish motive, too, for not wanting to live in a slave world: the products of slave labor embody the spirit that goes into them. Who but a conscript would produce the crappy, dispirited, toxic, ugly, cheap objects and buildings that surround us today? Who but a slave would be so resentful and unpleasant in providing services? The vast majority of our 'goods and services' are made by people who only do so for the money, who only do their work because they 'have to.' I want to live in a world of beautiful things created by people who love what they do."
"The vast reduction in what goes by the name of 'work' today is not going to leave us idle, to dissipate our time in vapid pleasures. I stated above that human needs are finite, but 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."
"Up until now, we have instead sought to make the infinite finite, and thereby debased art, love, knowledge, science, and beauty all. We have sold them out. When commercial application guides science, we end up not with science but with its counterfeit: pseudoscience in service of profit. When art bows to money, we get 'art' instead of art, a self-conscious self-caricature. Similar perversions result when knowledge is subordinated to power, when beauty is used to sell product, and when wealth tries to buy love or love is turned toward gaining wealth. But the age of the sellout is over."
"The long ascent of the monetized realm is drawing to a close, and its role in our work and our lives is changing so as to upend long-held intuitions, fears, and limitations. Since the time of the ancient Greeks, money has been, increasingly, both a universal means and a universal end, the object of limitless desire. No longer. Its retreat has begun, and we will devote more and more of our energy to those areas that money cannot reach. The growth of leisure, or, more accurately, the growth of labor done for love, goes hand in hand with the degrowth of the money economy. Humanity is entering its adulthood, a time when physical growth ends and we turn our attention to that which we want to give."
"A sacred way of life connects us to the people and places around us. That means that a sacred economy must be in large part a local economy, in which we have multidimensional, personal relationships with the land and people who meet our needs, and whose needs we meet in turn. Otherwise we suffer a divide between the social and the material, in which our social relationships lack substance, and in which our economic relationships are impersonal. It is inevitable, when we purchase generic services from distant strangers and standardized products from distant lands, that we feel a loss of connection, an alienation, and a sense that we, like the things we buy, are replaceable. To the extent that what we provide is standard and impersonal, we are replaceable."
"The threads of community are of two types: gift and story, warp and woof. In short, a strong community weaves together social and economic ties. The people we depend on, and who depend on us, are the same people whom we know and who know us. It is just that simple. The same goes for the broader community of all beings: the land and its ecosystems. Lacking community, we suffer a painful deficit of being, for it is these multidimensional ties that define who we are and expand us beyond the miserable, lonely, separate ego, the 'bubble of psychology in a prison of flesh.' We yearn to restore our lost connections, our lost being."
"If the people who grow your food and make your stuff live in Haiti or China or Pakistan, then their well-being or suffering is invisible. If they live nearby, you can still exploit them perhaps, but you can't easily avoid knowing it. Local economy faces us with the consequences of our actions, tightening the circle of karma and fostering a sense of self that includes others. Local economy is therefore aligned with the deep spiritual shift of our time."
"The fundamental idea behind time banks is deeply egalitarian, both because everyone's time is valued equally and because everyone starts out with the same amount of it. If there is one thing that we can be said to truly own, it is our time. Unlike any other possession, as long as we are alive, our time is inseparable from our selves. Our choice of how to spend time is our choice of how to live life. And no matter how wealthy one is in terms of money, it is impossible to buy more time. Money might buy you life-saving surgery or otherwise enhance longevity, but it won't guarantee long life; nor can it purchase more than twenty-four hours of experience in each day. In this we are all equal; a money system that recognizes this equality is intuitively appealing."
"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."
"Ultimately, what economics attempts to measure, underneath money, is the totality of all that human beings make and do for each other."
"Of all the things that human beings make and do for each other, it is the unquantifiable ones that contribute most to human happiness. You might, for instance, quantify leisure time and assign it a dollar value to calculate a society's well-being, but how is that leisure time spent? It could be spent mired in an addiction, in mindless entertainment, in intimacy with another person, or in telling stories to children. And even if we somehow accounted for these distinctions, could we quantify how present someone is when they are telling those stories? Can we quantify how anxious someone is when at work? If public policy is guided by the maximization of a quantity, be it GDP or some other measure, the most important things will surely be left out."
"Growth, on one level, might end-the growth of the monetized realm, the growth of our appropriation of nature but another kind of development will continue: the growth of the human spirit, with its infinite need for beauty, love, connection, and knowledge. A zero-growth future is not a stagnant future, no more than a human life stagnates when a teenager grows her last inch at age sixteen."
"When the qualitative is matched with the quantitative, the infinite to the finite, then the former is debased. The exchange of beauty for money, intimacy for money, attention for money, all smell of prostitution. The distaste of the artist for the world of commerce is not just an egotism that says he is above it all. When money tries to buy beauty, love, knowledge, connection, and so forth, either the buyer receives a counterfeit, or the seller, having sold the infinitely precious for a finite sum, is exploited. It is really quite simple; as the Beatles put it, 'Money can't buy you love.'"
"Whether or not money is involved, the fundamental issues of economy, what people make and do for each other-are these: (1) how to connect the provider of a gift with the person who needs that gift, (2) how to acknowledge and honor those who give generously of their gifts, and (3) how to coordinate the gifts of many people across space and time in order to create things transcending the needs or gifts of any individual. Though it may not be obvious, these goals correspond roughly to the three cardinal functions of money: medium of exchange, unit of account, and store of value."
"The measure function of money has a counterpart in gift economics, for even though gifts do not come with a specific expectation of return, nonetheless they ordinarily happen within view of the community. The anonymous giving that we elevate today to the highest category of generosity had a minor role in gift cultures past and present. Communities were generally aware of the needs, gifts, and degree of generosity of their members. Money substitutes for this awareness: in theory, at least, it confers the benefits of social recognition onto the people who contribute. In practice, the scope of recognized contribution has been limited to contribution to the 'ascent' of humanity, the growing of the human realm. But even with a degrowth currency, the deeper problem remains that money by nature can operate only in the realm of the quantifiable. We face the question of how to facilitate the flow of the nonquantifiable across the vast social distances of mass society. In hundreds of thousands of years of human existence, this is a new problem."
"When we give each other rides to the airport instead of hiring a taxi, when we share power tools instead of buying new ones, or when we give away our spare potato masher, we reduce consumer demand and cut into economic growth. The shrinkage of the monetary realm hastens the demise of the old regime and the transition into steady-state economics. It also makes that transition much less frightening. When we are ensconced in gift communities that honor and reciprocate generosity, then we depend less on money and associate it less with survival."
"The desire to own, to control, is the desire of the self of separation, the self that seeks to manipulate others to its own advantage, to extract wealth from nature and people and all that is other. The connected self grows rich by giving, by playing its role to the fullest in the nourishment of that which extends beyond itself."
"When I say that extraordinary individual gifts will turn toward the benefit of all, some readers might protest, 'But shouldn't individual excellence be rewarded?' Conservative friends in particular are immediately suspicious of my ideas, supposing that they entail the subsumption of the individual. They think that in a system that discourages accumulation and turns excellence toward the benefit of all, there would be no incentive or reward for greatness. Meanwhile, the traditional Left accepts the same basic premises, differing only in the conviction that the subsumption of the individual is good and necessary. In this view, a virtuous person labors in noble self-sacrifice for the common good, spurning any reciprocation or reward.<br />
<br />
Both of these views come from the paradigm of separation that holds that 'more for you is less for me.' More for the group is less for the individual. But in gift culture, that is simply untrue. A great giver of precious gifts can ascend to the highest pinnacle of honor and enjoy all that is within the power of human beings to bestow. Such is the nature and the power of gratitude. Unfortunately, the intuitions of gift culture are alien to us now, for though they live deeply in our hearts, they are absent from the economic and ideological structures of our society."<br />
"The bankruptcy of the economics of the separate self is now plain to see. In the capitalist world in which individual accumulation has been permitted, we have experienced not the exuberant expression of our gifts, but their suppression, their enslavement, and their perversion toward the purpose of taking and controlling, for these activities are what the present money system compels and rewards. Worse, these ostensible rewards have been a delusion: money, its purchases, and its accumulation substituting for connection, love, beauty, play, meaning, and purpose. The noncapitalist world fared us no better. Whether it comes from communist ideology or religious teaching, self-abnegation is life-denying; invariably, the life denied expresses itself in shadow forms that wreak the same consequences, or worse, as the outright aggrandizement of the separate self."
"Today, the interests of workers and owners are fundamentally at odds. It is in the owners' interest for the workers to do maximum work for as little pay as possible. It is in each individual worker's interest to do as little work as possible for maximum pay. Good management can mitigate this fundamental opposition by tying pay to 'performance' and by appealing to professional pride, loyalty, or team spirit, but the underlying contradiction remains. Employees commonly receive rewards for their success in office politics rather than authentic contributions, while recognizing 'team spirit' as the internal PR that it often is. 'If we are really all in it together,' they wonder, 'how is it that I can be fired at any time but the owners cannot? Any lasting value I create is theirs.' In this world, any employee who truly identifies with his employer is a dupe. This becomes obvious whenever a company downsizes or streamlines. 'I've given you twenty years of loyal service; how can you let me go?' As one insurance executive explained to an employee, 'If you want loyalty, get a dog.' Of course, most employers aren't so hard-hearted, but market discipline hardens a soft heart."
"Negative interest on reserves, and a physical currency that loses value with time, reverses the effects of interest. It enables prosperity without growth, systemically encourages the equitable distribution of wealth, and ends the discounting of future cash flows so that we no longer are pressed to mortgage our future for short-term returns. Moreover, it embodies the truth about the world, in which all things decay and return to their source. No longer is money an illusory exception to nature's law."
"Since money in some sense represents the accumulated power of millennia of technological development, which is the common inheritance of all human beings, it is unjust for someone to profit merely by owning it, as happens in the current system of risk-free positive interest."
"Polarization of wealth is inevitable when people are allowed to profit from merely owning a thing, without producing anything or contributing to society."
"Thousands of years of technological advances have made production of the quantifiable necessities of life extremely easy. These advances, the gift of our ancestors, should be the common property of all humanity. All deserve a share of the wealth they have made possible. The same is true of the natural wealth of the earth, which was made by no man. The current economic system essentially forces us to work for what is already ours. It is more just to pay out the proceeds of the economic rent compensation, pollution taxes, and so on to all citizens as a social dividend. This also serves to mitigate concentration of wealth and prevent deflationary crises. The social dividend would ideally provide the bare amount to cover life's necessities; beyond that, people could still choose to earn their own money. It frees work from the pressure of necessity; people would work because they want to, not because they have to."
"Over hundreds of years of inventing labor-saving devices, from the spinning jenny to the digital computer, we have at every turn chosen to consume more rather than to work less. This choice, driven by the money system, accompanied an accelerating drawdown of social and natural capital. Today, the option of accelerating consumption is no longer available to us. Absent the driving force of positive risk-free interest, economic growth will no longer be necessary to promote the flow of capital, and a degrowth economy will become feasible. Technology will continue to advance, and we will be left with the second option: to work less or, more accurately, to work less for money."
"Persistently high unemployment rates (near 20 percent, counting discouraged workers) in industrialized countries, together with overcapacity of production, imply that there is simply not enough paid work to employ everyone to produce all we need. To be sure, there is much necessary and beautiful work to be done-but much of it fundamentally does not generate an economic return. Unemployment is considered an evil today, but it would not be if it were supported by a social dividend and spread out over the economy. What if everyone worked 20 percent less, instead of 20 percent of the people working not at all? This economic circumstance coincides with a shift in consciousness as more and more of us reject the conventional notion of work-the division of life into two exclusive zones, work and leisure."
"We must also deprogram ourselves from the growth-is-good mantra that guides public policy today. In the 2009 stimulus program, the rationale for the roads, bridges, and other projects was to stimulate growth-it was not a conscious decision that we actually need more roads and bridges. Similarly, housing starts are welcome as a sign of growth, and not as an expression of a belief that we need more subdivisions and sprawl. Policies such as monetary and Keynesian fiscal stimulus, which in their new incarnation will be negative-interest money and the social dividend, must be reframed: they are not to get the economy growing again; they are to circulate money to those who need to spend it. Generally speaking, this will not trigger growth if the commons is protected from monetization; instead it will shift the allocation of resources and the focus of economic activity."
"The expansion of the money realm has come at the expense of other forms of economic circulation, in particular gifts. When every economic relationship becomes a paid service, we are left independent of everyone we know and dependent, via money, on anonymous, distant service providers. That is a primary reason for the decline of community in modern societies, with its attendant alienation, loneliness, and psychological misery. Moreover, money is unsuited to facilitate the circulation and development of the unquantifiable things that truly make life rich."
"The internet is in important respects a gift network, and it has made it easy to give away information that was once very costly to produce. In various ways, this has pushed services like advertising (think Craigslist), travel agency, journalism, publishing, music, and many more toward the gift realm. It has also facilitated gift-based modes of open-source production. What once required paid intermediaries and centralized administrative structures now happens directly. People and businesses are even creating credit, via mutual-credit systems, without the intermediation of banks. Meanwhile, on the local level the ideals of the connected self, the yearning for community, and sheer economic exigency are leading people to restore gift-based community structures."
"We have in our age created a distinction between money exchanges and gifts. The former is in the realm of rational self-interest; the latter is at least partially altruistic or selfless. This division of economics into two separate realms mirrors other defining dichotomies of our civilization: man and nature, spirit and matter, good and evil, sacred and profane, mind and body. None of these withstand deep scrutiny: all of them are crumbling as the Age of Separation draws to a close."
"I am not suggesting that you become a saint and abandon selfishness. Gift culture is not so simple. As we imbue matter with the qualities we once ascribed to spirit, we are also imbuing spirit with the messy qualities of matter. No longer is the spiritual realm of our conceptions a place of perfect order, harmony, goodness, and justice. Similarly, as we imbue money with some of the characteristics of gift culture, we must recognize that the gift realm never was, and may never be, a realm of pure disinterested selflessness."
"The religious ideal of the free gift that doesn't create any social bonds is, ironically enough, very similar to monetary transactions! These also generate no obligation, no tie: once the money is paid and the goods delivered, neither party owes the other anything. But with the exception of the idealized true gifts described above, gifts are very different. If you give me something, I will feel grateful and desire to give in turn, either to you or to someone else that social custom prescribes. Either way, an obligation has been created, an assurance of continued economic circulation within the gifting community."
"The generosity of others moves us toward generosity ourselves. We desire to give to those who are generous. We are moved by their openness, by their vulnerability, by their trust. We want to take care of them. With the possible exception of anonymous charity, gifts don't happen in a social vacuum. They expand the circle of self, linking our self-interest with that of anyone who, when he has more than he needs, will give us what we need."
"In the logic of me and mine, any obligation, any dependency, is a threat. Gifts naturally create obligations, so, in the Age of Separation, people have become afraid to give and even more afraid to receive. We don't want to receive gifts because we don't want to be obligated to anyone. We don't want to owe anybody anything. We don't want to depend on anyone's gifts or charity- 'I can pay for it myself, thank you. I don't need you.' Accordingly, we elevate anonymous acts of charity to a lofty moral status. It is supposed to be a great virtue to give without strings attached, to expect nothing in return."
"You may have had the experience of receiving a favor from someone and then offering to pay for it, and feeling the letdown and distancing that ensue. To pay for a gift renders it no longer a gift, and the bond that was being established is broken."
"Because it creates gratitude or obligation, to willingly receive a gift is itself a form of generosity. It says, 'I am willing to owe you one.' Or, in a more sophisticated gift culture, it says, 'I am willing to be in the debt of the community.'"
"To fully receive is to willingly put yourself in a position of obligation, either to the giver or to society at large. Gratitude and obligation go hand in hand; they are two sides of the same coin. Obligation is obligation to do what? It is to give without 'compensation.' Gratitude is what? It is the desire to give, again without compensation, borne of the realization of having received."
