www.princexml.com

Prince - Personal Edition

This document was created with Prince, a great way of getting web content onto paper.

Advance praise for SacredEconomics:

“If you want a convincing account ofjust how deep the shift in our new axi-al age is and must be, look no furtherthan this brilliant book by Charles Eis-enstein, one of the deepest integrativethinkers active today.”

—Michel Bauwens, founder of theP2P Foundation

“With his breadth of knowledge, en-thusiasm, commitment, diligence, andsensitivity, Eisenstein has become abeacon of hope for others. Your heartand mind will be opened by this treas-ure of a book that shines with wisdomof crucial importance to our troubledworld today.”

—Kamran Mofid, PhD in econom-ics; founder of the Globalisation

for the Common GoodInitiative

Praise for The Ascent of Humanity:

“This is an extraordinary book. Eisen-stein has put his finger on the coreproblem facing humanity—namely:separation. All the crises that human-ity now faces are grounded in the be-lief that we are separate—separatefrom each other, separate from thebiosphere that sustains us, separatefrom the universe that has brought usforth. This is a tour-de-force filled withastounding insight, wit, wisdom, andheart.”

—Christopher Uhl, author ofDeveloping Ecological Conscious-ness:

Paths to a Sustainable Future

3/1108

“Quite marvelous, a hugely importantwork … This book is truly needed inthis time of deepening crisis.”

—John Zerzan, author of FuturePrimitive and Elements of Refusal

“A radical awakening as to how we ar-rived at our current crisis and how wecan more effectively redefine the pathof our evolutionary journey.”

—Bruce Lipton, author of The Bi-ology of Belief

“Brilliant and original, with greatdepth of insight and understanding,Eisenstein’s Ascent of Humanity easilyranks with the works of such giants ofour age as David Bohm, Julian Jaynes,Jean Gebser, and Alfred North White-head. It is a profoundly serious, indeedsomber portrait of our times, even as itopens a door of honest hope amidst

4/1108

the dark destiny we have woven aboutus. Accept the challenge of this majoraccomplishment and discover the lightshining within it.”

—Joseph Chilton Pearce, authorof The Crack in the Cosmic Egg,

Magical Child, Evolution’s End,and The Biology of Transcendence

“This is one of those rare books thatmoves the goal posts. Eisenstein pullstogether a wide array of insights toshow that what we thought was thesolution is also the problem. It is eye-opening fodder for conversations witheveryone I meet. As a technologist anda human being, I believe this couldwell be one of the most importantbooks of the decade.”

—Garret Moddel, professor ofelectrical engineering at UCBoulder;

5/1108

chairman & CTO, PhiarCorporation

6/1108

Copyright © by Charles Eisenstein, 2011. Somerights reserved. [license_3.0] This work is li-censed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported Li-cense. For more information, please visit ht-tp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0.

Published by Evolver Editions

Evolver Editions’ publications are distributedbyNorth Atlantic BooksP.O. Box 12327Berkeley, California 94712

Cover art, “Still Life with Flowers, Fruits, andPoultry”

by Jan Van Os (courtesy of Rijksmuseum,

Amsterdam).Art direction and cover design by michaelrobin-sonnyc.com

Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in theAge of Transition is sponsored by the Society forthe Study of Native Arts and Sciences, a non-profit educational corporation whose goals areto develop an educational and cross-culturalperspective linking various scientific, social,and artistic fields; to nurture a holistic view ofarts, sciences, humanities, and healing; and topublish and distribute literature on the relation-ship of mind, body, and nature.

North Atlantic Books’ publicationsare available through most book-stores. For further information,call 800-733-3000 or visit ourwebsite at www.northatlantic-books.com.

9/1108

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Eisenstein, Charles, 1967–Sacred economics: money, gift, and

society in the age of transition/ Charles Eisenstein.

p. cm.eISBN: 978-1-58394-398-41. Money—History. 2. Money—Philo-

sophy. I. Title.HG231.E37 2011332.4′9—dc22

2011010766

v3.1

10/1108

To my parentsand all others who have given me so much

with no thought of return

AUTHOR’S NOTE

I offer this book to you in the spirit of agift, in keeping with its theme of bring-ing gift principles into the realm ofmoney. In order to align principles withaction, the publisher and I have chosena Creative Commons copyright, whichallows you to freely share this book forany non-commercial purpose. Thatmeans you can photocopy materialfrom the book, put it on your blog, andso forth, as long as you don’t sell it oruse it to carry advertising. We also askthat you provide attribution, in orderthat people who want to find more ofmy work can do so. You can find otherlegal details on the Creative Commonswebsite.

One characteristic of gifts is that thereturn gift is not specified in advance. Ifyou receive or disseminate this workfree of charge, we welcome a voluntaryreturn gift that expresses the gratitudeor sense of value that you may feel.You may do so through the websites as-sociated with the author and the book.

Ultimately, I see myself as a stewardand channel for the ideas of SacredEconomics. Standing atop the shouldersof thinkers far more illustrious thanmyself, I absorb, digest, and transmitideas from our cultural commons. Suchis the gift I have received and fromwhich I give in turn. That is why I can-not, in good conscience, consider my-self the morally legitimate owner ofthese ideas. Thankfully, my publisherhas had the courage to explore a newmodel of handling intellectual property.I look forward to the day when artists

13/1108

no longer need to maintain, through in-tellectual property laws, an artificialscarcity of their work, yet still receiveabundant returns borne of the gratitudeof those who receive it.

14/1108

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CoverTitle PageCopyrightDedicationAuthor’s NoteIntroduction

PART I: THE ECONOMICS OFSEPARATIONChapter 1: The Gift WorldChapter 2: The Illusion of ScarcityChapter 3: Money and the MindChapter 4: The Trouble with Property

Chapter 5: The Corpse of the CommonsCultural and Spiritual CapitalThe Strip-Mining of CommunityThe Creation of NeedsThe Money Power

Chapter 6: The Economics of UsuryAn Economic ParableThe Growth ImperativeThe Concentration of WealthWealth Redistribution and Class WarInflationMore for You Is Less for Me

Chapter 7: The Crisis of CivilizationChapter 8: The Turning of the Age

Money: Story and MagicHumanity’s Coming-of-Age Ordeal

PART II: THE ECONOMICS OFREUNION

16/1108

Chapter 9: The Story of ValueChapter 10: The Law of ReturnChapter 11: Currencies of the CommonsChapter 12: Negative-InterestEconomics

History and BackgroundModern Application and TheoryThe Debt Crisis: Opportunity for TransitionThinking for the FutureMore for Me Is More for You

Chapter 13: Steady-State and DegrowthEconomics

Sustainability ReconsideredTransition to Steady-State: Bump or Crash?Shrinking Money, Growing WealthDisintermediation and the P2P Revolution

Chapter 14: The Social DividendThe Paradox of LeisureThe Obsolescence of “Jobs”

17/1108

The Will to WorkWho Shall Remove the Garbage?

