Money Money

The modern perception of money is the product of fear, the fruit of identification with the ego, of being in danger, isolated and forgotten. In today's world, it is understandable to think like this: "money is my guarantee, it is what keeps me safe for the future. Without money, my right could be misunderstood, forgotten and I could lose the possibility of obtaining in a deferred time the consideration for my work today. So I need a guarantee because I am afraid that over time my work and my forgotten right will be forgotten. [1] 

It is not merely our attitudes about money that must change, we have to create new kinds of money that embody and reinforce changed attitudes that go all the way to the core of what it is to be human: our understanding of the purpose of Life, humanity's role on the planet, the relationship of the individual to the human and natural community; even what it is to be an individual, a self. [2] After all, we experience money (and property) as an extension of our selves; hence the possessive pronoun "mine" to describe it… 

Money is a system of social agreements, meanings, and symbols that develops over time. It is, in a word, a story, existing in social reality along with such things as laws, nations, institutions, santa claus, calendar and clock time, religion and science. Stories bear tremendous creative power: they give meaning and purpose to Life and therefore motivate action, shaping our vision of the world. The story of money embodies a divine property of abstraction, of disconnection from the real world of things; it reached its extreme in the early years of the twenty-first century, when apparently it animates people as well as machines: without it we are dispirited.

We live in an omnipresent anxiety, borne of the scarcity of the money which we depend on for life—witness the phrase “the cost of living"; that's because for something to become an object of commerce, it must be made scarce first. So immersed in scarcity are we that we take it to be the nature of reality: greed reflects the perception rather than the reality of scarcity. But in fact, we live in a world of abundance!

What we call progress is the conversion of Life and the world into money, the continuing commodification of everything. When everything is subject to money, then the scarcity of money makes everything scarce, including the basis of human life and happiness. Money promotes a sense of homogeneity among things in general. [3] All things are equal, because they can be sold for money, which can in turn be used to buy any other thing, including socialization! Infact, money depersonalizes a relationship, turning two people into mere “parties to an exchange” driven by the universal goal of maximizing self-interest.

Connections to nature, to culture, and to community have been riven, separated off and sold back to us. Money is deeply and irretrievably implicated in the conversion of the land commons into private property, the final and defining stage of which is its reduction to the status of just another commodity that can be bought and sold, like many other elements of our natural and cultural bequest. But actually all that we use and all that we own consists of modified bits of earth. Together they are "natural capital" -- the wealth and goodness that nature has bequeathed upon us. Originally none of it was property. 

"We frequently hear the phrase: Man has a natural right to the earth. But that is absurd, for it would be just as correct to say that man has a right to his limbs. If we talk of rights in this connection we must also say that a pine-tree has the right to sink its roots in the earth. Can man spend his life in a balloon? The earth belongs to, and is an organic part of man. We cannot conceive man without the earth any more than without a head or a stomach. The earth is just as much a part, an organ, of man as his head." [4]

The social ecology of the gift - the shared skills, customs, and social structures that meet each other's needs -- is just as rich a source of wealth, and bears just as many veins of treasure, as do the natural ecology and the earth underlying it. 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; this is the base to introduce consumerism to a previously isolated culture. To do that, it is first necessary to destroy its sense of identity, disrupting its networks of reciprocity by introducing consumer items from the outside.

The main features of the current money system are the division of labour and economy of scale; they are both leading to gross inequality through decentralization of costs and hierarchical power. This happens thanks to the "magic" of the storing of value: the flower of fear, the root of global social injustice.

Money is eclipsing (even if it might sounds a bit crazy to you right now) because of the very way is created and circulated: usury, better known as interest, the principle by which debt is unavoidably growing. Usury is the very antithesis of the gift: it generates today's endemic scarcity and drives the world-devouring engine of perpetual growth, with all the consequences we talked about. There can never be a time when we reach "enough" because in an interest-based debt system, credit exchanges goods now for more goods in the future. And, guess what, we don't have infinite Earths, just one, our Mother.

Think about it: we are quite accustomed to seeing money as the key to the fulfillment of all our desires. How many dreams do you have that you assume you could fulfill if only (and only if) you had the money? Thus we mortgage our dreams to money, turning it from means to end.

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. We see this happening every time there is an economic recession. [5] Before the collapse of the current system, anything we do to protect some natural or social resource from conversion into money in all the ways we already know right now will both hasten the collapse and mitigate its severity.

The new holistic economy, rising from the death of the old one, will restore the mentality of the gift to our vocations and economic life, reverse the money-induced homogenization and depersonalization of society. It will be an extension of the ecosystem, not a violation of it, restoring lost realms of natural, social, cultural, and spiritual capital. It will be based on local economies and revive community, promoting equitable distribution of wealth, initiative and entrepreneurship. It is a model of economy that enables its participants to meet their physical, emotional, psychological and spiritual needs, both collectively and individually, on the basis of materials and services being shared unconditionally. It means empowering of the uniqueness of all: a participative journey that allows us a lot more control over our lives and as much creativity as we can handle, manifesting positive impact on the rest of Nature and our own community. [6]

IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE GIFT!

Our lives are given us; therefore, our default state is gratitude. It is the truth of our existence! Unlike a modern money transaction, which is closed and leaves no obligation, a gift transaction is open-ended, creating an ongoing tie between the participants. The gift partakes of the giver, and that when we give a gift, we give something of ourselves. [7]

A zero-waste economy is the economic realization of the interconnectedness of all beings, a new materialism that treats the world as sacred.

[1] Devana, "Eko-nomia, the future without money"

[2] Charles Eisenstein, "The more beautiful world our hearts know it is possible"

[3 Richard Seaford, "Money and the Early Greek Mind"

[4] Silvio Gesell, "The natural economic order"

[5] The power of community (docufilm)

[6] Mark Boyle, "The Moneyless Manifesto"

[7] Charles Eisenstein, "Sacred Economics"