"In the age of the separate self, we have split the two, but originally they are one: obligation is a desire that comes from within and is only secondarily enforced from without. Clearly then, reluctance to receive is actually reluctance to give. We think that we are being noble, self-sacrificing, or unselfish if we prefer to give rather than to receive. We are being nothing of the sort. The generous person gives and receives with an equally open hand. Do not be afraid to be under obligation, to be in gratitude. We are afraid of obligation because, quite rightly, we are wary of 'have to', we are wary of forceful compulsion, wary of the coercion that underlies so many of our society's institutions. But when we convert 'have to' into 'want to,' we are free. When we realize that life itself is a gift, and that we are here to give ourselves, then we are free. After all, what you have taken in this life dies with you. Only your gifts live on."
"You can see how pervasive gift refusal is in our culture and how much relearning there is to do. Much of what goes by the name of modesty or humility is actually a refusal of ties, a distancing from others, a refusal to receive. We are as afraid to receive as we are to give; indeed, we are incapable of doing one without the other. We may imagine ourselves as selfless and virtuous for being more willing to give than to receive, but this state is just as miserly as its reverse, for without receiving, the wellspring of our own gifts dries up. Not only is it miserly, it is arrogant: What do we imagine to be the source of what we give? Ourselves? No. Life itself is a gift, life and all that nurtures it, from mother and father to the entire ecosystem. None were created through our own efforts. The same goes for our creative abilities, physical and mental, which some, intuiting this truth, might call God-given."
"New Age spiritual clichs about 'opening up to abundance' make me queasy, yet as with most clichs there is truth beneath them. Fear of receiving, though, isn't just a matter of low self-worth or feeling undeserving, as some self-help gurus would have us believe: it is also, ultimately, a fear of giving. The two go hand in hand-always! Together, they are a fear of life, of connection; they are a kind of reticence. To give and to receive, to owe and be owed, to depend on others and be depended on-this is being fully alive. To neither give nor receive, but to pay for everything; to never depend on anyone, but to be financially independent; to not be bound to a community or place, but to be mobile ... such is the illusory paradise of the discrete and separate self. Corresponding to the spiritual conceit of nonattachment, to the religious delusion of nonworldliness, and to the scientific ambition to master and transcend nature, it is proving to be not a paradise but a hell."
"As we awaken from our delusions of nonattachment, independence, and transcendence, we seek to reunite with our true, expansive selves. We yearn for community. Independence and nonattachment were never anything but delusions anyway. The truth is, has always been, and always will be that we are utterly and hopelessly dependent on each other and on nature. Nor will it ever change that the only alternative to depending, receiving, loving, and losing is to not be alive at all."
" Gifts both serve and result from the expansion of self beyond ego: they are both cause and consequence. Feeling a connection to the other, we desire to give. The more we give, the more we feel our connections. The gift is the sociophysical manifestation of an underlying unity of being."
"Detached from the world, one can do little good or harm in it. Immersed in the world, we are challenged to use our wealth wisely. It is generous to plunge fully into the social realm of ties and obligations. By giving of one's gifts in a way that is public, in a way that, contrary to religious ideals, might generate return, we increase the throughput of gifts through ourselves, magnifying our capacity and need to give. The idea is not to force a return gift or contrive to receive one-that is not a gift at all-but to meet a need and create a tie."
"The attitude of the giver-'I give to you freely and trust that I will receive what is appropriate, whether from you or from another in our gift circle'-strikes a deep chord. There is something eternal and true about the spirit of gratitude and generosity that expects no reward and contrives no obligation. So here is a paradox: on the one hand, the obligation-generating function of gifts creates social solidarity and community. On the other hand, our hearts respond to gifts that seek to create no obligation, that demand no reciprocation, and we are touched by the generosity of those who give without expectation of return. Is there a way to resolve this paradox? Yes-because the source of obligation needn't be social pressure levering the self-interest of a discrete and separate self. It can instead arise naturally, unforced; the result of gratitude. This obligation is an autochthonous desire, a natural corollary to the felt-state of connection that arises, spontaneously, upon receiving a gift or witnessing an act of generosity."
"The logic of the discrete and separate self says that human beings are fundamentally selfish. Whether for the selfish gene of biology or the economic man of Adam Smith, more for you is less for me. Accordingly, society must apply various threats and incentives to align the selfish behavior of the individual with the interests of society. Today, new paradigms in biology are replacing the neo-Darwinian orthodoxy while movements in spirituality, economics, and psychology challenge the atomistic Cartesian conception of the self. The new self is interdependent and, even more, partakes for its very existence in the existence of all other beings to which it is connected. This is the connected self, the larger self, which extends to include, by degrees, everyone and everything in its gift circle. Within that circle, it is not true that more for you is less for me. Gifts circulate so that the good fortune of another is also your good fortune."
"I have in this book articulated a conception of wealth as flow rather than accumulation. This is not a new idea: wealth only became an accumulation with the rise of agricultural civilization. Because hunter-gatherers are, with very few exceptions, nomadic, possessions are a literal burden to them. But the farmer is sedentary: moreover, the farmer's livelihood depends on the storage of food, especially in the case of grain-based agriculture. Hunter-gatherers stayed at populations beneath the carrying capacity of the unmodified ecosystem. In times of drought or flooding, they could easily move and adapt. Not so the farmer. For the farmer, seven lean years could easily follow seven fat ones, which meant that the best security was to keep large stores of food. To accumulate and store was the best form of security; from it flowed wealth, status, and many of the habits we identify today as virtues: thrift, sacrifice, saving for a rainy day, good work habits, industriousness, and diligence."
"Living without food storage, hunter-gatherers worked no harder than necessary to meet immediate needs and enjoyed long periods of leisure. The farmer's leisure comes with a bit of guilt - he could be working a little harder, storing up a little more just in case. On the farm, there is always something that needs to be done. We have today inherited and taken to an extreme the attitudes of the farmer, including the agricultural definition of wealth. After agriculture, these attitudes (work ethic, sacrifice of present for future, accumulation, and control) reached their next level of expression in the Age of the Machine, which led to accumulations of wealth undreamed of by the richest pharaoh."
"And today we are in the so-called Information Age, which is yet another intensification of the same attitudes, and which has seen an accumulation of wealth, a contrasting poverty, and an alienation from the natural world far exceeding any precedent."
"Certainly, accumulation is one of the violations of natural law that is inconsistent with the new human being and her relationship to nature. Hoarding resources beyond an individual's capacity to consume them is not unknown in nature, but it is rare, and many types of food storage (e.g., squirrels sequestering nuts) have other explanations. Generally speaking, natural systems are characterized by resource flow, not accumulation. In an animal, cells do not store more than a few seconds' worth of sugar but trust in the ongoing supply of their universe, the body."
"Evolutionary biologists offer two explanations of resource hoarding in humans from the perspective of genetic determinism. The first is that it offers security, a survival advantage. Hunter-gatherers and other species would do it too, the argument goes, but they generally lack the means. The second explanation is that the ostentatious accumulation and consumption of resources are a kind of mating display.<br />
<br />
Granted the premises of conventional genetic theory (a critique of which is beyond the scope of this book), the logic seems airtight. Quite subtly, though, the argument is based on circular reasoning that projects our present environment of scarcity, anxiety, and competition onto nature. The ability to accumulate and overconsume resources is a reproductive advantage only in a society where resources are not equitably shared. In a gift-based sharing culture, the welfare of your children does not depend so much on whether your mate is a great hunter or prolific gatherer. Moreover, anthropological evidence contradicts Dodds's thesis. Consistently, hunter-gatherers and primitive agriculturalists underproduced, preferring leisure over accumulation and control of resources. There was no gene-driven competition for ostentatious display of wealth: to the contrary, hoarding resulted not in high status but in opprobrium. Moreover, the widespread sharing of resources rendered productive capacity moot. If anything was genetically selected, it would be the inclination to share and to contribute to the well-being of the tribe. With small exaggeration, we can say that in a gift community, rational self-interest is identical to altruism."
"An important theme in all my work is the integration of hunter-gatherer attitudes into technological society - a completion and not a transcendence of the past. I have already laid out in this book the monetary equivalent of nonaccumulation (decaying currency), of nonownership (elimination of economic rents), and of underproduction (leisure and degrowth). Tellingly, many people feel a pull toward these values on a personal level too, such as in the movement toward 'voluntary simplicity' and in questioning the nature of work. Ahead of their time, these people have pioneered a new and ancient way of being that will soon become the norm."
"Nonaccumulation models hunter-gatherer societies, in which there was great abundance but no accumulation, and in which prestige went to those who gave the most. To give the most, one also had to receive the most, either from nature or from other people. The great hunter, the skilled artist or musician, the energetic, the healthy, and the lucky would have more to give. In any event, this kind of prestige is to the benefit of all. It is only when high income translates into accumulation, frivolous consumption, or socially destructive consumption that it makes sense to restrict it. In other words, the problem is not with high income, it is with the results of the income getting stuck at some point in its circulation, accumulating and stagnating."
"Nonaccumulation is a conscious intention not to accumulate more than a modest amount of assets. It is born not of the desire to be virtuous, but of the understanding that it feels much better to give than to keep, that the seeming security of accumulation is an illusion, and that excessive money and possessions burden our lives. It is deeply aligned with the spirit of the gift, of which a core principle is that the gift must circulate."
"Recall Mauss: 'Generally, even what has been received and comes into one's possession in this way - in whatever manner - is not kept for oneself, unless one cannot do without it.' In other words, if you need it, use it. If not, pass it on. This is such an obvious principle that even a child can understand it. Why keep something for yourself that you cannot use?"
"You might be thinking that since we indeed live in a hoarding culture and scarcity-inducing money system, nonaccumulation is impractical today. You might think wistfully that it would be nice if everyone else did it, but they don't, so you'd better protect yourself. This is all very logical. I cannot offer a rational argument to refute it. All I can do is to suggest, as you read this chapter, that you notice whether something besides reason tugs at your heart. Look where reason, practicality, and playing it safe have brought us. Maybe it is time to listen to that other something."
"Each organism in nature, each cell in the body, can handle only a certain volume of energy throughput. We are the same. Too much flow through a channel can burst the channel. Too big an accumulation is a tumor. Frivolous purchases such as a castle you never go to, or a fifteenth Rolls-Royce, are symptoms of excessive income. The organism is desperately trying to dissipate the energy flow, letting go and holding on at the same time. What the profligate rich man really wants to do is to give it away so as to balance giving and receiving, yet instead he just buys stuff and keeps it. What is the fear that impels him to hold on even as he lets go? It is the fear that rules the separate self, alone in the universe. Accumulation is a way to enlarge the tiny separate self. Yet ultimately this enlargement is a blatant lie. We leave this world as we entered it: naked."
"Most of the baubles of the rich are substitutions for what they truly need - sports cars substituting for freedom, mansions compensating for the lost connections of a shrunken self, status symbols in place of genuine respect from self and others. A sad game it is, the charade of wealth. Even the security it supposedly brings is a deceit, as life's travails have a way of infiltrating the fortress of wealth, afflicting its inhabitants with distorted forms of the same social ills that affect everyone else. Of course, you can imagine various medical emergencies and such in which wealth can be a lifesaver, but so what? We are all going to die anyway, and no matter how long you live, the moment will come when you look back upon your years and they seem short, a flash of lightning in the dark of night, and you realize that the purpose of life is not after all to survive in maximum security and comfort, but that we are here to give, to create that which is beautiful to us."
"If the world receives my work enthusiastically, then I expect to receive a great many gifts, far more than I can use for myself. What a waste it would be to accumulate great assets, stocks and bonds, investments and portfolios, basements and attics full of possessions! Why accumulate when there is so much excess in this world to share? Whether or not a decaying currency and gift economy appear in this lifetime, we can live in it right now. We can, to use Gesell's phrase, reduce money to the rank of umbrellas, freely lending it or giving it to friends who are in need. There is, of course, no guarantee that I will always receive the money or other gifts I need when I need them. I expect sometimes to have no money at all, but for this to be a matter of little anxiety. On the other hand, I might starve and regret not having accumulated and protected a nest egg. But I doubt it, and for me the freedom from worry and anxiety - the open, flowing, light experience of letting it go - far outweighs the risk. If you want guarantees, then go ahead and accumulate, until you discover that the promised security is a mirage, that life's vicissitudes have a way of invading the fortress of wealth."
"Ultimately, then, the essence of nonaccumulation lies in the intention with which money is given, lent, invested, or saved. In the spirit of the gift, we focus on the purpose and let the return to ourselves be secondary, an afterthought. In the spirit of accumulation, we seek to ensure and maximize the return and let the destination of the gift, loan, or investment serve that end. The former is a state of freedom, abundance, and trust. The latter is a state of anxiety, scarcity, and control. Whoever lives in the former is rich. Whoever lives in the latter is poor, no matter how much wealth he or she possesses."
"Excess wealth, whether inherited from family or from an earlier time in one's own life, carries with it a desire to use it well. It is a dharma, a call to service. To squander it on baubles, to give it away senselessly, or to devote oneself to its increase are all ways of refusing that call. The challenge of excess wealth is to give of it in a way that is beautiful. This may take years or decades and involve long-term planning and the creation of entire organizations, or it may happen through a single generous act. Either way, this is the kind of investment that is aligned with a future economy in which status comes from giving, not having, and security comes not from accumulation, but from being a nexus of flow. It is an entirely different mentality from the traditional paradigm of investment, which we equate with the increase of wealth."
"Like nonaccumulation, the concept is so simple that even a child can understand it. It says, 'I have more money than I can use, so I will let someone else use it.' That is an investment or a loan. And a bank or other investment intermediary is someone who is adept at finding someone else to use it. Banking, in its sacred dimension, says, 'I will help you find someone who can use your money beautifully.' I once shared this idea with an actual banker whom I met at a conference, and tears came to his eyes - tears of the recognition of the spiritual essence of his calling."
"A thousand years from now, when money is so different from what we know today that we might not even recognize it as money, the basic idea of investment will remain. That is because, thanks to the fundamental abundance of the universe and the infinitude of human creativity, we will often have access to a flow of gifts far beyond our immediate needs. We will always have the wherewithal - increasing over time - to create marvels through collective human effort and in partnership with Lover Earth. At the most basic level, sacred investing is simply the intentional channeling of this superabundance toward a creative purpose. It begins with the meeting of needs and unfolds into the creation of beauty."
"After a talk I gave, a very bright and compassionate woman active in socially conscious investing protested, 'Surely not all profitable investments contribute to the liquidation of the commonwealth. What if I invest in a company that has a great new invention for, say, cheap, portable photovoltaic chargers? I help to capitalize that company; they sell lots of units; we all make money; and the planet benefits too.' Fine, but if the company sold the units at a lower price (e.g., just high enough a profit margin to finance R&D and capital reinvestment), then wouldn't it do the planet even more good by making the device more accessible? The goal of paying interest or dividends to investors, to give them a positive rate of return, conflicts with the goal that makes the company socially or environmentally 'conscious.'"
"When you invest money at interest, you are indirectly participating in telling some poor chap, 'I don't care what you have to do to get it - give me the money!' Your certificate of deposit is someone else's foreclosure threat. You may not be acting like Ebenezer Scrooge, but you are paying someone else to."
"Occasionally I receive emails from people in the financial industry who read my work and describe their ideas on socially or environmentally conscious investment. I then propose my own idea: an investment fund that has, as an explicit goal, a zero return on investment. For some reason, none of the financial professionals to whom I suggested this has ever contacted me again! In a negative-interest money economy, though, a zero return on investment would be considered quite good."