Chapter 15: Local and ComplementaryCurrency

The Catch-22 of Local CurrencyExperiments in Local MoneyReclaiming the Credit Commons

Chapter 16: Transition to Gift EconomyChapter 17: Summary and Roadmap

1. Negative-Interest Currency2. Elimination of Economic Rents, and Com-pensation for Depletion of the Commons3. Internalization of Social and Environment-al Costs4. Economic and Monetary Localization5. The Social Dividend6. Economic Degrowth7. Gift Culture and P2P Economics

18/1108

PART III: LIVING THE NEWECONOMYChapter 18: Relearning Gift CultureChapter 19: NonaccumulationChapter 20: Right Livelihood andSacred Investing

The Dharma of WealthRobbing Peter to Pay PaulOld Accumulations to New PurposesRight Livelihood

Chapter 21: Working in the GiftTrusting GratitudeBusiness in the GiftThe Sacred Professions

Chapter 22: Community and theUnquantifiableChapter 23: A New Materialism

19/1108

Conclusion: The More Beautiful World OurHearts Tell Us Is PossibleAppendix: Quantum Money and the ReserveQuestionBibliographyAbout the Author

20/1108

INTRODUCTION

The purpose of this book is to makemoney and human economy as sacredas everything else in the universe.

Today we associate money with theprofane, and for good reason. If any-thing is sacred in this world, it is surelynot money. Money seems to be the en-emy of our better instincts, as is clearevery time the thought “I can’t affordto” blocks an impulse toward kindnessor generosity. Money seems to be theenemy of beauty, as the disparagingterm “a sellout” demonstrates. Moneyseems to be the enemy of every worthysocial and political reform, as corporatepower steers legislation toward the ag-grandizement of its own profits. Money

seems to be destroying the earth, as wepillage the oceans, the forests, the soil,and every species to feed a greed thatknows no end.

From at least the time that Jesusthrew the money changers from thetemple, we have sensed that there issomething unholy about money. Whenpoliticians seek money instead of thepublic good, we call them corrupt. Ad-jectives like “dirty” and “filthy” natur-ally describe money. Monks are sup-posed to have little to do with it: “Youcannot serve God and Mammon.”

At the same time, no one can denythat money has a mysterious, magicalquality as well, the power to alter hu-man behavior and coordinate humanactivity. From ancient times thinkershave marveled at the ability of a meremark to confer this power upon a diskof metal or slip of paper. Unfortunately,

22/1108

looking at the world around us, it ishard to avoid concluding that the ma-gic of money is an evil magic.

Obviously, if we are to make moneyinto something sacred, nothing lessthan a wholesale revolution in moneywill suffice, a transformation of its es-sential nature. It is not merely our atti-tudes about money that must change,as some self-help gurus would have usbelieve; rather, we will create newkinds of money that embody and rein-force changed attitudes. Sacred Econom-ics describes this new money and thenew economy that will coalesce aroundit. It also explores the metamorphosisin human identity that is both a causeand a result of the transformation ofmoney. The changed attitudes of whichI speak go all the way to the core ofwhat it is to be human: they includeour understanding of the purpose of

23/1108

life, humanity’s role on the planet, therelationship of the individual to the hu-man and natural community; evenwhat it is to be an individual, a self.After all, we experience money (andproperty) as an extension of our selves;hence the possessive pronoun “mine” todescribe it, the same pronoun we use toidentify our arms and heads. Mymoney, my car, my hand, my liver.Consider as well the sense of violationwe feel when we are robbed or “rippedoff,” as if part of our very selves hadbeen taken.

A transformation from profanity tosacredness in money—something sodeep a part of our identity, somethingso central to the workings of theworld—would have profound effects in-deed. But what does it mean for money,or anything else for that matter, to besacred? It is in a crucial sense the

24/1108

opposite of what sacred has come tomean. For several thousand years, theconcepts of sacred, holy, and divinehave referred increasingly to somethingseparate from nature, the world, andthe flesh. Three or four thousand yearsago the gods began a migration fromthe lakes, forests, rivers, and mountainsinto the sky, becoming the imperialoverlords of nature rather than its es-sence. As divinity separated fromnature, so also it became unholy to in-volve oneself too deeply in the affairsof the world. The human being changedfrom a living embodied soul into itsprofane envelope, a mere receptacle ofspirit, culminating in the Cartesianmote of consciousness observing theworld but not participating in it, andthe Newtonian watchmaker-God doingthe same. To be divine was to be super-natural, nonmaterial. If God

25/1108

participated in the world at all, it wasthrough miracles—divine intercessionsviolating or superseding nature’s laws.

Paradoxically, this separate, abstractthing called spirit is supposed to bewhat animates the world. Ask the reli-gious person what changes when a per-son dies, and she will say the soul hasleft the body. Ask her who makes therain fall and the wind blow, and shewill say it is God. To be sure, Galileoand Newton appeared to have removedGod from these everyday workings ofthe world, explaining it instead as theclockwork of a vast machine of imper-sonal force and mass, but even they stillneeded the Clockmaker to wind it up inthe beginning, to imbue the universewith the potential energy that has runit ever since. This conception is stillwith us today as the Big Bang, a prim-ordial event that is the source of the

26/1108

“negative entropy” that allows move-ment and life. In any case, our culture’snotion of spirit is that of something sep-arate and nonworldly, that yet can mi-raculously intervene in material affairs,and that even animates and directsthem in some mysterious way.

