Read Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition Online
Authors: Charles Eisenstein
Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition (14 page)
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. The question is, what happens when all of these forms of common capital are tapped out? What happens when there are no more fish to turn into seafood, no more forests to turn into paper, no more topsoil to turn into corn syrup, no longer anything people do for each other for free?
On the face of it, this should not be a crisis at all. Why must we keep growing? If all our needs are met with increasing efficiency, why can’t we just work less? Why has the promised age of leisure never arrived? As we shall see, in our present money system, it will never arrive. No new technological wonder will be enough. The money system we have inherited will always compel us to choose growth over leisure.
One might say that money
has
met one need that was truly unmet before—the need for the human species to grow and to operate on a scale of millions or billions. Our need for food, music, stories, medicine, and so forth may be no more satisfied than in the Stone Age, but we can, for the first time, create things that require the coordinated efforts of millions of specialists around the globe. Money has facilitated the development of a metahuman organism of seven billion cells, the collective body of the human species. It is like a signaling molecule, coordinating the contributions of individuals and organizations toward purposes that no smaller grouping could ever achieve. All the needs that money has created or transferred from the personal to the standard and generic have been part of this organismic development. Even the fashion industry has been
part of it, as a means for creating identity and a sense of belonging extending across vast social distances.
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.
All of the myriad forms of property today have one defining feature in common: all of them can be bought and sold for money. All are the equivalent of money, for whoever owns money can own any other form of capital and the productive power that goes along with it. And each of these forms, remember, arose from the commons, was once unowned by any person, and was eventually stripped from the commons and made property. The same thing that happened to land has happened to everything else and has brought the same concentration of wealth and power in the hands of those who own it. As the early Christian fathers, Proudhon, Marx, and George knew, it is immoral to rob someone of his property and then make him pay you to use it. Yet that is what happens any time
you charge rent on land or interest on money. No accident, then, that nearly all world religions impose prohibitions on usury. Someone should not benefit from merely owning what existed before ownership, and money today is the embodiment of all that existed before ownership, the distilled essence of property.
However, the anti-interest money systems I will propose and describe in this book are not motivated by mere morality. Interest is more than just the proceeds of a crime, more even than the ongoing income from a crime already committed. It is also the engine of continued robbery; it is a force that compels us all, however kind in our intentions, into willing or unwilling complicity in the strip-mining of the earth.
In my travels, firstly my inward journeying and then as a speaker and writer, I have oft encountered a deep anguish and helplessness borne of the ubiquity of the world-devouring machine and of the near-impossibility of avoiding participation in it. To give one example among millions, people who rage against Wal-Mart still shop there, or at other stores equally a part of the global predation chain, because they feel they cannot afford to pay double the price or to do without. And what of the electricity that powers my house—coal ripped out of the tops of mountains? What of the gas that gets me places and gets deliveries to me if I go “off-grid”? I can minimize my participation in the world-devouring machine, but I cannot avoid it entirely. As people become aware that merely living in society means contributing to the evils of the world, they often go through a phase of desiring to find a completely isolated and self-sufficient intentional community—but what good does that do, while Rome burns? So what, if you are not contributing your little part to the pollution that is overwhelming the earth? It proceeds apace whether you live in the forest and eat roots and berries or
in a suburb and eat food trucked in from California.
9
The desire for personal exculpation from the sins of society is a kind of fetish, akin to solar panels on a 4,000-square-foot house.
Laudable though the impulse may be, movements to boycott Wal-Mart or reform health care or education or politics or anything else quickly become exercises in futility as they run up against the money power. To make any impact at all feels like a grueling upstream swim, and as soon as we rest, some new outrage, some new horror sweeps us away again, some new stripping of nature, community, health, or spirit for the sake of money.
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.
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.
10
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.
The next few chapters describe this process and the dynamics of interest, reframing the current economic crisis as the culmination of a trend centuries in the making. Thus revealed, we can better understand how to create not just a new money system, but a new
kind
of money system, one that has the opposite effects of ours today: sharing instead of greed, equality instead of polarization, enrichment of the commons instead of its stripping, and sustainability instead of growth. As well, this new kind of money system will embody an even deeper shift that we see happening today, a shift in human identity toward a connected self, bound to all being in the circle of the gift. Any money that is part of this Reunion, this Great Turning, surely deserves to be called sacred.