"I am not advocating an age of altruism in which we forgo personal benefit for the common good. I foresee, rather, a fusion of personal benefit and common good. For example, when I give money to people in my community, I create feelings of gratitude that might motivate a return gift to me or an onward gift to someone else. Either way, I have strengthened the community that sustains me. When we are embedded in gift community, we naturally direct our gratitude not only toward the proximate giver but toward the community as a whole, and we take care of its neediest members (gifts seek needs). Our desire to give may very well express itself as a gift to someone in the community who has given us nothing herself. Therefore, we can see any gift, even one without expectation of direct return, as a form of 'investment.' We are still taking naked money and, if it is a good investment, clothing it in something fine. A poor investment clothes it in something ugly. It is just that simple."
"If you want to create a world of abundance, a world of gratitude, a world of the gift, you can start by using today's money, while it still exists, to create more gratitude in the world. If we have a large enough reservoir of gratitude, then our society can withstand practically anything. Again, we live in a world of fundamental abundance that we have, through our beliefs and habits, rendered artificially poor. So badly have we damaged planet and spirit that it will require a full outpouring of all our gifts to heal it. The outpouring of gifts comes from gratitude. Therefore, the best investment you can make with your money is to generate gratitude. It doesn't matter if the gratitude recognizes you as the giver. Ultimately, the proper object of gratitude is the Giver of all our own gifts, of our world, of our lives."
"Let us also revisit the essence of money. What exactly is it that accumulates in these vast accumulations of money? Money consists of ritual talismans by which we coordinate human intention and activity. Those who possess an accumulation of money have, at their disposal, the means to focus and organize society's labor. The increase of money can come only at the cost of the nonmonetized realm, but the expenditure of money can restore that realm as long as that expenditure is not an investment that seeks the further commodification of the social or natural commons. Money can be used to buy logging equipment to clear-cut a forest; equally it can be used to preserve and guard that forest. The first use is money creation, the second is money destruction (because it generates no further goods and services). Either way, accumulated money bestows the ability to coordinate human activity on a large scale."
" Of course I am vastly overgeneralizing, but I think there is truth in saying that whereas the children of the fifties and sixties became millionaire programmers for Microsoft, the children of the seventies and eighties are playing with Linux. This is not to impute any moral failing onto the Microsoft millionaires! In their day, it was still possible for a dynamic, visionary twenty-something to be excited about what was going on in the commercial software industry. The same goes for the central institutions of politics, academia, the arts, science, medicine, and so on. Of course, even then the inevitable denouement of the story of Ascent was apparent to those with eyes to see, as it had been apparent to mystics for thousands of years. For most, though, the crises were too far off, and the ideology of human dominion too deeply ingrained, to divert them from full participation in the project of ascent."
"The social dynamics of which I speak are in part an America-centric phenomenon, but I think they generalize to a world that is on the cusp of a new age. Like the American baby boomers, the world sits on top of a huge pile of wealth, the end product of ten thousand years of culture and technology. We have a mighty industrial infrastructure; we have roads and airplanes, we have a vast apparatus already in existence that, for centuries, has been devoted toward the expansion of the human realm and the conquest of the natural. The time has come to turn the tools of separation, dominance, and control toward the purpose of reunion, the healing of the world. Just as the wealthy baby boomer or heir of fortunes past can turn her wealth toward a beautiful purpose, and not worry that the wealth is somehow tainted by its origins, so also do we have the opportunity and the responsibility to use the accumulated fruits of our domination of the earth in a beautiful way."
"If I go to an indigenous culture, convince its people that subsistence farming is degrading and primitive, and induce them instead to work in a factory and join the market economy, then GDP rises (and I've created an 'investment opportunity'). If, on the other hand, I inspire people to abandon their high-paying jobs and 'go back to the land,' then GDP falls. If I create a community where we no longer pay for child care but instead care for each others' children cooperatively, then GDP falls. And if we succeed in protecting the Alaskan Wildlife Refuge from oil drilling, that's tens of billions of dollars that will never materialize. That is why I say we are using money to destroy money. Sometimes, the master's tools can dismantle the master's house."
"Another way to look at it is that these efforts to protect a portion of the commonwealth raise the 'bottom' to which we must fall before a transformation to a new world can crystallize. My use of the language of addiction recovery is deliberate. The dynamics of usury-money are addiction dynamics, requiring an ever-greater dose (of the commons) to maintain normality, converting more and more of the basis of well-being into money for a fix. If you have an addict friend, it won't do any good to give her 'help' of the usual kind, such as money, a car to replace the one she crashed, or a job to replace the one she lost. All of those resources will just go down the black hole of addiction. So too it is with our politicians' efforts to prolong the age of growth."
"Traditional employment receives money for helping expand the monetized realm. We find that in order to earn money, we must participate in the conversion of the good, the true, and the beautiful into money. That is because of the money system - credit ultimately goes to those who can most effectively create new goods and services (or take it from those who create them). An interest-based money system exerts a systemic pressure to convert the commonwealth into money, and the highest remuneration goes to those who do that most effectively. You want to get rich? Invent a way to chop down trees more efficiently. Create an advertising campaign that persuades other nations to drink Coke instead of indigenous beverages. Seeing the workings of the global economy, many idealistic young people decide they want no part of it. I get letters from them all the time. 'I want no part of this. I want to do what I love in a way that hurts no one. But there is no money in that. How do I survive?' How do you survive, not to mention access the large amounts of money to do great things, in a world that rewards the destruction of the very things you want to create?"
"It is OK if 'what feels good and right' is merely feeding your family. The key is the attitude of service. If you attempt to guilt yourself into right livelihood, you will likely end up with its counterfeit. Some entire nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are but enormous vanity projects, elaborate ways to allow people to approve of themselves. That's all ego. The purpose of right livelihood is not so you get to have a positive self-image. People who do it for that reason are quite obvious from their defensiveness, sanctimony, and self-righteousness. The purpose of right livelihood is to give your energies toward something you love. The concept should feel liberating, not like a moral burden, not another thing you are supposed to do right in order to be good."
"So, when it comes to right livelihood or right investment, let us be gentle. For ourselves and others, let us trust the natural desire to give, and let us trust the natural growth process that propels us toward it. Instead of attempting to guilt ourselves and others into it (and generating resistance to our sanctimony), we can offer opportunities and encouragement to give, and we can be generous with our appreciation and celebration of the gifts of others. We can see others not as selfish, greedy, ignorant, or lazy people who just 'don't get it,' but rather as divine beings who desire to give to the world. We can see that and speak to that and know it so strongly that our knowing serves as an invitation to ourselves and others to step into that truth."
" A sacred economy recognizes that human beings desire to work: they desire to apply their life energy toward the expression of their gifts. There is no room in this conception for 'compensation.' Work is a joy, a cause for gratitude. At its best, it is beyond price. Doesn't it sound blasphemous to you to speak of, say, compensating Michelangelo for painting the Sistine Chapel or Mozart for composing his Requiem? No finite amount of money is sufficient in exchange for the divine. Of the most sublime works, the only appropriate means of offering them is to give them away."
"When we see our work as sacred, we seek to do it well for its own sake rather than 'good enough' for something external such as the market, the building code, or a grade. A builder who does sacred work will employ materials and methods that might be hidden in the walls, beyond anyone's notice, for centuries. He derives no rational benefit from this, just the satisfaction of doing it right. So also the business owner who pays an above-market living wage or the manufacturer who far exceeds environmental standards. They have no rational expectation of benefit, yet somehow they do benefit, sometimes in ways that are completely unexpected. Unexpected returns accord perfectly with the nature of the Gift: as Lewis Hyde puts it, a gift 'disappears around the corner,' 'into the mystery,' and we don't know how it will travel back to us."
"The one who bows into service is an artist. To see work as sacred is to bow into service to it, and thus become its instrument. More specifically and somewhat paradoxically, we become the instrument of that which we create. Whether it is a material, human, or social creation, we put ourselves into the humble service of something preexisting yet unmanifest. Thus it is that the artist is in awe of his or her own creation. I get that feeling when I read aloud from The Ascent of Humanity: 'I could not have written this.' That book is its own entity, born through me but no more my creation than parents create a baby, or a farmer a spinach plant. They transmit the impulse of life, they provide a place for it to grow, but they do not and need not understand the details of cell differentiation. I too nourished my growing book with every resource available to me, and birthed it with terrific hardship from its womb in my mind into physical form, and I am intimately familiar with its every nuance, yet I have an abiding sense that it existed already, that it is beyond my contrivance. Can a parent legitimately take credit for the accomplishments of his or her child? No. That is a form of theft. Nor will I take credit for the beauty of my creations. I am at their service."
"In the old economy, people pursued jobs and careers for the purpose of making a living. From the viewpoint of survival, nothing is too sacred to sell, to charge money for. If you are working for the sake of survival, such as in a lead mine in China, then it probably won't feel wrong to negotiate and demand the best price possible for your labor. Another way to look at it is that the survival of oneself and loved ones is itself a sacred endeavor."
"So, if you find yourself slaving away at a job, working for the money, doing it 'good enough' rather than 'as beautifully as I am able,' I urge you to transition out of that job when and only when you are ready. Perhaps for now you will see your job as a gift to yourself, giving you a sense of security for as long as it takes for that feeling to become second nature. Fear is not the enemy, despite what so many spiritual teachers say. 'The opposite of love,' says one. 'Frozen joy,' says another. Actually fear is a guardian, holding us in a safe space in which to grow; you could even say that fear is a gift. Eventually, as we grow, the fears that were once protective become limiting, and we desire to be born. That this will happen is inevitable. Trust yourself now, and you will continue to trust yourself when your desire moves you to transcend the old fears and enter a larger, brighter realm. When the moment of birth comes, you won't be able to stop yourself."
"Ending the struggle to be good also means that giving does not involve a feeling of sacrifice or self-abnegation. We give because we want to, not because we should. Gratitude, the recognition that one has received and the desire to give in turn, is our innate default state. How could it not be, when life, breath, and world are gifts? When even the fruit of our own labors is beyond our contrivance? To live in the gift is to reunite with our true nature."
"Such is the pinnacle of civilization, the end point of centuries of increasing affluence: lonely people in boxes, living in a world of strangers, dependent on money, enslaved to debt - and incinerating the planet's natural and social capital to stay that way. We have no community because community is woven from gifts. How can we create community when we pay for all we need?"
"Community is not some add-on to our other needs, not a separate ingredient for happiness along with food, shelter, music, touch, intellectual stimulation, and other forms of physical and spiritual nourishment. Community arises from the meeting of these needs. There is no community possible among a group of people who do not need each other. Therefore, any life that seeks to be independent of other people for the meeting of one's needs is a life without community."
"The gifts that weave community cannot be mere superficialities; they must meet real needs. Only then do they inspire gratitude and create the obligations that bind people together. The difficulty in creating community today is that when people meet all their needs with money, there is nothing left to give. If you give someone a product that is for sale somewhere, either you are giving them money (by saving them the expense of buying it themselves) or you are giving them something they don't need (else they would have already bought it). Neither is sufficient to create community unless, in the first instance, the recipient actually needs money. Thus it is that poor people develop much stronger communities than rich people do. They have more unmet needs."
"It would be silly, though, to relinquish the things we have today simply in order to have community. It would be futile, too, because on some level we would sense the pretense. The needs met would not be real needs; they would be artificial. To say, 'I could saw these boards in an hour with a table saw, but let's use a two-person handsaw instead and take two days, because that will make us more interdependent,' is a delusion. Artificial dependency is not the solution to the artificial separation we have today. The solution is not to meet already-met needs less effectively, so that we are forced to help each other. Rather, it is to meet the needs that languish unfulfilled today."
"The people who say, 'We'd better learn how to use hand tools again because petroleum will become so expensive we'll have to,' are indulging in a kind of fatalism. They hope we will be forced back into right livelihood. I think we will choose it."
"You see, that feeling of 'I don't need you' is based on an illusion. In fact, we do need each other. Despite being able to pay for everything we need, we do not feel satisfied; we do not feel like all our needs have actually been met. We feel empty, hungry. And because this hunger is present as much in the rich as in the poor, I know it must be for something that money cannot buy. Perhaps there is hope for community after all, even in the midst of a monetized society. Perhaps it lies in those needs that bought things cannot satisfy. Perhaps the very things we need the most are absent from the products of mass production, cannot be quantified or commoditized, and are therefore inherently outside the money realm."
"Money can buy songs, but not a song sung specifically to you. Even if you hire a band to play in your home, there is no guarantee, no matter how much you pay, that they will really sing to you and not just pretend to. If your mother sang you lullabies, or if you have ever been serenaded by a lover, you know what I am talking about and how deep a need it fills. Sometimes it even happens at a concert, when the band isn't just putting on an act but is actually playing for that audience, or really, to that audience. Each such performance is unique, and its special, magical quality vanishes in recording. 'You had to be there.' True, we may pay money to attend such an event, but we receive more than we paid for when the band is truly playing to us. We do not feel that the transaction is complete and closed, that all obligations are canceled out, as in a pure money transaction. We feel a lingering connection, because a giving has transpired. No life can be rich without such experiences, which might ride the vehicle of money transactions, but which no amount of money can guarantee."
"The situation in America, the most highly monetized society the world has ever known, is this: some of our needs are vastly overfulfilled 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 surround us everywhere while we starve for authentic communication. We are offered entertainment every second of the day but lack the chance to play. In the ubiquitous realm of money, we hunger for all that is intimate, personal, and unique. We know more about the lives of Michael Jackson, Princess Diana, and Lindsay Lohan than we do about our own neighbors, with the result that we really don't know anyone, and are barely known by anyone either."
"The things we need the most are the things we have become most afraid of, such as adventure, intimacy, and authentic communication. We avert our eyes and stick to comfortable topics. We hold it as a virtue to be private, to be discreet, so that no one sees our dirty laundry - or even our clean laundry: our undergarments are considered unsightly, a value strangely reflected in the widespread American prohibition on hanging laundry outdoors to dry. Life has become a private affair. We are uncomfortable with intimacy and connection, which are among the greatest of our unmet needs today. To be truly seen and heard, to be truly known, is a deep human need. Our hunger for it is so omnipresent, so much a part of our experience of life, that we no more know what it is we are missing than a fish knows it is wet. We need way more intimacy than nearly anyone considers normal. Always hungry for it, we seek solace and sustenance in the closest available substitutes: television, shopping, pornography, conspicuous consumption - anything to ease the hurt, to feel connected, or to project an image by which we might be seen and known, or at least see and know ourselves."
"Clearly, the transition to a sacred economy accompanies a transition in our psychology. Community, which in today's parlance usually means proximity or a mere network, is a much deeper kind of connection than that: it is a sharing of one's being, an expansion of one's self. To be in community is to be in personal, interdependent relationship, and it comes with a price: our illusion of independence, our freedom from obligation. You can't have it both ways. If you want community, you must be willing to be obligated, dependent, tied, attached. You will give and receive gifts that you cannot just buy somewhere. You will not be able to easily find another source. You need each other."
"We can buy touch, we can buy stories (e.g., when we go to the movies), we buy music and video games to play, we can even buy sex. But whatever we buy, something unquantifiable (and therefore impervious to monetization) either rides its vehicle, or does not, and it is that unquantifiable thing that we really crave. When it is missing, whatever we have bought seems empty. It does not satisfy. When it is present, then even if we have purchased the vehicle it rides, we know we have received infinitely more than we paid for. We know, in other words, that we have received a gift. The chef who puts extra care into cooking something special, the musician playing her heart out, and the engineer who overdesigned a product just because he wanted to do it right will not directly profit from their extra efforts. They are in the spirit of the gift, and we can feel it-hence the desire to send 'our compliments to the chef.' Their behavior is uneconomic, and the present competition-based money system weeds it out. If you have ever worked in that system, you know what I mean. I am speaking of the relentless pressure to do things just well enough, and no better."