It is hugely ironic and hugely signi-ficant that the one thing on the planetmost closely resembling the forgoingconception of the divine is money. It isan invisible, immortal force that sur-rounds and steers all things, omnipo-tent and limitless, an “invisible hand”that, it is said, makes the world go’round. Yet, money today is an abstrac-tion, at most symbols on a piece of pa-per but usually mere bits in a com-puter. It exists in a realm far removedfrom materiality. In that realm, it is ex-empt from nature’s most importantlaws, for it does not decay and return

27/1108

to the soil as all other things do, but israther preserved, changeless, in itsvaults and computer files, even growingwith time thanks to interest. It bearsthe properties of eternal preservationand everlasting increase, both of whichare profoundly unnatural. The naturalsubstance that comes closest to theseproperties is gold, which does not rust,tarnish, or decay. Early on, gold wastherefore used both as money and as ametaphor for the divine soul, thatwhich is incorruptible and changeless.

Money’s divine property of abstrac-tion, of disconnection from the realworld of things, reached its extreme inthe early years of the twenty-first cen-tury as the financial economy lost itsmooring in the real economy and tookon a life of its own. The vast fortunes ofWall Street were unconnected to any

28/1108

material production, seeming to exist ina separate realm.

Looking down from Olympianheights, the financiers called them-selves “masters of the universe,” chan-neling the power of the god they servedto bring fortune or ruin upon themasses, to literally move mountains,raze forests, change the course ofrivers, cause the rise and fall of nations.But money soon proved to be a capri-cious god. As I write these words, itseems that the increasingly franticrituals that the financial priesthooduses to placate the god Money are invain. Like the clergy of a dying religion,they exhort their followers to greatersacrifices while blaming their misfor-tunes either on sin (greedy bankers, ir-responsible consumers) or on the mys-terious whims of God (the financial

29/1108

markets). But some are already blamingthe priests themselves.

What we call recession, an earlierculture might have called “Godabandoning the world.” Money is disap-pearing, and with it another property ofspirit: the animating force of the humanrealm. At this writing, all over theworld machines stand idle. Factorieshave ground to a halt; constructionequipment sits derelict in the yard;parks and libraries are closing; and mil-lions go homeless and hungry whilehousing units stand vacant and foodrots in the warehouses. Yet all the hu-man and material inputs to build thehouses, distribute the food, and run thefactories still exist. It is rathersomething immaterial, that animatingspirit, which has fled. What has fled ismoney. That is the only thing missing,so insubstantial (in the form of

30/1108

electrons in computers) that it canhardly be said to exist at all, yet sopowerful that without it, human pro-ductivity grinds to a halt. On the indi-vidual level as well, we can see the de-motivating effects of lack of money.Consider the stereotype of the unem-ployed man, nearly broke, slouched infront of the TV in his undershirt, drink-ing a beer, hardly able to rise from hischair. Money, it seems, animates peopleas well as machines. Without it we aredispirited.

We do not realize that our concept ofthe divine has attracted to it a god thatfits that concept, and given it sover-eignty over the earth. By divorcing soulfrom flesh, spirit from matter, and Godfrom nature, we have installed a rulingpower that is soulless, alienating, un-godly, and unnatural. So when I speakof making money sacred, I am not

31/1108

invoking a supernatural agency to in-fuse sacredness into the inert, mundaneobjects of nature. I am rather reachingback to an earlier time, a time beforethe divorce of matter and spirit, whensacredness was endemic to all things.

And what is the sacred? It has twoaspects: uniqueness and relatedness. Asacred object or being is one that is spe-cial, unique, one of a kind. It is there-fore infinitely precious; it is irreplace-able. It has no equivalent, and thus nofinite “value,” for value can only be de-termined by comparison. Money, likeall kinds of measure, is a standard ofcomparison.

Unique though it is, the sacred isnonetheless inseparable from all thatwent into making it, from its history,and from the place it occupies in thematrix of all being. You might be think-ing now that really all things and all

32/1108

relationships are sacred. That may betrue, but though we may believe thatintellectually, we don’t always feel it.Some things feel sacred to us, and somedo not. Those that do, we call sacred,and their purpose is ultimately to re-mind us of the sacredness of all things.

Today we live in a world that hasbeen shorn of its sacredness, so thatvery few things indeed give us the feel-ing of living in a sacred world. Mass-produced, standardized commodities,cookie-cutter houses, identical packagesof food, and anonymous relationshipswith institutional functionaries all denythe uniqueness of the world. The dis-tant origins of our things, the anonym-ity of our relationships, and the lack ofvisible consequences in the productionand disposal of our commodities alldeny relatedness. Thus we live withoutthe experience of sacredness. Of course,

33/1108

of all things that deny uniqueness andrelatedness, money is foremost. Thevery idea of a coin originated in thegoal of standardization, so that eachdrachma, each stater, each shekel, andeach yuan would be functionallyidentical. Moreover, as a universal andabstract medium of exchange, money isdivorced from its origins, from its con-nection to matter. A dollar is the samedollar no matter who gave it to you.We would think someone childish toput a sum of money in the bank andwithdraw it a month later only to com-plain, “Hey, this isn’t the same money Ideposited! These bills are different!”

By default then, a monetized life is aprofane life, since money and thethings it buys lack the properties of thesacred. What is the difference betweena supermarket tomato and one grownin my neighbor’s garden and given to

34/1108

me? What is different between a prefabhouse and one built with my own parti-cipation by someone who understandsme and my life? The essential differ-ences all arise from specific relation-ships that incorporate the uniqueness ofgiver and receiver. When life is full ofsuch things, made with care, connectedby a web of stories to people and placeswe know, it is a rich life, a nourishinglife. Today we live under a barrage ofsameness, of impersonality. Even cus-tomized products, if mass-produced, of-fer only a few permutations of the samestandard building blocks. This samenessdeadens the soul and cheapens life.

The presence of the sacred is like re-turning to a home that was alwaysthere and a truth that has always exis-ted. It can happen when I observe aninsect or a plant, hear a symphony ofbirdsongs or frog calls, feel mud

35/1108

between my toes, gaze upon an objectbeautifully made, apprehend the im-possibly coordinated complexity of acell or an ecosystem, witness a syn-chronicity or symbol in my life, watchhappy children at play, or am touchedby a work of genius. Extraordinarythough these experiences are, they arein no sense separate from the rest oflife. Indeed, their power comes fromthe glimpse they give of a realer world,a sacred world that underlies and inter-penetrates our own.

