November 28: Sacred Economics
By Charles Eisenstein
Anytime you want to understand something. Why is such-and-such happening? Why is there a biodiversity crisis? Or why are we drilling for more oil when it’s polluting the atmosphere and causing oil spills? Why? And down a couple levels of why you always get to money.
I talk a lot about the story of self that every culture has that answers the question: what are you? What is it to be human? It says that you’re this separate being among other separate beings in a universe that is separate from yourself as well. You’re not me, that plant is not me, that’s something separate.
And this story of self really creates our world. If you’re a separate self and there’s other separate selves out there and other separate species out there the universe is fundamentally indifferent to you, or even hostile. And then you definitely want control; you want to be able to have power over other beings, and over these whimsical, arbitrary forces of nature that could extinguish you at any time.
Money is an agreement. It doesn’t have value all by itself. It has value because people agree that it has value. Economists will tell you what money does: it facilitates exchange, you use it to count things, and keep track of things. You write some numbers on a magical piece of paper called a check and you can cause all kinds of abundant goods to come to your house. You can even cause misery for thousands of people if you are one of the highest initiates of the magic of money.
Scarcity is built into the money system. On the most obvious level, it’s because of the way money is created, as interest-bearing debt. So any time a bank lends money into existence, or the Federal Reserve creates money, the money comes along with a corresponding amount of debt. And the debt, because there’s interest on it, is always greater than the amount of money. So it essentially throws people into competition with each other for not enough money.
Growth is another thing that’s built into our money system. If you’re a bank, you’re going to lend to a person who's going to create new goods and services, so they can profit and pay you back. You’re not going to lend to someone who does not create goods and services. But basically economic growth means that you have to find something that was once nature and make it into a good, or was once a gift relationship and make it into a service. You have to find something that people once got for free or did for themselves or for each other and take it away and sell it back to them.
By turning things into commodities, we get cut off from nature in the same ways we’re cut off from community. We look at nature with eyes of “it’s just a bunch of stuff” and that leaves us very lonely and with many basic human needs that go unmet.
One of the things I talk about is the sense of wrongness I had as a child. I think most kids have some sense of it, that it’s not supposed to be this way. For example, that you’re not supposed to actually hate Monday and be happy when you don’t have to go to school. School should be something that you love. Life should be something that you love. We didn’t earn any of the things that keep us alive, or that make life good. We didn’t earn air, we didn’t earn being born, we didn’t earn our conception, we didn’t earn being able to breathe, we didn’t earn having a planet that can provide food, we didn’t earn the sun. So I think that people have this inborn gratitude because on some level we know that we didn’t earn any of this. That life is a gift.
Well if you know you’ve received a gift, the natural response is gratitude; the desire to give in return. In a gift economy it’s not true the way it is in our money economy that everybody’s in competition. In the gift society if you have more than you need, you give it to somebody that needs it, that’s how you get status. And that’s even where security comes from. Because if you build up all that gratitude then people are going to take care of you. And if there’s no gifts, then there’s no community.