"Environmentalists often state that we can ill afford to maintain our resource-intensive lifestyles, implying that we would like to if only we could afford it. I disagree. I think we will move toward a more ecological way of life by positive choice. Instead of saying, 'Too bad we have to leave our gigantic suburban homes behind because they use too much energy,' we will no longer want those homes because we will recognize and respond to our need for personal, connected, sacred dwellings in tight communities. The same goes for the rest of the modern consumer lifestyle. We will put it aside because we can no longer stand the emptiness, the ugliness. We are starving for spiritual nourishment. We are starving for a life that is personal, connected, and meaningful. By choice, that is where we will direct our energy. When we do so, community will arise anew because this spiritual nourishment can only come to us as a gift, as part of a web of gifts in which we participate as giver and receiver. Whether or not it rides the vehicle of something bought, it is irreducibly personal and unique."
"When I use the word spiritual, I am not contradistinguishing it from the material. I have little patience with any philosophy or religion that seeks to transcend the material realm. Indeed, the separation of the spiritual from the material is instrumental in our heinous treatment of the material world. Sacred economics treats the world as more sacred, not less. It is more materialistic than our current culture - materialistic in the sense of deeply and attentively loving our world. So when I speak of meeting our spiritual needs, it is not to keep cranking out the cheap, generic, planet-killing stuff while we meditate, pray, and prattle on about angels, spirit, and God. It is to treat relationship, circulation, and material life itself as sacred. Because they are."
"When I drive through American suburbia with its fast food restaurants, enormous boxy stores, and cookie-cutter subdivisions, or look upon the architecture of modern office buildings and residential high-rises, I cannot help but marvel at the ugliness of it all. Compared to the charm and the intense vitality that imbues older objects and structures, ours is a deeply impoverished world. I marvel, with indignation bordering on outrage, that we can live in such an ugly world after thousands of years of advances in material technology. Are we really so poor that we can afford no better? What was the point of all this sacrifice, all this destruction, if we are poorer in the finer things of life, the beautiful and the unique, than a Medieval peasant was? Looking at the artifacts of bygone times, I am impressed by their vibrancy, the intense quality of life within them. Today, almost everything we use, even if it is expensive, is cheap, reeking of phoniness, indifference, and salesmanship."
"The first misconception about beauty corresponds to the worldview of Cartesian science; the second to the worldview of Cartesian religion. The first corresponds to the belief that beauty, life, and soul are secondary properties, epiphenomena, not measurable and therefore not real. You take an organism apart, and you get just a bunch of matter, a bunch of elements, some carbon, some nitrogen, some phosphorus - where is the ingredient you can call life or spirit? The mentality of religion, on the other hand, appears superficially to contradict science by saying that spirit is a real ingredient in life that science doesn't see. But on a deeper level it agrees: it agrees that spirit does not inhere in matter but occupies a separate, nonmaterial realm. Both agree that if there is such a thing as a spirit of life, it is something separate from matter, an extra ingredient. A parallel mind-set makes beauty an extra ingredient on top of function."
"And so, even those things that we use today that try to be beautiful as well as functional usually bear a certain inauthenticity. The beauty seems snazzy, gimmicky: it doesn't go very deep. Real beauty, which I might call life or soul, goes to the very heart of an object, and it is inseparable from its function, not secondary to the perfection of function. It evokes the paradoxical feeling, 'This is more beautiful than it has to be, yet it could be no other way.' It is identical to the feeling I get when I contemplate the beauty of a cell or a sunset or the mathematical object known as the Mandelbrot set. There is no reason for such beauty, such order out of chaos - it seems like a marvelous though gratuitous gift. The world would keep spinning around if sunsets were ugly, or raspberries not quite so delicious, would it not? Yet none of these could be any other way."
"Remember the truth of the connected self: we are our relationships. Moving inward a level, we could say the same for the relationship between ourselves and our organs. This is a universal truth of life. An economy that is alive, that is sacred, that is an extension of ecology, must have the same properties. And each object of that economy, each object that human beings create and circulate, must embody connection to all that environs it. Today, ours is an economy of separation: standard commodities that bear no relationship to the individual user, buildings that bear no relation to the land they occupy, retail outlets that bear no connection to local production, and products made in obliviousness to their effects on nature and people. None of these can possibly be beautiful, alive, or whole."
"The pursuit of this kind of wealth has not been a public priority for any part of the ideological spectrum for several hundred years. The twentieth-century socialists, for example, rejected any fripperies or indulgences that didn't further measurable material welfare, preferring the squat utilitarianism of rational efficiency in their grand project of maximizing production to bring plentiful, cheap goods to the masses. The same austerity expected of the socialist comrade extends to the progressive activist today, who is supposed to eschew fine living in pursuit of altruistic ideals. And establishment capitalism is little different: it has re-created and perfected the painfully ugly, utilitarian buildings and objects of socialism. I remember as a child hearing of the horrors of life in the Soviet Union. There was supposedly only one kind of store, a gigantic windowless dispensary staffed by listless, surly functionaries selling cheaply made, generic goods. It sounds a lot like Wal-Mart."
"In any event, we have created a material world devoid of soul, barren of life and killing of life. All for what? The pursuit of efficiency, the grand project of maximizing the production of commodities, and underneath that, the domination and control of life. This was to be the paradise of technology, life under control, and finally we see it for what it is: the strip mall, the robotic cashier, the endless parking lot, the extermination of the wild, the living, the messy, and the sacred."
"After all, we have a surfeit of manufactured goods, the result of standardized mass production and efficiencies of scale. Our tremendous overcapacity indicates that we don't need these efficiencies, nor so much mass production. Trapped by the madness of growth-demanding money, we compulsively produce more and more cheap, ugly things we don't need while suffering a poverty of things that are beautiful, unique, personal, and alive. That poverty, in turn, drives continued consumption, a desperate quest to fill the void left by a material environment bereft of relatedness."
"For a long time now, we have cared less and less about our things. We in rich countries don't even bother repairing most things anymore, as it is usually cheaper to buy new ones. However, much of this cheapness is an illusion coming from the externalization of costs. When we must pay the true price for the depletion of nature's gifts, materials will become more precious to us, and economic logic will reinforce, and not contradict, our heart's desire to treat the world with reverence and, when we receive nature's gifts, to use them well."
"We are born creators, here to achieve the exuberant expression of our gifts. The underlying connection between beauty and function suggests a parallel harmony between survival and the expression of our gifts. The old divide between making a living and being an artist will crumble, is already crumbling. So many of us, more and more of us, are refusing that divide. No object will be too insignificant to merit our care, our reverence, and our effort to make it right. We will seek - are already seeking - to embed all things in wholeness. All of the movements I have described in this book are carrying us toward a world that beautiful. The social dividend, the internalization of costs, degrowth, abundance and the gift economy, all take us away from the mentality of struggle, of survival, and therefore of utilitarian efficiency, and toward our true state of gratitude: of reverence for what we have received and of desire to give equally, or better, from our endowment. We wish to leave the world more beautiful than we entered it."
"How beautiful can life be? We hardly dare imagine it. I caught my first glimpse of it at the age of nineteen when I visited the National Palace Museum in Taiwan. It contained objects that, had I not seen them with my own eyes, I would not have believed could exist. I remember in particular a teapot, the emperor's teapot, an object of such beauty and perfection that it seemed to harbor the soul of a god. True wealth would be for everyone to live surrounded by objects like that, objects made by masters in the full flush of their genius. I don't believe that such mastery is available only to a few. Rather, it is because our gifts are so suppressed that few achieve such mastery. Thankfully, we have the record of the past to remind us of what is possible. I look at great works such as that teapot and think, 'The kind of person who made this does not exist anymore.' Such objects are beyond the capacity of any human living in this degenerate age. Yet the possibility lives on in our humanness, and we are on the way to its recovery."
" In transitioning into a new way of being, we might revisit the old once or twice and try to fit back into the womb; but when we do, we find that it can no longer accommodate us, and a state of being we once inhabited for years becomes intolerable in weeks or days."
"A corollary to the nonhoarding of gifts and to the social nature of their giving is that wealth in gift cultures tends to be publicly transparent. Everyone knows who has given what to whom, who has how much, who is hoarding, and who is generous. Translated into modern money dynamics, this suggests that all monetary holdings and transactions should be publicly transparent. With the advent of money, a new secrecy came to infect wealth that had been impossible before. When wealth was lands, sheep, and cattle, there was no hiding one's wealth, and therefore no shirking the social expectations incumbent upon it. But money can be hoarded in the basement, buried in the ground, stashed away in numbered bank accounts, kept secret, kept private. To undo the negative effects of money, eventually this characteristic of money must pass."
"Obviously, a system in which every transaction and every account balance is available for public view would radically change business practice. If you have ever been in business, imagine if you will that every customer, supplier, and competitor knew your true costs! However, monetary transparency fits in naturally to the gift-inspired business models I explored in Chapter 21, which require that you honestly reveal your costs and invite gifts on top of that. No longer would one be able to lie about one's costs in order to profit from the other party's lack of knowledge."
"Many people would find the idea of no financial privacy very threatening. Since money today is so bound up with self, we would feel exposed, vulnerable - as indeed, in today's society, we would be: exposed to envy and judgment and vulnerable to criminal extortion and demands from importunate relatives. In a different context, though, financial transparency is part of a way of being that is open, trusting, unguarded, and generous - being a person who has nothing to fear, who is comfortable in society. Moreover, financial transparency would make many kinds of criminal activity more difficult."
"Another basic feature of money as we have known it is its homogeneity: any dollar is the same as any other dollar. Thus money has no history, no story attached to it. In addition to homogenizing all it touches, this feature of money also disconnects it from the material and social world. In former times, though, gifts were unique objects that carried stories. In gift-giving ceremonies, often the entire history of a gift would be recounted (we still do this today, acting on a primal urge: we want to tell about where we bought it, or how Grandma received it as a wedding present). Money's homogeneity and anonymity (my dollars are the same as yours) therefore make it incompatible with gift principles and with the two features of sacredness I described in the introduction: uniqueness and connectedness."
"Therefore, I foresee money eventually losing its homogeneity and gaining the capacity to bear with it its history. With electronic, transparent money, every transaction that a given dollar has ever been used for could be attached to it in an electronic database. In making a purchase, then, you could decide whether to use the money from your salary or the money you were given by a friend, and even if it were in the same bank account, it would be different money. The child's intuition that the bank keeps 'your money' and returns those same physical bills when you make a withdrawal would become true. (This system does not conflict with credit creation - money could still be born, circulate for a while, and die.)"
"If our outer experience in some ways mirrors our psychology, perhaps the advent of energy abundance for humanity awaits an inventor who lets go of all hope of patenting and profiting from his invention and instead releases it into the public domain. That would short-circuit the usual accusations of charlatanism and the seizure of patents by the Department of Defense. Can a person hope to corral and own what is fundamentally a free gift of the universe?"
"I cannot predict how the Age of Reunion will unfold in linear time. I do know, however, that by the end of our lifetimes, my generation will live in a world unimaginably more beautiful than the one we were born into. And it will be a world that is palpably improving year after year. We will reforest the Greek isles, denuded over two thousand years ago. We will restore the Sahara Desert to the rich grassland it once was. Prisons will no longer exist, and violence will be a rarity. Work will be about, 'How may I best give of my gifts?' instead of, 'How can I make a living?' Crossing a national border will be an experience of being welcomed, not examined. Mines and quarries will barely exist, as we reuse the vast accumulation of materials from the industrial age. We will live in dwellings that are extensions of ourselves, eat food grown by people who know us, and use articles that are the best that people in the full flow of their talents could make them. We will live in a richness of intimacy and community that hardly exists today, that we know, because of a longing in the heart, must exist. And most of the time, the loudest noises we hear will be the sounds of nature and the laughter of children."
"We live today at a moment of transition between worlds. The institutions that have borne us through the centuries have lost their vitality; only with increasing self-delusion can we pretend they are sustainable. Our systems of money, politics, energy, medicine, education, and more are no longer delivering the benefits they once did (or seemed to). Their Utopian promise, so inspiring a century ago, recedes further every year. Millions of us know this; more and more, we hardly bother to pretend otherwise. Yet we seem helpless to change, helpless even to stop participating in industrial civilization's rush over the cliff."
"As we awaken to the interconnectedness of all our systems, we see that we cannot change, for example, our energy technologies without changing the economic system that supports them. We learn as well that all of our external institutions reflect our basic perceptions of the world, our invisible ideologies and belief systems. In that sense, we can say that the ecological crisis - like all our crises - is a spiritual crisis. By that I mean it goes all the way to the bottom, encompassing all aspects of our humanity."
"Since my childhood in the 1970s, our Story of the People has eroded at an accelerating rate. More and more people in the West no longer believe that civilization is fundamentally on the right track. Even those who don't yet question its basic premises in any explicit way seem to have grown weary of it. A layer of cynicism, a hipster self-awareness has muted our earnestness. What was once so real, say a plank in a party platform, today is seen through several levels of 'meta' filters that parse it in terms of image and message. We are like children who have grown out of a story that once enthralled us, aware now that it is only a story."
"Today we cannot ignore the intensifying degradation of the biosphere, the malaise of the economic system, the decline in human health, or the persistence and indeed growth of global poverty and inequality. We once thought economists would fix poverty, political scientists would fix social injustice, chemists and biologists would fix environmental problems, the power of reason would prevail and we would adopt sane policies. I remember looking at maps of rainforest decline in National Geographic in the early 1980s and feeling both alarm and relief - relief because at least the scientists and everyone who reads National Geographic are aware of the problem now, so something surely will be done.<br />
<br />
Nothing was done. Rainforest decline accelerated, along with nearly every other environmental threat that we knew about in 1980. Our Story of the People trundled forward under the momentum of centuries, but with each passing decade the hollowing-out of its core, which started perhaps with the industrial-scale slaughter of World War I, extended further. When I was a child, our ideological systems and mass media still protected that story, but in the last thirty years the incursions of reality have punctured its protective shell and eroded its essential infrastructure. We no longer believe our storytellers, our elites."
"Occasionally, something happens that is so absurd, so awful, or so manifestly unjust that it penetrates these defenses and causes people to question much of what they'd taken for granted. Such events present a cultural crisis. Typically, though, the dominant mythology soon recovers, incorporating the event back into its own narratives. The Ethiopian famine became about helping those poor black children unfortunate enough to live in a country that still hasn't 'developed' as we have. The Rwandan genocide became about African savagery and the need for humanitarian intervention. The Nazi Holocaust became about evil taking over, and the necessity to stop it. All of these interpretations contribute, in various ways, to the old Story of the People: we are developing, civilization is on the right track, goodness comes through control. None hold up to scrutiny; they obscure, in the former two examples, the colonial and economic causes of the famine and genocide, which are still ongoing. In the case of the Holocaust, the explanation of evil obscures the mass participation of ordinary people - people like you and me. Underneath the narratives a disquiet persists, the feeling that something is terribly wrong with the world."
"Who could have foreseen, two generations ago when the story of progress was strong, that the twenty-first century would be a time of school massacres, of rampant obesity, of growing indebtedness, of pervasive insecurity, of intensifying concentration of wealth, of unabated world hunger, and of environmental degradation that threatens civilization? The world was supposed to be getting better. We were supposed to be becoming wealthier, more enlightened. Society was supposed to be advancing. Is heightened security the best we can aspire to? What happened to visions of a society without locks, without poverty, without war? Are these things beyond our technological capacities? Why are the visions of a more beautiful world that seemed so close in the middle twentieth century now seem so unreachable that all we can hope for is to survive in an ever more competitive, ever more degraded world? Truly, our stories have failed us. Is it too much to ask, to live in a world where our human gifts go toward the benefit of all? Where our daily activities contribute to the healing of the biosphere and the well-being of other people? We need a Story of the People - a real one, that doesn't feel like a fantasy - in which a more beautiful world is once again possible."