What is this “home that was alwaysthere,” this “truth that has always exis-ted”? It is the truth of the unity or theconnectedness of all things, and thefeeling is that of participating insomething greater than oneself, yetwhich also is oneself. In ecology, this isthe principle of interdependence: thatall beings depend for their survival on

36/1108

the web of other beings that surroundsthem, ultimately extending out to en-compass the entire planet. The extinc-tion of any species diminishes our ownwholeness, our own health, our ownselves; something of our very being islost.

If the sacred is the gateway to the un-derlying unity of all things, it is equallya gateway to the uniqueness and spe-cialness of each thing. A sacred objectis one of a kind; it carries a unique es-sence that cannot be reduced to a set ofgeneric qualities. That is why reduc-tionist science seems to rob the worldof its sacredness, since everything be-comes one or another combination of ahandful of generic building blocks. Thisconception mirrors our economic sys-tem, itself consisting mainly of stand-ardized, generic commodities, job de-scriptions, processes, data, inputs and

37/1108

outputs, and—most generic ofall—money, the ultimate abstraction. Inearlier times it was not so. Tribalpeoples saw each being not primarily asa member of a category, but as aunique, enspirited individual. Evenrocks, clouds, and seemingly identicaldrops of water were thought to be sen-tient, unique beings. The products ofthe human hand were unique as well,bearing through their distinguishing ir-regularities the signature of the maker.Here was the link between the twoqualities of the sacred, connectednessand uniqueness: unique objects retainthe mark of their origin, their uniqueplace in the great matrix of being, theirdependency on the rest of creation fortheir existence. Standardized objects,commodities, are uniform and thereforedisembedded from relationship.

38/1108

In this book I will describe a vision ofa money system and an economy that issacred, that embodies the interrelated-ness and the uniqueness of all things.No longer will it be separate, in fact orin perception, from the natural matrixthat underlies it. It reunites the long-sundered realms of human and nature;it is an extension of ecology that obeysall of its laws and bears all of itsbeauty.

Within every institution of our civil-ization, no matter how ugly or corrupt,there is the germ of something beauti-ful: the same note at a higher octave.Money is no exception. Its original pur-pose is simply to connect human giftswith human needs, so that we might alllive in greater abundance. How insteadmoney has come to generate scarcityrather than abundance, separationrather than connection, is one of the

39/1108

threads of this book. Yet despite what ithas become, in that original ideal ofmoney as an agent of the gift we cancatch a glimpse of what will one daymake it sacred again. We recognize theexchange of gifts as a sacred occasion,which is why we instinctively make aceremony out of gift giving. Sacredmoney, then, will be a medium of giv-ing, a means to imbue the global eco-nomy with the spirit of the gift thatgoverned tribal and village cultures,and still does today wherever people dothings for each other outside the moneyeconomy.

Sacred Economics describes this futureand also maps out a practical way toget there. Long ago I grew tired of read-ing books that criticized some aspect ofour society without offering a positivealternative. Then I grew tired of booksthat offered a positive alternative that

40/1108

seemed impossible to reach: “We mustreduce carbon emissions by 90 per-cent.” Then I grew tired of books thatoffered a plausible means of reaching itbut did not describe what I, personally,could do to create it. Sacred Economicsoperates on all four levels: it offers afundamental analysis of what has gonewrong with money; it describes a morebeautiful world based on a differentkind of money and economy; it explainsthe collective actions necessary to cre-ate that world and the means by whichthese actions can come about; and it ex-plores the personal dimensions of theworld-transformation, the change inidentity and being that I call “living inthe gift.”

A transformation of money is not apanacea for the world’s ills, nor shouldit take priority over other areas of act-ivism. A mere rearrangement of bits in

41/1108

computers will not wipe away the veryreal material and social devastation af-flicting our planet. Yet, neither can thehealing work in any other realmachieve its potential without a corres-ponding transformation of money, sodeeply is it woven into our social insti-tutions and habits of life. The economicchanges I describe are part of a vast,all-encompassing shift that will leaveno aspect of life untouched.

Humanity is only beginning toawaken to the true magnitude of thecrisis on hand. If the economic trans-formation I will describe seems miracu-lous, that is because nothing less than amiracle is needed to heal our world. Inall realms, from money to ecologicalhealing to politics to technology tomedicine, we need solutions that ex-ceed the present bounds of the possible.Fortunately, as the old world falls

42/1108

apart, our knowledge of what is pos-sible expands, and with it expands ourcourage and our willingness to act. Thepresent convergence of crises—inmoney, energy, education, health, wa-ter, soil, climate, politics, the environ-ment, and more—is a birth crisis, ex-pelling us from the old world into anew. Unavoidably, these crises invadeour personal lives, our world fallsapart, and we too are born into a newworld, a new identity. This is why somany people sense a spiritual dimen-sion to the planetary crisis, even to theeconomic crisis. We sense that“normal” isn’t coming back, that we arebeing born into a new normal: a newkind of society, a new relationship tothe earth, a new experience of beinghuman.

I dedicate all of my work to the morebeautiful world our hearts tell us is

43/1108

possible. I say our “hearts,” because ourminds sometimes tell us it is not pos-sible. Our minds doubt that things willever be much different from what ex-perience has taught us. You may havefelt a wave of cynicism, contempt, ordespair as you read my description of asacred economy. You might have feltan urge to dismiss my words as hope-lessly idealistic. Indeed, I myself wastempted to tone down my description,to make it more plausible, more re-sponsible, more in line with our low ex-pectations for what life and the worldcan be. But such an attenuation wouldnot have been the truth. I will, usingthe tools of the mind, speak what is inmy heart. In my heart I know that aneconomy and society this beautiful arepossible for us to create—and indeedthat anything less than that is unworthyof us. Are we so broken that we would

44/1108

aspire to anything less than a sacredworld?

45/1108

PART ITHE ECONOMICS OFSEPARATION

The converging crises of our time allarise from a common root that wemight call Separation. Taking manyforms—the human/nature split, the dis-integration of community, the divisionof reality into material and spiritualrealms—Separation is woven into everyaspect of our civilization. It is also un-sustainable: it generates great and

growing crises that are propelling us in-to a new era, an Age of Reunion.