1.
Pollution credits and similar schemes seek to convert the earth’s absorptive capacity into property. Even without them, however, it is already an invisible, embedded component of every manufactured product, an essential input of which there is a limited supply. Even without explicit property rights, this absorptive capacity is being taken from the commons.
2.
Filmmakers, for instance, need entire “rights clearance” legal departments in order to make sure they haven’t inadvertently used some copyrighted image in their movie. These could include images of designer furniture, buildings, brand logos, and clothing—almost everything in the built environment. The result has been to stifle creativity and relegate much of the most interesting art illegal. (This is inevitable when art uses the stuff of life around us for its subject and that stuff is in the realm of property already.)
3.
Mumford,
Technics and Civilization
, 142. Of course, the person at the last stage of the invention process deserves reward for his or her ingenuity and toil, but the social context must also be acknowledged. This is decreasingly the case as patent and copyright periods have expanded from their original decade or two to, in some cases, upwards of a century.
4.
Kropotkin,
The Conquest of Bread
, chapter 1.
5.
A detailed discussion of intellectual property rights is beyond the scope of this book. Certainly, I have made a contribution to this matrix of ideas (at least I think I have!) and deserve to be sustained in my work. However, to prevent other people from incorporating my writing and other creations into new creations of their own feels miserly. Practically speaking, I advocate a broad expansion of the “fair use” doctrine and a dramatic shortening of the term for copyrights and patents.
6.
Or she accepts no reality at all, discounting everything as just so many images and symbols. On the one hand, this allows her to “see through the bullshit.” On the other hand, it leaves her cynical and jaded.
7.
Seaford,
Money and the Early Greek Mind
, 157.
8.
Modern life is short, too: despite relatively long life spans, life seems short to a busy, hurried person.
9.
Nonetheless, the efforts people are making to reduce their complicity in the wrecking of the world are very important on the level of ritual. Ritual consists of the manipulation of symbols in order to affect reality—even money is an implement of ritual—and therefore wield great practical power. So please don’t allow my words to dissuade you from boycotting Wal-Mart. For a deeper discussion, see my essay “Rituals for Lover Earth” online, preferably after having read through
Chapter 8
of this book.
10.
Well, not entirely. The imputation of nefarious control to extraterrestrial or demonic entities encodes a valid insight: that the source of evil in our world is beyond conscious human agency. There are puppet-masters, but they are systems and ideologies, not people. As for extraterrestrials, I have trouble answering the question of whether I “believe in them.” Perhaps the question of whether they “exist” smuggles in ontological assumptions that aren’t true, especially that there is an objective backdrop in which things objectively either exist or do not exist. So usually I just say “yes.”
THE ECONOMICS OF USURY
In spite of the holy promises of people to banish war once and for all, in spite of the cry of millions “never again war” in spite of all the hopes for a better future I have this to say: If the present monetary system based on interest and compound interest remains in operation, I dare to predict today that it will take less than twenty-five years until we have a new and even worse war. I can foresee the coming development clearly. The present degree of technological advancement will quickly result in a record performance of industry. The buildup of capital will be fast in spite of the enormous losses during the war, and through the oversupply [of money] the interest rate will be lowered [until the money speculators refuse to lower their rates any further]. Money will then be hoarded [causing predictable deflation], economic activities will diminish, and increasing numbers of unemployed persons will roam the streets … within these discontented masses, wild, revolutionary ideas will arise and with it also the poisonous plant called “Super Nationalism” will proliferate. No country will understand the other, and the end can only be war again
.
—Silvio Gesell (1918)
We are faced with a paradox. On the one hand money is properly a token of gratitude and trust, an agent of the meeting of gifts and needs, a facilitator of exchanges among those who otherwise could make none. As such it should make us all richer. Yet it does not.
Instead, it has brought insecurity, poverty, and the liquidation of our cultural and natural commons. Why?