"Our society runs in large part on the denial of that truth. Only by interposing ideological and systemic blinders between ourselves and the victims of industrial civilization can we bear to carry on. Few of us would personally rob a hungry three-year-old of his last crust or abduct his mother at gunpoint to work in a textile factory, but simply through our consumption habits and our participation in the economy, we do the equivalent every day. And everything that is happening to the world is happening to ourselves. Distanced from the dying forests, the destitute workers, the hungry children, we do not know the source of our pain, but make no mistake - just because we don't know the source doesn't mean we don't feel the pain. One who commits a direct act of violence will, if and when she realizes what she has done, feel remorse, a word that literally means 'biting back.' Even to witness such an act is painful. But most of us cannot feel remorse for, say, the ecological harm that the mining of rare earth minerals for our cell phones does in Brazil. The pain from that, and from all the invisible violence of the Machine of industrial civilization, is more diffuse. It pervades our lives so completely that we barely know what it is like to feel good. Occasionally, we get a brief respite from it, maybe by grace, or through drugs, or being in love, and we believe in those moments that this is what it is supposed to feel like to be alive. Rarely, though, do we stay there for very long, immersed as we are in a sea of pain."
"How much of our dysfunctional, consumptive behavior is simply a futile attempt to run away from a pain that is in fact everywhere? Running from one purchase to another, one addictive fix to the next, a new car, a new cause, a new spiritual idea, a new self-help book, a bigger number in the bank account, the next news story, we gain each time a brief respite from feeling pain. The wound at its source never vanishes though. In the absence of distraction - those moments of what we call 'boredom' - we can feel its discomfort."
"Of course, any behavior that alleviates pain without healing its source can become addictive. We should therefore hesitate to cast judgment on anyone exhibiting addictive behavior (a category that probably includes nearly all of us). What we see as greed or weakness might merely be fumbling attempts to meet a need, when the true object of that need is unavailable. In that case the usual prescriptions for more discipline, self-control, or responsibility are counterproductive."
"In Sacred Economics I made the point that what we perceive as greed might be an attempt to expand the separate self in compensation for the lost connections that compose the self of interbeing; that the objects of our selfish desires are but substitutes for what we really want. Advertisers play on this all the time, selling sports cars as a substitute for freedom, junk food and soda as a substitute for excitement, 'brands' as a substitute for social identity, and pretty much everything as a substitute for sex, itself a proxy for the intimacy that is so lacking in modern life. We might also see sports hero worship as a substitute for the expression of one's own greatness, amusement parks as a substitute for the transcending of boundaries, pornography as a substitute for self-love, and overeating as a substitute for connection or the feeling of being present. What we really need is nearly unavailable in the lives that society offers us. You see, even the behaviors that seem to exemplify selfishness may also be interpreted as our striving to regain our interbeingness."
"Have you ever heard arguments that we must practice conservation because of the economic value of 'ecosystem services'? Such arguments are problematic because they affirm the very assumption we need to question, that decisions in general should be made according to economic calculations. They also fail to persuade. Are you an environmentalist because you are moved by all the money we'll save? Well, no one else will become an environmentalist for that reason either. We have to appeal to what moves us: the love of our beautiful planet."
"Nonetheless, these conspiracy theories do express a psychological truth. They give voice to a feeling of helplessness and rage, the primal indignation of being cast into a world ruled by institutions and ideologies that are inimical to human well-being. The 'evil cabal' also represents a shadow aspect of ourselves, driven to dominate and control - an inevitable outgrowth of the separate self in an indifferent or hostile universe. The endless drive to prove conspiracy theories is a kind of protest. It says, 'Please believe me. It isn't supposed to be this way. Something awful has taken over the world.' That something is the Story of Separation and all that arises from it."
"Enlightenment is a group activity."
"In particular, the money system is not aligned with the Story of Interbeing, enforcing instead competition, scarcity, alienation from nature, dissolution of community, and the endless, nonreciprocal exploitation of the planet. If your life's work does not contribute to the conversion of nature into products and relationships into services, you may often find that there isn't much money to be made doing it. There are exceptions - glitches in the system, as well as the halting attempts by benevolent people and organizations to use some of their money in the spirit of the gift - but by and large, money as it is today is not aligned with the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible."
"Contrary to the doctrine of the cynic, the Story of Interbeing is (as we shall see) not actually less rational or evidence-based than the Story of Separation. We like to think that we base our beliefs on evidence, but far more often we arrange the evidence to fit our beliefs, distorting or excluding what won't fit, seeking out evidence that will, surrounding ourselves with others who share them. When these beliefs immerse us as part of a Story of the People, and when financial self-interest and social acceptance are tied to them, it is all the more difficult to accept anything radically different."
"Just this morning I heard ten seconds of a news segment on immigration reform. An image sprang to mind of a vast apparatus of fences, checkpoints, ID cards, paperwork, interviews, borders, security zones, and official 'status,' and I thought, 'Wait a minute - isn't it obvious that Earth belongs to everyone and to no one, and that there should be no borders? Isn't it hypocritical to make life unlivable somewhere through economic and political policies, and then to prevent people from leaving that place?' The two sides of the debate don't even mention that viewpoint, so far outside the bounds of respectable thought it lies. The same is true of practically every issue of public controversy. Isn't it insane to think that I am right and everyone else is wrong?"
"A number of years ago I came to be acquainted with a man whom I'll call Frank. Frank was highly intellectual, with more than a cursory knowledge of several scientific fields, but his life's work, on which he spent eight or ten hours a day, was to cut out words from product packaging and magazines. From these clues he teased out a vast, all-encompassing conspiracy theory. He believed that by rearranging the words with scissors and glue, he could disrupt the conspiracy and change reality on behalf of all beings.<br />
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He brought the most fascinating connections to light. A cereal box might have 'General Mills' on the front. 'Mills' contains 'mil,' short for 'military,' and look, the text on the back of the box has sentences of nineteen and thirteen words respectively. That comes to 1913, the year the Federal Reserve was established. Aha! The pattern begins to emerge. This example barely hints at the labyrinthine complexity of Frank's theories, which tie together packaging, logos, numerology, and more.<br />
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Everybody thought Frank was deranged, but I seriously considered, 'How am I different from him?' It seems like a trivial question, but I found it fruitful. Both of us uphold an explanation for the workings of the world that seriously violates consensus reality. Both of us are rearranging words drawn from an existing linguistic and conceptual substrate, hoping thereby to alter reality. Both of us are seen by many as deviant, and therefore must persevere indefinitely without much financial support or social affirmation (at the time, I was as broke and unknown as he was).<br />
<br />
Sometimes I titillate my brain with the thought that maybe this guy Frank really is right; that he is the greatest and bravest genius in history, working on a magical symbolic level to save the world. Maybe, if only I took the time to delve into his work, I would see it too.<br />
<br />
...I haven't kept in touch with Frank, but I have little doubt that he continues his obscure labors to this day. Most of us don't have that kind of hardihood. We are social animals and need at least a little bit of affirmation. We cannot stay in a deviant story by ourselves; in the face of a whole society that pulls us into the Story of Separation, we need allies. This book is meant to be such an ally. I hope that it will awaken or reinforce your understanding that you are not crazy after all, and that if anything it is the world that has gone insane."
"Conditional self-approval and self-rejection are powerful mechanisms of self-control: the application of psychological force upon oneself. We are deeply conditioned to it; it is perhaps the most fundamental of what I will call the 'habits of separation.' So conditioned, we are also vulnerable to any authority figure or government that can take over the role of parent: the arbiter of good and bad, the grantor or withholder of approval."
"The same conditioning also influences our attempts to change other people and the world. We invoke guilt with slogans like 'Are you part of the problem, or part of the solution?' We proclaim the complicity of each and every one of us in the imperialistic depredations of Western civilization, the ecocide, culturecide, and genocide. We try to manipulate the vanity of the people whose actions we hope to change: if you do X, you are a good person.<br />
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We habitually apply force to politicians and corporations as well. It could be the threat of public humiliation or the incentive of public praise and a positive image. It could be the threat of a lawsuit or recall campaign. It could be financial threat or incentive. 'Engage in environmentally responsible practices because it will ultimately enhance your bottom line.'<br />
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What worldview, what story, are we reinforcing when we use these tactics? It is the worldview in which things happen only through the application of force. These tactics seem to say, 'I know you. You are a ruthless maximizer of rational self-interest or genetic self-interest.' Assuming that, we attempt to leverage that self-interest. We do it to other people, and we do it to ourselves."
"None of this is to say that we should withhold praise and disapproval, or strive to free ourselves from being influenced by the opinions of others. As interbeings, the world reflects back to us what we put into the world. There is nothing wrong with celebrating the brave choices that move us, or expressing anger or grief over harmful decisions. It is when these are used with manipulative intent that they draw from the worldview of force."
"Control breeds its own necessity. So, when we treat land with heavy pesticides, the superweeds and superbugs that emerge require new and even stronger doses of pesticides. When someone goes on a diet and attempts to control her urge to eat, at some point the pent-up desire explodes outward as a binge, prompting further attempts to control herself. And when human beings are boxed in, surveilled, scheduled, assigned, classed, and compelled, they rebel in all kinds of ways, sometimes irrational or even violent. Ah, we think, we need to control these people. As with an addiction, these escalating attempts at control eventually exhaust all available resources, whether personal, social, or planetary. The result is a crisis that the technologies of control can only postpone but never solve. And each postponement only depletes what resources are still available even further."
"You might say that the despair we face when we recognize the futility of the technologies of separation to solve the crisis of separation is a sign of the fulfillment of the Age of Separation. It marks a turning point: we give up in despair and something new becomes available. The old story has finally reached the end of its telling, and the space is clear for a new story to emerge. This cannot happen while the old story still carries hope. If anything in the old world's 'practical' still has any hope of succeeding, that means the old story has life in it still. That's why 'near term extinction' arguments like those of Guy McPherson are valuable. Irrefutable on their own terms, they vanquish any hope within those terms, which encode the narrow view of the possible implicit in the Story of Separation."
"Why does one photon go here and one go there, if not compelled by some force? Well, why do you do one thing rather than another, if not compelled by some force? You choose, so the obvious intuitive answer is that the photon chooses its course. Physics, of course, cannot countenance such an answer, so far outside the scope of scientific thought it is as to be beyond laughable. Physics - and remember, physics lies at the foundation of our Story of the World, of what is real, what is practical, how things work - says instead that the behavior is 'random,' preserving, at the price of acausality, a universe of unconscious, generic building blocks. For indeed, to ascribe choice to something as humble as a photon or an electron would be to acknowledge our universe as intelligent through and through. No longer would the universe be just a bunch of stuff; no longer would we so cavalierly arrogate to ourselves the role of its lords and masters. The core project of our Story of the People would be shaken to its foundation."
"Winston, it is shown, is really no different from the Party in putting an abstract and unreachable goal ahead of any means. It is significant that the Brotherhood is phony, a fabrication of the Party; it is the Party. In the same way, only perhaps more subtly, the social or environmental crusader who sacrifices human values for the cause is no true revolutionary at all, but the opposite: a pillar of the system. We see again and again, within environmental organizations, within leftist political groups, the same bullying of underlings, the same power grabs, the same egoic rivalries as we see everywhere else. If these are played out in our organizations, how can we hope that they won't be played out in the world we create, should we be victorious?"
"It is here where the root of our collective illness lies, of which global warming is but a symptomatic fever. Let us be wary of measures that address only the most proximate cause of that symptom and leave the deeper causes untouched. Already some would justify fracking, nuclear power, and other ecologically destructive activities on the (specious) grounds that they will ameliorate climate change. Technological ideologues propose vast geoengineering schemes that would seed the stratosphere with sulfuric acid or the oceans with iron, actions that might have enormous unintended consequences, and that are an extension of the same mindset of managing and controlling nature that is at the root of our ecological predicament."
"For this reason, I am a bit wary of the conventional narrative about global warming, in which reducing CO2 and other greenhouse emissions is the top environmental priority. This narrative lends itself too easily to centralized solutions and the mentality of maximizing (or minimizing) a number. It subsumes all the small, local things we need to do to create a more beautiful world in a single cause for which all else must be sacrificed. This is the mentality of war, in which an all-important end trumps any compunctions about the means and justifies any sacrifice. We as a society are addicted to this mindset; thus the War on Terror replaced the Cold War, and if climate change loses popularity as a casus belli, we will surely find something else to replace it - say, the threat of an asteroid hitting Earth - to justify the mentality of war."
"The mentality of war, which justifies and compels the sacrifice of all things for the sake of Victory, is also the mentality of usury. As I describe in Sacred Economics, a money system that like ours is based on interest-bearing debt impels the endless growth of the money realm and the conversion of the many into the one - the diversity of values into a unitary quantity called value. As society becomes increasingly monetized, its members accept that money is the key to the fulfillment of any need or desire. Money, the universal means, becomes therefore a universal end as well. Just like the paradise of technological Utopia or the final victory in the war against evil, it becomes a god with an insatiable demand for sacrifice. The pursuit of it subsumes the small or unquantifiable acts and relationships that make life truly rich, but that the numbers cannot justify. When money is the goal, everything that cannot be translated into its terms gets squeezed out."
"Focusing on greenhouse gas emissions emphasizes the quantifiable while making the qualitative - might I even say the sacred? - invisible. Environmentalism is reduced to a numbers game. We as a society are comfortable with that, but I think the shift we must make is deeper. We need to come into direct, caring, sensuous relationship with this forest, this mountain, this river, this tiny plot of land, and protect them for their own sake rather than for an ulterior end. That is not to deny the dangers of greenhouse gases, but ultimately our salvation must come from recovering a direct relationship to what's alive in front of us."
"The ideology of control says that if we can only identify the 'cause,' we can control climate change. Fine, but what if the cause is everything? Economy, politics, emissions, agriculture, medicine ... all the way to religion, psychology, our basic stories through which we apprehend the world? We face then the futility of control and the necessity for transformation."
"I spoke recently with Kalle Lasn, the founder of the radical magazine Adbusters and a man who has devoted his entire life to promoting and practicing hands-on activism. He told me that for some time now he hasn't been spending much time on politics or the magazine because he is taking care of his ninety-five-year-old mother-in-law. He said, 'Taking care of her is far more important to me than all my other work put together.'<br />
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Kalle agreed with me when I said, 'Our worldview must accommodate the truth and importance of this.' My dear reader, can you countenance a reality in which to save the planet, we have to neglect our ninety-five-year-old mother-in-law? There must be a place in our understanding of how the universe works for the intimate, uncalculated acts of service that are such a beautiful part of our humanity.<br />
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Is Kalle to trust his feeling that in taking care of this old woman he is doing something significant?<br />
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Do you not know in your bones that any belief system that denies that significance must be part of the problem?<br />
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Can you bear to live in a world in which what he is doing doesn't matter?"
"You may think it is dangerous to sow despair, even if what I say is true. But the despair is there whether I sow it or not. Every activist I have asked confirms that they have at one time or another confronted precisely the despair I am evoking. We try to obscure it with reasoning like 'Sure, it makes no difference if you are the only one making changes, but if everyone does it then the world will change.' True, but is it in your power to make everyone do it? No. What you do would matter if everyone did it; by the same token, since everyone isn't doing it, what you do doesn't matter. I have never found an escape from this logic within its own terms. It is as sound as its premises - the separate self in an objective world. Worse yet, some would say that our individual efforts to buy local or recycle or ride bicycles are even counterproductive, giving us a false complacency, depotentiating more effective revolutionary acts, and enabling the larger mechanisms of ruin to trundle forward. As Derrick Jensen says, don't take shorter showers."
"There is a kind of senselessness in the most beautiful acts. The acts that change the world most profoundly are the ones that the mind of Separation cannot fathom. Imagine if Kalle Lasn had set out taking care of his mother-in-law with the agenda of making a big public show of his devotion. It would have stank of hypocrisy. The same is true of, say, peacebuilding projects or ecovillages that, too soon, develop a self-conscious image of themselves as an example. Please don't think that you 'have to write a book about it' for your experiences to have a large effect.<br />
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The book may come, the peacebuilding project documentary might come, but usually there must first be a latency, a time of doing something for its own sake, a time of inward focus on the goal and not the 'meta' goal. The magic comes from that place. From there, the synchronicities flow; there is no sense of forcing, only of participating in a larger happening that seems to have an intelligence of its own. You show up in the right place, at the right time. You respond to practical needs."