Separation is not an ultimate reality,but a human projection, an ideology, astory. As in all cultures, our defining St-ory of the People has two deeply re-lated parts: a Story of Self, and a Storyof the World. The first is the discreteand separate self: a bubble of psycho-logy, a skin-encapsulated soul, a biolo-gical phenotype driven by its genes toseek reproductive self-interest, a ration-al actor seeking economic self-interest,a physical observer of an objective uni-verse, a mote of consciousness in a pris-on of flesh. The second is the story ofAscent: that humanity, starting from astate of ignorance and powerlessness, isharnessing the forces of nature andprobing the secrets of the universe,moving inexorably toward our destinyof complete mastery over, and

47/1108

transcendence of, nature. It is a story ofthe separation of the human realm fromthe natural, in which the former ex-pands and the latter is turned progress-ively into resources, goods, property,and, ultimately, money.

Money is a system of social agree-ments, meanings, and symbols that de-velops over time. It is, in a word, astory, existing in social reality alongwith such things as laws, nations, insti-tutions, calendar and clock time, reli-gion, and science. Stories bear tremend-ous creative power. Through them wecoordinate human activity, focus atten-tion and intention, define roles, andidentify what is important and evenwhat is real. Stories give meaning andpurpose to life and therefore motivateaction. Money is a key element of thestory of Separation that defines ourcivilization.

48/1108

Part I of this book illuminates theeconomic system that has arisen on thefoundation of the story of Separation.Anonymity, depersonalization, polariza-tion of wealth, endless growth, ecolo-gical despoliation, social turmoil, andirremediable crisis are built into oureconomic system so deeply that nothingless than a transformation of our defin-ing Story of the People will heal it. Myintention is that by identifying the corefeatures of the economics of Separation,we may be empowered to envision aneconomics of Reunion as well, an eco-nomics that restores to wholeness ourfractured communities, relationships,cultures, ecosystems, and planet.

49/1108

CHAPTER 1THE GIFT WORLD

Even after all this timeThe sun never says to the earth,“You owe Me.”Look what happenswith a love like that,It lights the Whole Sky.

—Hafiz

In the beginning was the Gift.We are born helpless infants,

creatures of pure need with little re-source to give, yet we are fed, we areprotected, we are clothed and held andsoothed, without having done anything

to deserve it, without offering anythingin exchange. This experience, commonto everyone who has made it past child-hood, informs some of our deepest spir-itual intuitions. Our lives are given us;therefore, our default state is gratitude.It is the truth of our existence.

Even if your childhood was horrific,if you are reading this right now, atleast you were given enough to sustainyou to adulthood. For the first years oflife, none of this was anything youearned or produced. It was all a gift.Imagine walking out the door right nowand finding yourself plunged into analien world in which you were com-pletely helpless, unable to feed orclothe yourself, unable to use yourlimbs, unable even to distinguish whereyour body ends and the world begins.Then huge beings come and hold you,

51/1108

feed you, take care of you, love you.Wouldn’t you feel grateful?

In moments of clarity, perhaps after anarrow brush with death, or upon ac-companying a loved one through thedeath process, we know that life itselfis a gift. We experience an overwhelm-ing gratitude at being alive. We walk inwonderment at the riches, undeservedand freely available, that come withlife: the joy of breathing, the delights ofcolor and sound, the pleasure of drink-ing water to quench thirst, the sweet-ness of a loved one’s face. This sense ofmixed awe and gratitude is a clear signof the presence of the sacred.

We feel the same reverence and grat-itude when we apprehend the magnifi-cence of nature, the miraculous com-plexity and order of an ecosystem, anorganism, a cell. They are impossiblyperfect, far beyond the capacity of our

52/1108

minds to conceive, to create, even tounderstand more than a tiny part of.Yet they exist, without our ever havingto create them: an entire world to sus-tain and environ us. We don’t have tounderstand exactly how a seed germin-ates and grows; we don’t have to makeit happen. Even today, the workings ofa cell, an organism, an ecosystem arelargely a mystery. Without needing toengineer it, without needing even tounderstand its inner workings, we stillreceive nature’s fruits. Can you imaginethe wonder, the gratitude, of our earlyancestors as they contemplated the un-deserved provenance the world gavethem so freely?

No wonder ancient religious thinkerssaid that God made the world, and nowonder they said God gave the worldto us. The first is an expression of hu-mility, the second of gratitude. Sadly,

53/1108

later theologians twisted this realiza-tion to mean, “God gave us the worldto exploit, to master, to dominate.”Such an interpretation is contrary tothe spirit of the original realization.Humility knows that this Gift is beyondour ability to master. Gratitude knowsthat we honor, or dishonor, the giver ofa gift by how we use it.

Modern cosmology also affirms themythological recognition of universe-as-gift. Is not the Big Bang something(indeed everything) for nothing?1 Thisfeeling is strengthened by closer exam-ination of the various constants of phys-ics (speed of light, electron mass, relat-ive strengths of the four fundamentalforces, etc.), all of which inexplicablyhave the precise values necessary for auniverse containing matter, stars, andlife. It is as if the whole universe were

54/1108

constructed for us, so that we mightexist.

In the beginning was the Gift: in thearchetypal beginning of the world, atthe beginning of our lives, and in theinfancy of the human species. Gratitudetherefore is natural to us, so primal, soelemental that it is very difficult todefine. Perhaps it is the feeling of havingreceived a gift, and the desire to give inturn. We might therefore expect primit-ive people, connected with this primalgratitude, to enact it in their social andeconomic relationships. Indeed, theydid. Most accounts of the history ofmoney begin with primitive barter, butbarter is a relative rarity among hunter-gatherers. The most important mode ofeconomic exchange was the gift.

Primal though it is, gratitude and thegenerosity flowing from it coexist withother, less savory, aspects of human

55/1108

nature. While I believe in the funda-mental divinity of human beings, I alsorecognize that we have embarked on along sojourn of separation from that di-vinity, and created a world in whichruthless sociopaths rise to wealth andpower. This book doesn’t pretend suchpeople don’t exist, nor that such tend-encies don’t exist in everyone. Rather,it seeks to awaken the spirit of the giftthat is latent within us, and to constructinstitutions that embody and encouragethat spirit. Today’s economic system re-wards selfishness and greed. Whatwould an economic system look likethat, like some ancient cultures, rewar-ded generosity instead?

Let us begin by better understandingthe dynamics of the gift. I referred toeconomic exchange above, but that isgenerally not an accurate description ofgift community. Circulation is a better

56/1108

word. Today we often exchange gifts,but gift exchange is already a step to-ward barter. In ancient communities,elaborate customs governed gift giving,customs that persist today in societiesthat have not completely lost their con-nection to the past. Usually gift net-works are closely tied to kin networks.Customs dictate who gives to whom. Tosome kin categories you might be ex-pected to give; from others you mightexpect to receive; and in others the giftsflow in both directions.