"Can you believe that changing an old woman's bedpan can change the world? If you do it to change the world, it will not. If you do it because she needs her bedpan changed, then it can."
"The contradiction between small, personal acts of compassion and steps to save the environment is a straw man, a contrapositive rhetorical device constructed by the cynic to voice his wound of powerlessness. In truth, the habit of acting from love will naturally apply to all our relationships, expanding alongside our understanding. Acts of ecological or social healing, so long as they are in earnest and not secretly designed to establish an identity or prove oneself good, are just as senseless as the small, personal ones. They are senseless because they are a drop in the bucket. What can one person do? As I have said, despair is inescapable in the old story. The alternative, an interconnected, intelligent universe, empowers those acts, but at a price for the activist - it equally empowers the small-scale acts that don't fit into her save-the-world paradigm at all. It makes her climate change awareness campaign no more and no less important than changing the bedpans in the hospice. But again, would you really like to live in any other world?"
"When we are in service to something that is real, when we speak of it our words have power. Others can feel its reality too. That is why some people have the seemingly magical ability to speak things into existence. When they say such-and-such is going to happen, everyone believes it is going to happen, even if its happening depends on everyone believing it will happen."
"Given that premise, the goal of spirituality becomes to transcend the material realm and ascend into the spiritual. A kind of antimaterialism infuses such teachings as 'You are not your body' as well as aspirations to 'raise one's vibrations.' Given that our environmental collapse comes from antimaterialism as well (a devaluing and desacralization of the material world), we might want to reconsider these teachings. What is so special about 'high' vibrations? Is a bassoon less beautiful than a flute? Is a rock less sacred than a cloud? Is Earth less sacred than Heaven? Is superior better than inferior? Is high better than low? Is abstract better than concrete? Is reason better than feeling? Is pure better than messy? Is man better than woman?"
"It is no coincidence that the abstraction of spirit from matter, the removal of the abode of the gods into a heavenly realm, and the emergence of patriarchy all happened at about the same time. All arose with the first large-scale agricultural civilizations, with their social classes, division of labor, and need to exert control over natural forces. It was then that the conquest of nature that had started earlier with domestication of plants and animals became an explicit virtue, and the gods became the lords of nature rather than its personification. The builder societies, requiring standardization in their armies and construction projects, developing abstract systems of measure in their accounting and distribution of resources, looked naturally to the sky, with its orderly, predictable movements, as the seat of divinity. Mirroring that, the higher social classes - the priests, nobles, and kings - had less and less to do with the soil and with the messiness of human relationships, but were kept insulated in temples, palaces, and, when they must go out, above the ground on litters. At the same time, the concepts of good and evil were born. Anything that violated the progressive imposition of control onto nature and human nature was evil: floods, weeds, wolves, locusts, etc., as well as fleshly desires, rebelliousness, and indolence. Self-discipline - necessary to raise oneself above the desires of the material world - became a cardinal spiritual virtue."
"Why are we so desperate to escape the material world? Is it really so bleak? Or could it be, rather, that we have made it bleak: obscured its vibrant mystery with our ideological blinders, severed its infinite connectedness with our categories, suppressed its spontaneous order with our pavement, reduced its infinite variety with our commodities, shattered its eternity with our time-keeping, and denied its abundance with our money system? If so, then we are misguided if we appeal to a nonmaterial spiritual realm for our salvation from the prison of materiality."
"Today, our economic environment screams at us, 'Scarcity!'; our political environment screams at us, 'Us versus them'; our medical environment screams at us, 'Be afraid!' Together, they keep us alone and scared to change."
"To live in nuclear families in isolated boxes, to procure life's necessities from anonymous strangers, to depend not at all on the land around us for sustenance insinuates separation into our basic perceptions of the world."
"I'm not going to pin my optimism on the hope that some miracle technology is going to save us. If it were up to technology to save us, it already would have. We have long possessed the technologies to live abundantly and sustainably on this planet, but we have used them to other ends. We could live in an earthly paradise using perfectly uncontroversial technologies: conservation, recycling, green design, solar energy, permaculture, biological wastewater treatment, bicycles, designing for reparability, durability, and reusability, and so on. These are technologies that already exist and, by and large, have existed for decades or centuries. No new, miraculous technologies are necessary. However, another kind of miracle is necessary to redeem the promise of these existing technologies: a social or political miracle. That's what it would take to reverse deforestation, cut greenhouse gas emissions, heal damaged watersheds, and remove all the legal, social, and economic impediments to change. It would doubtless require a different money system, and therefore a radical restructuring of economic power and privilege. It would require a wholesale shift away from militarism and all the belief systems behind it. It would require millions of people going back to the land to engage in small-scale, high-productivity, labor-intensive agriculture. Technologically feasible? Certainly. Politically realistic? Hardly."
"For a long time, activists in these areas and many others have been operating in their own silos, as if they were addressing a single anomalous malady in a system that, despite a few problems, were fundamentally sound. It was not obvious that someone working for, say, prison reform was devoted to another facet of the same cause as someone working for organic agriculture. Fortunately, this is changing today. A creeping radicalization is taking over, as people recognize the interconnectedness of all our systems and institutions, and the complicity of these in upholding the dominant narratives. The prison system as we know it depends on the same kinds of beliefs that also embed our food system, educational system, and medical system. They all depend on the same political mindsets, the same economic mechanisms, and the same kinds of interpersonal relationships."
"The ancients, knowing that the truth would be co-opted and distorted if left in explicit form, encoded it into stories. When we hear or read one of these stories, even if we cannot decode the symbolism, we are affected on an unconscious level. Myths and fairy tales represent a very sophisticated psychic technology. Each generation of storytellers, without consciously intending to, transmits the covert wisdom that it learned, unconsciously, from the stories told it."
"You can recognize a true story by the way its images linger in your mind. It imprints itself on the psyche. You get the feeling that something else has been transmitted alongside the plot, something invisible. Usually, such stories bear rich symbolism often unknown even to their authors. A comparison of two twentieth-century children's books illustrates my point: compare a Berenstain Bears story with How the Grinch Stole Christmas! Only the latter has a psychic staying power, revealing the spirit of a true story, and it is rich with archetypal symbolism."
"In a conversation, the Lakota Aloysius Weasel Bear told me that he once asked his grandfather, 'Grandpa, the White Man is destroying everything, shouldn't we try to stop him?' His grandfather replied, 'No, it isn't necessary. We will stand by. He will outsmart himself.' The grandfather recognized two things in this reply: (1) that Separation carries the seeds of its own demise, and (2) that his people's role is to be themselves. But I don't think that this is an attitude of callousness that leaves the White Man to his just deserts; it is an attitude of compassion and helping that understands the tremendous importance of simply being who they are. They are keeping alive something that the planet and the community of all being needs."
"By the same token, our culture's fascination with all things indigenous is not merely the latest form of cultural imperialism and exploitation. True, the final stage of cultural domination would be to turn Native ways into a brand, a marketing image. And certainly there are some in my culture who, sundered from community and from a real identity, adopt Native pseudo-identities and pride themselves on their connections to Native culture, spirituality, people, and so forth. Underneath that, however, we recognize that the surviving First Peoples have something important to teach us. We are drawn to their gift, to the seed that they have preserved until the present time. To receive this seed, it is not necessary to participate in their rituals, take an animal name, or claim a Native ancestor, but only to humbly see what they have preserved, so that memory may awaken. Until recently, such seeing was impossible for us, blinkered by our cultural superiority complex, our arrogance, our apparent success in mastering the universe. Now that converging ecological and social crises reveal the bankruptcy of our ways, we have the eyes to see the ways of others."
"If my house is on fire, I won't stay sitting in front of the computer. The world is on fire! Why am I sitting in front of my computer? It is because I don't have a fire extinguisher for the world, and there isn't a global 911 to call."
"After all, why is global warming happening? There are the proximate causes: the burning of fossil fuels, and the assault on the forests and biodiversity that maintain climate homeostasis. And why are these happening? It is all in the name of efficiency: labor efficiency (doing more work per unit of labor) and economic efficiency (maximizing the short-term return on capital). And efficiency is just another name for getting it done faster.
One might wish to think that there is good hurrying (to save the planet) and bad hurrying (to use machines to get things done with less work), but maybe the underlying mindset behind both kinds of hurrying is the problem. This mindset is one of the habits of separation, the next theme of this book."
"I would like to propose that the reason our actions have been so manifestly unsuccessful in steering the world away from its present collision course is that we have not, generally speaking, been basing them on any true understanding."
"It is quite natural to first apply familiar solutions to new problems. Perhaps only their failure awakens us to the idea that the problems are of a different nature than we supposed. In any event, we are arriving, many of us, at that place of not knowing what to do."
"None of this should be taken as a rejection of action or a call for passivity. There is a place in this world for effort, for urgency. What I have described is much like a birth process. From what I've witnessed in the birth of my children, when the time comes to push, the urge to push is unstoppable. Here is the very epitome of urgency. Between contractions the mother rests. Can you imagine saying to her, 'Don't stop now! You have to make an effort. What happens if the urge doesn't arise again? You can't just push when you feel like it!'"
"'You can't just do whatever you feel like.' 'You can't just do anything you want.' 'You have to learn self-restraint.' 'You're only interested in gratifying your desires.' 'You don't care about anything but your own pleasure.' Can you hear the judgmentality in these admonitions? Can you see how they reproduce the mentality of domination that runs our civilization? Goodness comes through conquest. Health comes through conquering bacteria. Agriculture is improved by eliminating pests. Society is made safe by winning the war on crime. On my walk today, students accosted me, asking if I wanted to join the 'fight' against pediatric cancer. There are so many fights, crusades, campaigns, so many calls to overcome the enemy by force. No wonder we apply the same strategy to ourselves. Thus it is that the inner devastation of the Western psyche matches exactly the outer devastation it has wreaked upon the planet. Wouldn't you like to be part of a different kind of revolution?"
"The debate over debt reduction versus fiscal stimulus takes for granted economic growth as an unquestionable good. The question of immigration reform takes for granted the social conventions of borders and ID. Statistics on Third World poverty take for granted that money is a good measure of wealth. The choice of news stories on television implies that these are the most important, relevant things happening. Signs all over public space saying things like 'Emergency brake. Penalty for misuse' imply that it is penalties that maintain social order, just as ubiquitous security cameras imply that people need to be watched. Above all, the normalcy of society's routines tells us that this way of life is normal."
"For many people, the most powerful enforcer of the habits of separation is money. Usually, the actions that love inspires don't redound to our financial self-interest; to the contrary, it is money that often seems to thwart such actions. Is it prudent? Is it practical? Can you afford to? For other people the enforcer is a religious teaching, or social pressure, or the fear of family and friends. 'It won't do any good.' 'It isn't safe.' 'It's weird.'"
"No wonder, trying to reconcile the rules with the world we have lived in, religious authorities divided the universe into two realms, the earthly and the heavenly, the material and the spiritual. Yes, they conceded, the material world is sinful, and our bodies, being of that world, are sinful as well, but there is something else, another world with different rules. To live according to those, we have to resist the ways of the material world and the flesh."
"Scarcity is one of the defining features of modern life. Around the world, one in five children suffer from hunger. We fight wars over scarce resources such as oil. We have depleted the oceans of fish and the ground of clean water. Worldwide, people and governments are cutting back, making do with less, because of a scarcity of money. Few would deny that we live in an era of scarce resources; many would say it is dangerous to imagine otherwise.<br />
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On the other hand, it is not hard to see that most of this scarcity is artificial. Consider food scarcity: vast amounts, as much as 50 percent of production by some estimates, is wasted in the developed world. Vast areas of land are devoted to producing ethanol, vaster areas still are devoted to America's number one cultivated species: lawn grass. Meanwhile, land that is devoted to food production is typically farmed by chemical-intensive, machine-dependent methods that are actually less productive (per hectare, not per unit of labor) than labor-intensive organic agriculture and permaculture.<br />
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Similarly, scarcity of natural resources is also an artifact of our system. Not only are our production methods wasteful, but much of what is produced does little to further human well-being. Technologies of conservation, recycling, and renewables languish undeveloped. Without any real sacrifice, we could live in a world of abundance.<br />
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Perhaps nowhere is the artificiality of scarcity so obvious as it is with money. As the example of food illustrates, most of the material want in this world is due to lack not of anything tangible, but to lack of money. Ironically, money is the one thing we can produce in unlimited quantities: it is mere bits in computers. Yet we create it in a way that renders it inherently scarce, and that drives a tendency toward concentration of wealth, which means overabundance for some and scarcity for the rest."
"Even wealth offers no escape from the perception of scarcity. A 2011 study of the superwealthy at Boston College's Center on Wealth and Philanthropy surveyed attitudes toward wealth among households with net worth of $25 million or more (some much more - the average was $78 million). Amazingly, when asked whether they experienced financial security, most of the respondents said no. How much would it take to achieve financial security? They named figures, on average, 25 percent higher than their current assets.<br />
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If someone with $78 million in assets can experience scarcity, it obviously has much deeper roots than economic inequality. The roots are nowhere else than in our Story of the World. Scarcity starts in our very ontology, our self-conception, and our cosmology. From there, it infiltrates our social institutions, systems, and experience of life. A culture of scarcity immerses us so completely that we mistake it for reality."
"The most pervasive, life-consuming form of scarcity is that of time. As the Dogon man exemplifies, 'primitive' people generally don't experience a shortage of time. They don't see their days, hours, or minutes as numbered. They don't even have a concept of hours or minutes. 'Theirs,' says Helena Norberg-Hodge in describing rural Ladakh, 'is a timeless world.' I have read accounts of Bedouins content to do nothing but watch the sands of time pass, of Pirahã fully absorbed in watching a boat appear on the horizon and disappear hours later, of native people content to literally sit and watch the grass grow. This is a kind of wealth nearly unknown to us."
"Scarcity of time is built in to the Story of Science that seeks to measure all things, and thereby renders all things finite. It delimits our existence to the boundaries of a single biographical timeline, the finite span of a separate self."
"Scarcity of time also draws from the scarcity of money. In a world of competition, at any moment you could be doing more to get ahead. At any moment you have a choice whether to use your time productively. Our money system embodies the maxim of the separate self: more for you is less for me. In a world of material scarcity, you can never 'afford' to rest at ease. This is more than a mere belief or perception: money as it exists today is not, as some teachings claim, 'just energy'; at least it is not a neutral energy. It is always in short supply. When money is created as interest-bearing debt as ours is, then always and necessarily there will be more debt than there is money. Our systems mirror our collective perceptions."
"'More for you is less for me' is a defining axiom of Separation. True in a competitive money economy, it is false in earlier gift cultures in which, because of widespread sharing, more for you was more for me. Scarcity conditioning extends far beyond the economic realm, manifesting as envy, jealousy, one-upmanship, social competitiveness, and more."
"The scarcity of money, in turn, draws from the scarcity of love, intimacy, and connection. The foundational axiom of economics says as much: human beings are motivated to maximize rational self-interest. This axiom is a statement of separateness and, I hazard to say, loneliness. Everyone out there is a utility-maximizer, in it for themselves. You are alone. Why does this seem so true, at least to economists? Where does the perception and experience of aloneness come from? In part it comes from the money economy itself, which surrounds us with standardized, impersonal commodities divorced from their original matrix of relationships, and replaces communities of people doing things for themselves and each other with paid professional services. As I describe in Sacred Economics, community is woven from gifts. Gifts in various forms create bonds, because a gift creates gratitude: the desire to give in return or to give forward. A money transaction, in contrast, is over and done with once goods and cash have changed hands. Each party goes their separate ways."
"The scarcity of love, intimacy, and connection is also inherent in our cosmology, which sees the universe as composed of generic building blocks that are just things, devoid of sentience, purpose, or intelligence. It is also a result of patriarchy and its attendant possessiveness and jealousy. If one thing is abundant in the human world, it should be love and intimacy, whether sexual or otherwise. There are so many of us! Here like nowhere else is the artificiality of scarcity plain. We could be living in paradise."
"I could go on to mention many other kinds of scarcity that are so normal in our society as to escape notice. Scarcity of attention. Scarcity of play. Scarcity of listening. Scarcity of dark and quiet. Scarcity of beauty. I live in a hundred-year-old house. What a contrast there is between the regular, factory-perfect commodity objects and buildings that environ us, and the old radiators in my house, clanking and hissing all night, with their curved iron, their irregular valves and connectors, made with a touch more care than they needed to be, that seem to possess a quality of life. I drive past the strip malls and big box stores, the parking lots and auto dealerships, office buildings and subdevelopments, each building a model of cost-efficiency, and I marvel, 'After five thousand years of architectural development, we've ended up with this?' Here we see the physical expression of the ideology of science: Only the measurable is real. We have maximized our production of the measurable - the square feet, the productivity per labor unit - at the expense of everything qualitative: sacredness, intimacy, love, beauty, and play."
"How much of the ugly does it take to substitute for a lack of the beautiful? How many adventure films does it take to compensate for a lack of adventure? How many superhero movies must one watch, to compensate for the atrophied expression of one's greatness? How much pornography to meet the need for intimacy? How much entertainment to substitute for missing play? It takes an infinite amount. That's good news for economic growth, but bad news for the planet. Fortunately, our planet isn't allowing much more of it, nor is our ravaged social fabric. We are almost through with the age of artificial scarcity, if only we can release the habits that hold us there."
"From our immersion in scarcity arise the habits of scarcity. From the scarcity of time arises the habit of hurrying. From the scarcity of money comes the habit of greed. From the scarcity of attention comes the habit of showing off. From the scarcity of meaningful labor comes the habit of laziness. From the scarcity of unconditional acceptance comes the habit of manipulation. These are but examples - there are as many responses to each of these missing things as there are individuals."
"We are like a man lost in a maze. He runs around frantically, hitting the same dead ends again and again, repeatedly circling back to his starting point. Finally he pauses to rest, to breath, to ponder. Then in a flash he understands the logic of the maze. Now it is time to begin walking. Imagine if instead he says, 'No, I cannot pause to rest. Only by moving my feet will I ever get anywhere. So I must not stop moving my feet.' We tend to devalue those periods of pause, emptiness, silence, and integration."
"The situation on Earth today is too dire for us to act from habit - to reenact again and again the same kinds of solutions that brought us to our present extremity. Where does the wisdom to act in entirely new ways come from? It comes from nowhere, from the void; it comes from inaction. When we see it, we realize it was right in front of us all along. It is never far away; yet at the same time it is in a different universe - a different Story of the World. A Chinese saying describes it well: 'As far away as the horizon, and right in front of your face.' You can run toward it forever, run faster and faster, and never get any closer. Only when you stop do you realize you are already there. That is exactly our collective situation right now. All of the solutions to the global crisis are sitting right in front of us, but they are invisible to our collective seeing, existing, as it were, in a different universe."
"The same might be said for the monetary authorities' response to financial crisis, and more generally to governments everywhere. In most places, the political system is frozen into increasingly irrelevant debates, in which real solutions aren't even on the table. In the U.S., amid the wrangling over troop levels, withdrawal timetables, and so on, where is the call to withdraw from all military bases worldwide and dismantle the standing army entirely? It is not part of the conversation. Of course, for it to enter the conversation would require the rejection of deeply held myths about the way the world works, the causes of war and terrorism, the real goals of American foreign policy, and so on, all the way down to our notions of good and evil. If one has not questioned these myths, then a call to disband the military would seem laughably naive."
"Similarly, where in the universe of political dialogue on agricultural policy is the idea of a large-scale transition to permaculture, involving big gardens where lawns are today, a repopulation of rural land, humanure composting, and the therapeutic benefits of reconnecting to the soil? This could sequester carbon back into the soil, end the eutrophication of waterways, replenish aquifers, and reverse desertification. It would provide meaningful work to millions who are looking for it, drastically reduce fossil fuel use - and produce more food on less land, allowing wild ecosystem restoration."
"It takes some doing to document these claims. Many authorities state categorically, 'The only way to feed seven billion people on this planet is with massive fossil fuel inputs.' To refute this claim requires deconstructing its basic assumptions about agriculture and diet. How many of them take into account (to use one example of hundreds) crops like the Mayan bread nut, which in the tropics can produce eight times the caloric yield of corn per hectare with superior nutrition and storability, can be collected in vast quantities with minimal labor, requires no pesticides, only needs to be planted once, is drought-resistant, provides fodder for goats and cows, and can be used as an overstory crop with vegetables, aquaculture, etc., underneath? This tree has been cut down all over Central America to make room for corn."
"That's a lot of stories, layer upon layer, that have to change. Thus I say that our revolution must go all the way to the bottom, all the way down to our basic understanding of self and world. We will not survive as a species through more of the same: better breeds of corn, better pesticides, the extension of control to the genetic and molecular level. We need to enter a fundamentally different story. That is why an activist will inevitably find herself working on the level of story. She will find that in addition to addressing immediate needs, even the most practical, hands-on actions are telling a story. They come from and contribute to a new Story of the World."
"A good time to do nothing is any time you feel stuck. I have done a lot of nothing in the writing of this book. For several days I was trying to write the conclusion, spinning my wheels, turning out tawdry rehashes of earlier material. The more I did, the worse it got. So I finally gave up the effort and just sat there on the couch, a baby strapped to my chest, mentally traveling through the book I had written, but with no agenda whatever of figuring out what to write. It was from that empty place that the conclusion arose, unbidden."
"Do not be afraid of the empty place. It is the source we must return to if we are to be free of the stories and habits that entrap us."
"If we are stuck and do not choose to visit the empty place, eventually we will end up there anyway. You may be familiar with this process on a personal level. The old world falls apart, but the new has not emerged. Everything that once seemed permanent and real is revealed as a kind of hallucination. You don't know what to think, what to do; you don't know what anything means anymore. The life trajectory you had plotted out seems absurd, and you can't imagine another one. Everything is uncertain. Your time frame shrinks from years to this month, this week, today, maybe even to the present moment. Without the mirages of order that once seemed to protect you and filter reality, you feel naked and vulnerable, but also a kind of freedom. Possibilities that didn't even exist in the old story lie before you, even if you have no idea how to get there. The challenge in our culture is to allow yourself to be in that space, to trust that the next story will emerge when the time in between has ended, and that you will recognize it. Our culture wants us to move on, to do. The old story we leave behind, which is usually part of the consensus Story of the People, releases us with great reluctance. So please, if you are in the sacred space between stories, allow yourself to be there. It is frightening to lose the old structures of security, but you will find that even as you might lose things that were unthinkable to lose, you will be okay. There is a kind of grace that protects us in the space between stories. It is not that you won't lose your marriage, your money, your job, or your health. In fact, it is very likely that you will lose one of these things. It is that you will discover that even having lost that, you are still okay. You will find yourself in closer contact to something much more precious, something that fires cannot burn and thieves cannot steal, something that no one can take and cannot be lost. We might lose sight of it sometimes, but it is always there waiting for us. This is the resting place we return to when the old story falls apart. Clear of its fog, we can now receive a true vision of the next world, the next story, the next phase of life. From the marriage of this vision and this emptiness, a great power is born."
"My brother, whose clarity of mind is relatively pristine because he rarely reads anything written after 1900, described to me his vision of how the changeover will finally manifest. A bunch of bureaucrats and leaders will be sitting around wondering what to do about the new financial crisis. All the usual central bank policies, bailouts, interest rate cuts, quantitative easing, and so forth will be on the table, but the leaders just won't be able to bring themselves to deal with it. 'Fuck it,' they'll say. 'Let's go fishing instead.'"
"As your old story came to an end, or comes to an end, do you find yourself contracting a case of the fuck-its? The procrastination, the laziness, the halfhearted attempts, the going through the motions - all indicate that the old story isn't motivating you anymore. What once made sense, makes sense no longer. You are beginning to withdraw from that world. Society does its best to persuade you to resist that withdrawal, which, when resisted, is called depression. Increasingly potent motivational and chemical means are required to keep us focused on what we don't want to focus on, to keep us motivated to do that which we don't care about. If fear of poverty doesn't work, then maybe psychiatric medication will. Anything to keep you participating in business as usual."
"That depression that makes it impossible to vigorously participate in life as it is offered has a collective expression as well. Lacking a compelling sense of purpose or destiny, our society muddles along, going halfheartedly through the motions. 'Depression' manifests in the economic sense, as the instrument of our collective will - money - stagnates. No longer is there enough of it to do anything grand. Like insulin in the insulin-resistant diabetic, the monetary authorities pump out more and more of it, to less and less effect. What would once have sparked an economic boom barely suffices now to keep the economy from grinding to a halt. Economic paralysis could indeed be the way this 'stop' appears. But it could be anything that makes us give up our story and its enactments once and for all."
"Doing nothing is not a universal suggestion; it is specific to the time when a story is ending and we enter the space between stories. I am drawing here from the Taoist principle of wu-wei. Sometimes translated as 'nondoing,' a better translation might be 'noncontrivance' or 'nonforcing.' It means freedom from reflexive doing: acting when it is time to act, not acting when it is not time to act. Action is thus aligned with the natural movement of things, in service to that which wants to be born."
"What if we are fooling ourselves when we think we are making our choices according to one or another principle? What if the choices are really coming from somewhere else, and all the reasons we cite for the choice are actually rationalizations? In fact, there is a lot of social psychology research that demonstrates precisely this. Unconscious motives of social conformity, self-image, coherence with belief systems, validation of group norms and worldviews, and so on demonstrably wield a far greater influence than most people suspect."
"Our civilization is stuck in patterns that we seem helpless to alter. One need only look at the stirring pronouncements of the 1992 Rio Summit to see that. Organizations and nations routinely pursue policies that only a small fraction of their members support - or sometimes in the case of organizations, that no one supports. How is this possible? Certainly, part of the explanation has to do with the interests of the elites who wield financial and political power, but we must remember that this power comes ultimately from social agreements and not from the superpowers of the rulers. Moreover, such things as global warming or the risk of thermonuclear war are not in the interest of the elites either. So we are back into the realm of self-deception. The question I am asking is 'How can the body politic, the human species as a whole, change its destructive habits?'"
"The reason that (in this particular instance - you don't think I'd confess to you the times I have acted like a self-centered drama king now, do you?) I did not act from the habits of separation after my walk is not because I tried not to or chose not to. It is because of the attention I gave to the habits themselves and to the feelings underneath them. To give attention to a habit weakens its compulsion. To give attention to the condition underlying the habit robs it of its motivation. The feeling underlying all of my little plans was a kind of tender, helpless loneliness. I gave attention to these things without even having an agenda of stopping myself from acting on them. I trusted the power of attention to do its work. Maybe the result would be that I would adopt Plan A after all. I didn't worry about that."
"I am hoping that the stories and lists of habits of separation will bring some of you readers to a curious awareness of whichever of those habits reside within you. Please do not try to stop them by force. If you do try it probably won't work; you will only deceive yourself. Indeed, it would be a habit of separation to respond with shame, chagrin, and the desire to turn over a new leaf when you notice a habit of separation."
"We are not on a quest here to become better and better people. 'Being good' is part of the old story. It reflects an internalized approval-seeking originating in modern parenting, schooling, and religion. The quest to be good is part of the war against the self and the war against nature that it reflects."
"Here is another paradox: We become better people only when we give up the quest to become better people. That quest can achieve only the appearance of what it seeks. None are as capable of evil as the self-righteous. One amusing study showed participants packages of organic food or comfort food like brownies. Those shown the organic food displayed less empathy and made harsher moral judgments than those shown the comfort food. When you're honest with yourself that you want that brownie as much as the next person, naturally you'll be less judgmental. Studies like this are often interpreted so as to sound a call for humility. Unfortunately, humility is not something one can attain through hard work or an act of will. If we could, then we could also rightly take credit for our own humility. Be wary of those who strive for humility - usually what they achieve is a counterfeit of it that, in the end, fools no one but themselves. It might actually be more humble to be cheerfully immodest."
"And there is a time to do nothing, but sooner or later, from nothing doing comes, a natural impulse backed by one's full unconflicted energy."
"Sit for a moment with the thought 'I don't have to do anything. The change I seek is already happening.' Does that bring up the same feelings in you as it does in me? Feelings of scorn, a kind of swelling outrage, and a secret longing as for something too good to be true? The scorn and outrage say, 'This is a recipe for complacency and therefore for disaster. If I give up my efforts, however feeble they admittedly are, then there is no hope whatever.' They also tap into the deep unease that comes from a worldview that casts us into a purposeless, insentient universe. In that world of force, if you don't make something happen, nothing will happen. You can never let go and trust. Yet there is that secret longing too, that wants to do just that. Will it be okay? Or will the hostility of the universe that our ideology has taught us and that our society has reified once again exploit our vulnerability?"
"Most of us have grown up in a society that trains us, from kindergarten or even earlier, to do things we don't really want to do, and to refrain from things we do want to. This is called discipline, the work ethic, self-control. Since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution at least, it has been seen as a cardinal virtue. After all, most of the tasks of industry were not anything a sane human being would willingly do. To this day, most of the tasks that keep society as we know it running are the same. Lured by future rewards, chastened by punishment, we face the grim necessity of work. This would all be defensible, perhaps, if this work were truly necessary, if it were contributing to the well-being of people and planet. But at least 90 percent of it is not."
"You don't have to do anything - why? Not because nothing needs to be done. It is that you don't have to do, because you will do. The unstoppable compulsion to act, in bigger and wiser ways than you knew possible, has already been set in motion. I am urging you to trust in that. You needn't contrive to motivate yourself, guilt yourself, or goad yourself into action. Actions taken from that place will be less powerful than the ones that arise unbidden. Trust yourself that you will know what to do, and that you will know when to do it."
"Virtue comes from self-denial, willpower, discipline, self-sacrifice. Mirroring the war against nature, this war against the self can have only one result: you lose."
"A corollary principle of self-struggle is to elevate anything that is hard and devalue anything that comes easy. It is therefore also a habit of scarcity and of ingratitude. Imagine you are a practitioner of meditation and someone asks you, 'What do you do?' You reply, 'Well, I sit on a cushion and pay attention to my breath.' The questioner says, 'That's all? What's so hard about that?' 'Oh,' you say, offended, 'it's really hard!' Being hard validates it. To do it, you have to overcome something in yourself; you have to prevail in some kind of struggle."
"The belief that goodness comes through sacrifice and struggle goes back thousands of years - but only thousands of years. It is the defining mentality of agriculture: only if ye sow, shall ye reap. The ancient peasant had to learn to overcome the immediate urges of the body for the sake of a distant future reward. Just as it takes a lot of work to overcome nature (for example by clearing fields, pulling weeds, etc.) so also does it take work to overcome human nature: the desire perhaps to play, to sing, to roam, to create, and to seek food only when hungry. Agricultural life requires sometimes overcoming these desires."
"... the origin of the valorization of self-conquest probably came later, with the first 'builder' civilizations. Their high degree of division of labor, standardization of tasks, hierarchy, and other regimentation necessitated the virtues of discipline, obedience, sacrifice, and the work ethic.