While gifts can be reciprocal, just asoften they flow in circles. I give to you,you give to someone else … and even-tually someone gives back to me. Afamous example is the kula system ofthe Trobriand Islanders, in which pre-cious necklaces circulate in one direc-tion from island to island, and braceletsin the other direction. First described in

57/1108

depth by the anthropologist BronislawMalinowski, kula, which literally means“circle,” is the lynchpin of a vast systemof gifts and other economic exchanges.Marcel Mauss describes it as follows:

The system of gift-through-ex-change permeates all the econom-ic, tribal, and moral life of theTrobriand people. It is “impreg-nated” with it, as Malinowski veryneatly expressed it.It is a constant “give and take.”The process is marked by a con-tinuous flow in all directions ofpresents given, accepted, and re-ciprocated.”2

While the pinnacle of the kula systemis the highly ritualized exchange of ce-remonial bracelets and necklaces bychiefs, the gift network surrounding it

58/1108

extends to all kinds of utilitarian items,food, boats, labor, and so forth.Outright barter, according to Mauss, isunusual. In any event, “Generally, evenwhat has been received and comes intoone’s possession in this way—inwhatever manner—is not kept for one-self, unless one cannot do without it.”3In other words, gifts flow continuously,only stopping in their circulation whenthey meet a real, present need. Here isLewis Hyde’s poetic description of thisprinciple of the gift:

The gift moves toward the emptyplace. As it turns in its circle itturns toward him who has beenempty-handed the longest, and ifsomeone appears elsewhere whoseneed is greater it leaves its oldchannel and moves toward him.Our generosity may leave us

59/1108

empty, but our emptiness thenpulls gently at the whole until thething in motion returns to replen-ish us. Social nature abhors a va-cuum.4

While today we clearly distinguishbetween a gift and a commercial trans-action, in past times this distinctionwas by no means clear. Some cultures,such as the Toaripi and Namau, had buta single word to designate buying,selling, lending, and borrowing,5 whilethe ancient Mesopotamian word šámmeant both “buy” and “sell.”6 This am-biguity persists in many modern lan-guages. Chinese, German, Danish, Nor-wegian, Dutch, Estonian, Bulgarian,Serbian, Japanese, and many otherseach have but a single term for borrow-ing and lending, perhaps a vestige of anancient time when the two were not

60/1108

distinguished.7 It even persists in Eng-lish among less-educated speakers, whosometimes use the word “borrow” tomean “lend,” as in “I borrowed himtwenty dollars.” How could this be?How could the same word apply to twoopposite operations?

The solution to this puzzle lies in thedynamics of the gift. With the rare, per-haps theoretical, exceptions that Der-rida called “free gifts,” gifts are accom-panied either by some token of ex-change or by a moral or social obliga-tion (or both). Unlike a modern moneytransaction, which is closed and leavesno obligation, a gift transaction is open-ended, creating an ongoing tie betweenthe participants. Another way of look-ing at it is that the gift partakes of thegiver, and that when we give a gift, wegive something of ourselves. This is theopposite of a modern commodity

61/1108

transaction, in which goods sold aremere property, separate from the onewho sells them. We all can feel the dif-ference. You probably have some treas-ured items that were given you, thatare perhaps objectively indistinguish-able from something you might buy,but that are unique and special becauseof who gave them to you. Thus it wasthat ancient people recognized that amagical quality, a spirit, circulatesalong with gifts.

Useless objects like cowry shells,pretty beads, necklaces, and so on werethe earliest money. To exchange themfor something of utilitarian value is, na-ively speaking, merely a way to facilit-ate a gift—something for nothing. Theyturn it into something-for-something,but that doesn’t make it any less a gift,because they are merely giving physicalform to the felt sense of obligation;

62/1108

they are tokens of gratitude. From thisperspective, the identity of buying andselling, borrowing and lending, is easyto understand. They are not oppositeoperations at all. All gifts circle back tothe giver in another form. Buyer andseller are equal.

Today there is an asymmetry in com-mercial transactions, which identifiesthe buyer as the one giving money andreceiving goods and the seller as theone receiving money and giving goods.But we could equally say the “buyer” isselling money for goods, and the“seller” is buying money with goods.Linguistic and anthropological evidenceindicates that this asymmetry is new,far newer than money. What hashappened to money, then, to create thisasymmetry? Money is different fromevery other commodity in the world,

63/1108

and, as we shall see, it is this differencethat is crucial in making it profane.

Gifts, on the other hand, we intuit-ively recognize as sacred, which is whyeven today we make ceremonies of giv-ing presents. Gifts embody the keyqualities of the sacredness I discussedin the introduction. First, uniqueness:unlike the standardized commodities oftoday, purchased in closed transactionswith money and alienated from theirorigins, gifts are unique to the extentthat they partake of the giver. Second,wholeness, interdependency: gifts ex-pand the circle of self to include the en-tire community. Whereas money todayembodies the principle, “More for me isless for you,” in a gift economy, morefor you is also more for me becausethose who have give to those who need.Gifts cement the mystical realization ofparticipation in something greater than

64/1108

oneself which, yet, is not separate fromoneself. The axioms of rational self-in-terest change because the self has ex-panded to include something of theother.

The conventional explanation of howmoney developed that one finds in eco-nomics texts assumes barter as a start-ing point. From the very beginning,competing individuals seek to maxim-ize their rational self-interest. Thisidealized description is not supportedby anthropology. Barter, according toMauss, was rare in Polynesia, rare inMelanesia, and unheard of in the Pa-cific Northwest. Economic anthropolo-gist George Dalton emphatically con-curs, “Barter, in the strict sense ofmoneyless exchange, has never been aquantitatively important or dominantmodel or transaction in any past orpresent economic system about which

65/1108

we have hard information.”8 The onlyinstances of barter, says Dalton, werefor petty, infrequent, or emergencytransactions—just as is the case today.Aside from these, moneyless transac-tions scarcely resembled theimpersonal, utility-maximizing transac-tions of economists’ fantasies, butrather “tended to require lasting (andsometimes ritualized) personal relation-ships sanctioned by custom and charac-terized by reciprocity.”9 Such transac-tions should not be called barter at all,but rather ritualized gift exchange.