<br />
These civilizations developed the conceptual and organizational basis for the Industrial Revolution, which took division of labor, standardization of processes, and the attendant degradation, exploitation, and tedium to new heights. It was then as well that the values of the machine achieved their full expression. Society required millions of people to do very hard things indeed. We devised numerous institutions to compel ourselves to sacrifice the present for the future. Religion taught us to do that: renounce and overcome fleshly desires for the sake of a heavenly reward in the afterlife. School taught us to do that, conditioning us to perform tedious tasks we really don't care about for the sake of an external future reward. And, most of all, money taught us to do that, or, more often, compelled us to do that, through the devices of interest and debt. The former tempts the investor to forgo immediate gratification (or generosity) for the sake of even more in the future. The latter compels the equivalent of the debtor."
"You can see how intertwined are the habits of scarcity and the habits of struggle. On the economic level, it is scarcity that motivates and compels sacrifice. On the psychological level, the need to validate oneself through (paradoxically) self-conquest comes itself from another form of scarcity: 'I'm not good enough.' And both scarcity and struggle are implicit in our basic concept of being. The separate self can never have enough: never enough power to stave off every threat from the arbitrary, merciless forces of nature; never enough money to ensure against every possible misfortune; never enough security to defeat death, which, for the separate self, means total annihilation. At the same time, in striving for money, power, and security at the expense of other beings, the separate self is essentially evil; only by self-conquest, self-sacrifice, can it act in the interests of other beings. In the face of this desolation, it is easy to see the appeal of an otherworldly realm of spirit, a place where our perpetual sacrifice is redeemed."
"The things we think we want are often substitutes for what we really want, and the pleasures we seek are less than the joy that they distract us from."
"A multiplicity of basic human needs go chronically, tragically unmet in modern society. These include the need to express one's gifts and do meaningful work, the need to love and be loved, the need to be truly seen and heard, and to see and hear other people, the need for connection to nature, the need to play, explore, and have adventures, the need for emotional intimacy, the need to serve something larger than oneself, and the need sometimes to do absolutely nothing and just be."
"Our addictions and superficial pleasures aren't only substitutes for something else - they are also glimpses of that something, promises. Shopping does give many people a fleeting experience of abundance or connection. Sugar does give many people a feeling of loving themselves. Cocaine offers a moment of knowing oneself as a capable, powerful being. Heroin offers a brief surcease from the pain that one had experienced as omnipresent. A soap opera produces the feeling of belonging, which properly comes from being enmeshed in the stories of the people one sees every day. All of these things are palliative medicines that make the state of Separation a bit easier to maintain, but also contain the seeds of Separation's undoing: first, because they sow discontent by contrasting the momentary experience of well-being or connection or animation with the default state of aching, lonely dullness; second, because their effects rend the fabric of life, wealth, and health, hastening the unraveling of the old story. Over time, their palliative efficacy diminishes while their destructive side effects grow. The drug stops working. We up the dose. Eventually that doesn't work either."
"The same dynamic currently afflicts our civilization. We constantly up the dose of technology, of laws and regulations, of social controls, of medical interventions. In the beginning, it seemed, these measures brought great improvements, but now they barely suffice to maintain normality and keep the pain at bay. The first pharmaceutical prescriptions vastly improved health; now, when more than four billion prescriptions are written for Americans every year, endless new pills are necessary even to keep people functioning. The first machines vastly increased the productivity and leisure of the people who adopted them; today, people buy one high-tech device after another and still feel unable to keep up with the accelerating pace of life. The first chemical fertilizers brought dramatic increases in crop yields; now, agrochemical companies can barely keep up with declining soil health, pesticide resistance, and other problems. In the early days of science, the reduction of the complexity of observed phenomena to a few elegant laws bestowed upon us an astonishing ability to predict and control reality; today, we find more complexity and more unpredictability as we endlessly elaborate what were once simple laws in a futile quest for the Theory of Everything; meanwhile, the spiraling ecological calamity puts the lie to our pretensions of control."
"Underneath their numbers games, the banks and hedge funds are stripping wealth away from the masses and the planet. Behind every profit statement, behind every executive bonus, is a trail of wreckage: strip mines, debt slaves, pension cuts, hungry children, ruined lives, and ruined places. We all participate in this system, but can do so willingly only to the extent we do not feel, see, or know. "
"It is for good reason that hedonism has always carried a faintly subversive air. To choose pleasure, even the most superficial, and to embrace and celebrate that choice, is to set in motion a process that upends the Story of the World. Eventually, the superficial pleasures become tedious and unsatisfying, and we move on to the kind of pleasure we call joy."
"The more beautiful world my heart knows is possible is a world with a lot more pleasure: a lot more touch, a lot more lovemaking, a lot more hugging, a lot more deep gazing into each other's eyes, a lot more fresh-ground tortillas and just-harvested tomatoes still warm from the sun, a lot more singing, a lot more dancing, a lot more timelessness, a lot more beauty in the built environment, a lot more pristine views, a lot more water fresh from the spring. Have you ever tasted real water, springing from the earth after a twenty-year journey through the mountain?"
"Let us be wary of any revolution that isn't threaded with an element of play, celebration, mystery, and humor. If it is primarily a grim struggle, then it may be no revolution at all. That is not to say that there is never a time for struggle, but to frame the transformative process primarily in terms of struggle reduces it to something of the old world. It devalues other parts of the process: the gestation, the latency, the coming inward, the breathing, the emptiness, the observation, the listening, the nourishing, the reflection, the playful exploration, the unknowing. Aren't these the things we could use a little more of on this earth?"
"Herein lies half of what leadership is in a less hierarchical world: a leader is someone who creates opportunities for others to give their gifts."
"The power of attention is much greater than the force of self-restraint."
"Very often, it is only by achieving what we thought we wanted can we realize that we didn't want it."
"So, by giving myself absolute license to drink as much alcohol as I wanted, I ended up almost never drinking any. By giving myself absolute license to eat as much sugar as I wanted, I ended up eating far less than when I tried to restrain myself. And my unrestrained license to shop leads me mostly to the thrift shop. It isn't because I have disciplined myself to stop these behaviors. It is because I have integrated on multiple levels the fact that they actually don't feel very good. Then, it takes no more willpower to stop them than to refrain from poking my thumb in my eye."
"Decades of research, going back to the Milgram experiments of the 1960s, belie our sanctimonious belief that if I were that CEO, that politician, that brother-in-law, that ex-spouse, that teacher, that addict, that inexcusable person, then I wouldn't have done what she did. Ask yourself, what kind of person would deliver painful, even life-threatening, electrical shocks to an innocent subject as part of a psychological experiment? Surely only a very bad person would do that. Surely you wouldn't do that! Well actually, as it turns out, 'you' would. Or at least nearly everyone did in Stanley Milgram's lab when the right conditions were present and the right excuses, the right story, was available. 'Surely it can't be wrong if a Yale scientist with a white coat is in charge.' 'The subject did volunteer for this.' 'I'm not the one responsible, I'm just following instructions.' More broadly, the thought that anything monstrous could be happening in a laboratory, decked out with the regalia of science, at a prestigious university, was so dissonant with the prevailing Story of the World, with society's consensus about legitimacy and propriety, that one volunteer after another turned the knob up to max and pulled the lever."
"Why do you really visit those websites that get you stirred up and indignant? Whatever reason you give yourself (e.g., to 'stay informed'), maybe the real reason is the emotional gratification, the reminder that you are right, smart, in a word, good. You are part of the in-group. If you want even more reassurance you might start an online discussion group or a face-to-face group where you and a bunch of other people get together and talk about how right you are and how awful, incomprehensible, evil, and sick those other people are. Unfortunately, because this gratification is addictive, no amount will be enough. (The real need here is for self-acceptance, and the proxy offered does not and cannot meet the real need.) Soon everyone will want to be even more right - more right than certain others in the group, which will degenerate into infighting and flame wars."
"Western notions of story and plot have a kind of war built in to them as part of the standard three-act or five-act narrative structure, in which a conflict arises and is resolved. Is any other structure possible that isn't dull, that still qualifies as a plot? Yes. As the blogger 'Still Eating Oranges' observes, the East Asian story structure called Kishōtenketsu in Japanese is not based on conflict. But we in the West almost universally experience a story as something in which someone or something must be overcome. This surely colors our worldview, making 'evil' - the essence of that which must be overcome - seem quite natural a basis for the stories we construct to understand the world and its problems."
"Our political discourse, our media, our scientific paradigms, even our very language predispose us to seeing change as the result of struggle, conflict, and force."
" Have you ever wondered why 'cool' has been the preeminent term of approbation for the last fifty years? Why does 'cool' equal 'good'? Why is it desirable to be cool in our emotions, to not feel very much, not care very much, not be in earnest about anything? One reason may be the urge to withdraw from a world too painful to bear. Another is that we recognize the bankruptcy of so many of the things we are given to care about. The news media offer us an endless array of trivialities and pantomimes, punctuated regularly by shocking and seemingly disconnected horrors that we learn to shrug off. Do we inure ourselves to them because we are psychopathic ourselves? Or could it be because we sense that they are a kind of a show, symptoms of a deeper disease? Maybe we hold back because the prevailing story has obscured much of what we really want to care about."
"Society renders us artificially small so that we may fit into its boxes, a project in which we become accomplices. If the program of diminishment is unsuccessful, or if the energy denied cannot be contained, then society will have no place for you. It is impossible to feel fully, and still be a functioning member of normal society. When we feel too much, we care too much, and the roles we are put in that grease the wheels of the machine become intolerable - good news, as this is the very same machine that we are riding over the edge of a cliff."
"Today the story of technology making life on Earth better and better is tottering, and the pain grows beyond all our attempts to deny it. For a while we might find some distraction, some inconsequential arena where we can feel. Sports extravaganzas, action movies, fantasy novels, celebrity news, and the various heartrending tragedies that appear regularly in the mainstream media all allow us to exercise our feelings and continue living life as normal. But eventually we stop caring about the trivialities, and we realize that the tragedies too are merely the most visible outcroppings of a deeper vein of dysfunction. Life stops making sense. We wonder, as F. did at the mortgage company, what the point is. We keep slogging away, perhaps, at our jobs or school out of fear of financial hardship, but at some point even that isn't enough to keep us going. The next step is medication: antidepressants to inure us to the pain; antianxiety meds to quell the sense that something is terribly wrong; stimulants to force us to pay attention to things we don't care about. But all of these merely drive the life-force deeper underground. There it builds, bubbling up eventually as cancer, turning against the body as autoimmunity, or exploding outward as violence."
"I once read a news story about a train wreck in Peru. The travelers and tourists were stranded in the mountainous area in winter, without food or heat. Many might have died that night, if it weren't for the local villagers who came with food and blankets to keep them warm. These were poor villagers, and they were giving their only blankets.
<br />
I remember when I read that story how petty my own insecurity seemed, how tight my heart, and how tiny my generosity. I felt a kind of opening. If those indigent villagers can give their last blankets, then surely I needn't be so concerned about my financial future. I can give. It will be okay.
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One way to interpret this story is to conclude that obviously, those seemingly indigent villagers are much wealthier than I am. Let's try a new definition of wealth: 'the ease and freedom to be generous.' Perhaps these villagers have what we, in pursuit of money and its illusory security, are seeking to attain. For one thing, they are in community, and know that they will be taken care of by those around them. That is not so true in a money economy like ours. Second, they have a deep connection to the land and a sense of belonging. Through their relationships, they know who they are. That is a kind of wealth that no amount of money can replace. We moderns, the disconnected, have a lot of rebuilding to do. Those like those villagers, and anyone living from interbeing, remind us of our potential wealth and the ground truth of interbeing. Their generosity enriches us merely through witnessing it."
"All of us have at one time or another been fortunate enough to witness generosity and to feel how it opens us. Nonetheless, if you are like me you also harbor a voice that says, 'But what if it isn't okay? What if I give, and just get taken advantage of? What if I give, and have nothing left, and no one takes care of me?' Underneath these plaintive questions is another, even more profound: 'What if I am alone in the universe?' This is the primal fear of the separate self. In its logic, giving is insane. If I and the world are one, then what I do to the world, I do to myself - generosity is natural. But if I am separate from the world, there is no guarantee that anything I do will come back to me. I have to contrive it, I have to engineer an avenue of return, an assurance. If I give, I have to leverage some form of influence over the receiver, legal or emotional, to ensure I get paid back. At least I have to make sure other people see my generosity, so that they are impressed and I get a social return. You will recognize that this whole mindset is contrary to the spirit of the gift."
"Evil is not only a response to the perception of separation, it is also its product. How do we deal with this implacable, malevolent Evil? Because force is the only language it understands, we are compelled to join it in force; as the Orwell dialogue I quote earlier shows, we become evil too. Human beings have been committing horrors for thousands of years in the name of conquering evil. The identity of evil keeps changing - the Turks! the Infidels! the bankers! the French! the Jews! the bourgeoisie! the terrorists! - but that mindset remains the same. As does the solution: force. As does the result: more evil. Must we forever battle the image of our own delusion? We see the results all over our scarred planet. A saying goes, 'The greatest tool of the Devil is the belief that there is no Devil.' Perhaps the opposite is true: 'The greatest tool of Evil is the idea there is such a thing as Evil.'"
"Evil is real - no less real than any other story. What are some other stories? America is a story, money is a story, even the self is a story. What could be more real than your self? Yet even the self can be realized as an illusory construct when, through grace or practice, we are freed from its story. The point is not that we should treat evil as unreal. It is that we must address it on the level of story rather than accept its own invisible premises and logic. If we do the latter, we become its creature. If we address it on the level of story, and deconstruct through words and actions the mythology it lives in, then we win without defeating."
"When a story is young and hale, it has a kind of immune system that insulates its holders from cognitive dissonance. New data points that don't fit the story are easily discarded. They seem outlandish. The immune system responds in a variety of ways. It can attack the bearer of the disruptive information: 'What are that guy's credentials?' It can muster a few superficially convincing rebuttals and pretend that the offender has not thought of those and has no response: 'But technology has vastly increased the human life span, so we need to get the minerals from somewhere.' It can appeal to the implicitly assumed rightness of the system: 'Surely, scientists and engineers have determined that this is the least ecologically disruptive way to do it.' Or it can discard the offending information into the bin marked 'anomaly,' or simply toss it down the memory hole.
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When a story grows old, none of these immune responses work as well. Inconsistent data, even when dismissed, leaves a lingering doubt. Like an aging body or a womb nearing childbirth, the story becomes less and less comfortable. This is why people like the Shuar might succeed where others like them have, for thousands of years now, failed. Their resistance might dislodge us from the story that enables the pillage."
"The idea that we base beliefs on reason and evidence, or at least the ideal of so doing, has deep roots in Western philosophy and the worldview from which it arises. It echoes the axiomatic method in mathematics, the philosophical program of establishing 'first principles' and reasoning upward from those, and the objectivism of science that says that we can find truth through the impartial testing of hypotheses about a reality outside ourselves. It is reflected in the idea that one must start any argument with clear definitions of terms. Well, any argument with your Republican brother-in-law or your anti-vaccine aunt or your pro-vaccine cousin (pick the one that tweaks you) should confirm that this approach just doesn't work. It quickly becomes apparent that it is impossible to agree even on what the facts are, let alone what the facts mean.
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It gets worse. A series of studies at the University of Michigan in 2005 and 2006 showed not only that people routinely dismiss facts that don't fit their beliefs, but that they actually harden their beliefs when presented with contradictory facts, perhaps in an effort to avoid cognitive dissonances. Moreover, the most misinformed people had the strongest opinions, and the most politically sophisticated thinkers were the least open to contrary information."
"The most direct way to disrupt the Story of Separation at its foundation is to give someone an experience of nonseparation. An act of generosity, forgiveness, attention, truth, or unconditional acceptance offers a counterexample to the worldview of separation, violating such tenets as 'Everyone is out for themselves,' and affirming the innate desire to give, create, love, and play. Such acts are invitations only - they cannot compel someone to soften separation-based belief systems. Generosity can always be interpreted as 'He's trying to get something from me.' Forgiveness can be seen as manipulation (as so often fake forgiveness is). Truth can be ignored. But at least the invitation is there."
Charles Eisenstein