Today we put gifts and purchases in-to separate, exclusive categories; to besure, different economics and psycho-logy apply to each. But very ancienttimes bore no such dichotomy, nor wasthere today’s distinction between abusiness relationship and a personal re-lationship. Economists, in telling the

66/1108

history of money, tend to project thismodern distinction backward, and withit some deep assumptions about humannature, the self, and the purpose of life:that we are discrete and separate selvescompeting for scarce resources to max-imize our self-interest. I won’t say thatthese assumptions are not true. Theyare part of the defining ideology of ourcivilization, a Story of the People thatis now drawing to a close. This book ispart of the telling of a new Story of thePeople. The transformation of money ispart of a larger transformation, foundedon very different assumptions aboutself, life, and world.

Human economy is never very farfrom cosmology, religion, and thepsyche. It was not only ancient eco-nomies that were based on gifts: an-cient cosmology and religion were too.Today as well, our money with its

67/1108

qualities of standardization, abstrac-tion, and anonymity is aligned withmany other aspects of the human ex-perience. What new scientific, religious,or psychological paradigms might arisein the context of a different kind ofmoney?

If money did not arise from the eco-nomists’ imaginary world of calculated,interest-maximizing barter, then howdid it arise? I propose that it arose as ameans to facilitate gift giving, sharing,and generosity, or at least that it boresomething of that spirit. To recreate asacred economy, it is necessary to re-store to money that original spirit.

At its core, money is a beautifulconcept. Let me be very naive for a mo-ment so as to reveal this core, this spir-itual (if not historical) essence ofmoney. I have something you need, andI wish to give it to you. So I do, and

68/1108

you feel grateful and desire to givesomething to me in return. But youdon’t have anything I need right now.So instead you give me a token of yourgratitude—a useless, pretty thing like awampum necklace or a piece of silver.That token says, “I have met the needsof other people and earned their gratit-ude.” Later, when I receive a gift fromsomeone else, I give them that token.Gifts can circulate across vast social dis-tances, and I can receive from people towhom I have nothing to give while stillfulfilling my desire to act from the grat-itude those gifts inspire within me.

On the level of a family, clan, orhunter-gatherer band, money is not ne-cessary to operate a gift economy. Noris it necessary in the next larger unit ofsocial organization: the village or tribeof a few hundred people. There, if Idon’t need anything from you now,

69/1108

either you will (acting from gratitude)give me something that I need in thefuture, or you will give to someoneelse, who gives to someone else, whogives to me. This is the “circle of thegift,” the basis of community. In a tribeor village, the scale of society is smallenough that those who give to me re-cognize my gifts to others. Such is notthe case in a mass society like ours. If Igive generously to you, the farmer inHawaii who grew my ginger or the en-gineer in Japan who designed my cellphone display won’t know about it. Soinstead of personal recognition of gifts,we use money: the representation ofgratitude. The social witnessing of giftsbecomes anonymous.

Money becomes necessary when therange of our gifts must extend beyondthe people we know personally. Such isthe case when economic scale and the

70/1108

division of labor exceed the tribal orvillage level. Indeed, the first moneyappeared in the first agricultural civiliz-ations that developed beyond the Neo-lithic village: Mesopotamia, Egypt, Ch-ina, and India. Traditional, decentral-ized gift networks gave way to central-ized systems of redistribution, with thetemple, and later the royal palace, asthe hub. Quite possibly, these evolvedfrom potlatch-type traditions in whichgifts flowed to chiefs and other leaders,and then back from them to their kinand tribe. Starting as centralized nodesfor a large-scale flow of gifts, they soondiverged from the gift mind-set as con-tributions became forced and quanti-fied, and outward disbursement becameunequal. Ancient Sumerian documentsalready speak of economic polarization,haves and have-nots, and wages thatwere barely at subsistence.10 While

71/1108

centralized directives, and not markettrade, governed the movement ofgoods,11 the early agricultural empiresalso used what some call money: agri-cultural and metallic commodities instandard measured units that served asmedia of exchange, units of account,and stores of value. So already, fourthousand years ago, money was failingto meet my naive expectation that itwould create greater abundance for allby facilitating the meeting of gifts andneeds.

By facilitating trade, motivating effi-cient production, and allowing the ac-cumulation of capital to undertakelarge-scale projects, money should en-rich life: it should bestow upon us ease,leisure, freedom from anxiety, and anequitable distribution of wealth.Indeed, conventional economic theorypredicts all of these results. The fact

72/1108

that money has become an agent of theopposite—anxiety, hardship, and polar-ization of wealth—presents us with aparadox.

If we are to have a world with tech-nology, with cinema and symphony or-chestras, with telecommunications andgreat architecture, with cosmopolitancities and world literature, we needmoney, or something like it, as a wayto coordinate human activity on thevast scale necessary to create suchthings. I have therefore written thisbook, to describe a system that restoresto money the sacredness of the gift. Isay “restore” because from the earliesttimes, money has had sacred or magicalconnotations. Originally, it was thetemples where agricultural surpluseswere stored and redistributed: the cen-ter of religious life was also the centerof economic life. Some authors claim

73/1108

that the earliest symbolic money (as op-posed to commodity money) was issuedby temples and could be redeemed forsacred sex with temple prostitutes;12 inany event, it is certain that templeswere deeply involved in issuing earlycoins, many of which bore the imagesof sacred animals and deities. Thispractice continues today with bills andcoins bearing the likenesses of deifiedpresidents.

Perhaps someday we won’t needmoney to have a gift economy on thescale of billions of humans; perhaps themoney I shall describe in this book istransitional. I am not a “primitivist”who advocates the abandonment ofcivilization, of technology and culture,of the gifts that make us human. I fore-see rather the restoration of humanityto a sacred estate, bearing all thewholeness and harmony with nature of

74/1108

the hunter-gatherer time, but at a high-er level of organization. I foresee thefulfillment, and not the abdication, ofthe gifts of hand and mind that make ushuman.

Notice how natural it is to describeour uniquely human attributes as gifts.In keeping with the gift’s universalprinciples, our human gifts partake oftheir Giver as well. In other words, theyare divine gifts. Mythology bears thisintuition out, from the Promethean giftof fire to the Apollonian gift of music,to the gift of agriculture from theChinese mythological ruler Shen Nong.In the Bible, too, we are given not onlythe world, but the breath of life and ourcapacity to create—for we are made “inthe image” of the Creator itself.

On the personal level as well, we allsense that our individual gifts were giv-en to us for a reason, a purpose.

75/1108

Moreover, we have an irrepressible de-sire to develop those gifts, and fromthem, to give our own gifts out into theworld. Everyone has experienced thejoy of giving and the selfless generosityof strangers. Ask for directions in a city,and most people are pleased to taketime to help. It is in no one’s rationalself-interest to give directions to astranger; this is a simple expression ofour innate generosity.

It is ironic indeed that money, origin-ally a means of connecting gifts withneeds, originally an outgrowth of a sac-red gift economy, is now precisely whatblocks the blossoming of our desire togive, keeping us in deadening jobs outof economic necessity, and forestallingour most generous impulses with thewords, “I can’t afford to do that.” Welive in an omnipresent anxiety, borne ofthe scarcity of the money which we

76/1108

depend on for life—witness the phrase“the cost of living.” Our purpose for be-ing, the development and full expres-sion of our gifts, is mortgaged to thedemands of money, to making a living,to surviving. Yet no one, no matter howwealthy, secure, or comfortable, canever feel fulfilled in a life where thosegifts remain latent. Even the best-paidjob, if it does not engage our gifts, soonfeels deadening, and we think, “I wasnot put here on earth to do this.”

Even when a job does engage ourgifts, if the purpose is something wedon’t believe in, the same deadeningfeeling of futility arises again, the feel-ing that we are not living our ownlives, but only the lives we are paid tolive. “Challenging” and “interesting”are not good enough, because our giftsare sacred, and therefore meant for asacred purpose.

77/1108

That we are indeed here on earth todo something is essentially a religiousconcept, for conventional biologyteaches that we have evolved to be ableto survive, that any effort towardsomething outside of survival and re-production goes against our geneticprogramming. However, one can makea cogent neo-Lamarckian case that theview of biology as consisting of myriaddiscrete, separate competing selves—organisms or “selfish genes”—is more aprojection of our own present-day cul-ture than it is an accurate understand-ing of nature.13 There are other ways ofunderstanding nature that, while not ig-noring its obvious competition, giveprimacy to cooperation, symbiosis, andthe merging of organisms into largerwholes. This new understanding is ac-tually quite ancient, echoing the

78/1108

indigenous understanding of nature asa web of gifts.

Each organism and each speciesmakes a vital contribution to the total-ity of life on earth, and this contribu-tion, contrary to the expectations ofstandard evolutionary biology, need nothave any direct benefit for the organ-ism itself. Nitrogen-fixing bacteria don’tdirectly benefit from doing so, exceptthat the nitrogen they give to the soilgrows plants that grow roots that growfungi, which ultimately provide nutri-ents to the bacteria. Pioneer speciespave the way for keystone species,which provide microniches for otherspecies, which feed yet other species ina web of gifts that, eventually, circleback to benefit the pioneer species.Trees bring up water to water otherplants, and algae make oxygen so thatanimals can breathe. Remove any

79/1108

being, and the health of all becomesmore precarious.

You may think me naive, with my“so that” reasoning. You may say it isjust good luck that things work out sowell: the trees don’t care about water-ing the plants around them—they arein it for themselves, maximizing theirchances to survive and reproduce. Thatthey nourish other beings is anunintended side-effect. The same forthe algae, for the nitrogen-fixing bac-teria, and for the bacteria inside rumin-ants that allow them to digest cellulose.This world, you might think, is every-one for himself. Nature is a cutthroatcompetition, and an economy that isthe same is natural too.

I do not think it is natural. It is an ab-erration, a peculiar though necessaryphase that has reached its extreme andis now giving way to a new one. In

80/1108

nature, headlong growth and all-outcompetition are features of immatureecosystems, followed by complex inter-dependency, symbiosis, cooperation,and the cycling of resources. The nextstage of human economy will parallelwhat we are beginning to understandabout nature. It will call forth the giftsof each of us; it will emphasize cooper-ation over competition; it will encour-age circulation over hoarding; and itwill be cyclical, not linear. Money maynot disappear anytime soon, but it willserve a diminished role even as it takeson more of the properties of the gift.The economy will shrink, and our liveswill grow.

Money as we know it is inimical toan economy manifesting the spirit ofthe gift, an economy we might call sac-red. In order to know what kind ofmoney could be a sacred currency, it

81/1108

will help to identify exactly whatmakes money into the force for greed,evil, scarcity, and environmental pil-lage that it is today.

Just as science often projects cultureonto nature, so economics takes cultur-ally determined conditions as axiomat-ic. Living in a culture of scarcity (forscarcity is what we are experiencing,when “making a living” dictates the ex-pression of our gifts), we assume it asthe basis of economics. As in biology,we have seen the world as a competi-tion among separate selves for limitedresources. Our money system, as weshall see, embodies this belief on adeep, structural level. But is this belieftrue? Do we live in a world, a universe,of basic scarcity? And if not, if the truenature of the universe is abundance andthe gift, then how did money becomeso unnatural?

82/1108

1. Readers of The Ascent of Humanity know Iprefer non-Big Bang cosmologies such as HaltonArp’s dynamic steady-state universe, in whichmatter is continually born, grows old, and dies.But here, too, it appears spontaneously fromnowhere, as if by a gift.2. Mauss, The Gift, 29.3. Ibid., 30.4. Hyde, The Gift, 23.5. Mauss, The Gift, 32.6. Seaford, Money and the Early Greek Mind,323.7. The Chinese terms for buying and sellinghave nearly identical pronunciation and similarideograms as well. The character for buying,, originated as a depiction of a cowry shell, anearly form of money, while the character forselling, , was developed later, suggesting anearlier nondistinction.8. Dalton, “Barter,” 182.9. Seaford, Money and the Early Greek Mind,292.

83/1108

10. Nemat-Nejat, Daily Life in Ancient Mesopot-amia, 263.11. Seaford, Money and the Early Greek Mind,123. Seaford adduces persuasive evidence forthis claim: early documents that took the formof lists, artwork showing processions of indi-viduals bearing offerings, etc.12. Bernard Lietaer makes this claim in The Fu-ture of Money for a bronze shekel that he statesis the earliest known coin, dating to 3000 BCE.I have found no other mention of this in my re-search, however. As far as I know, the earliestcoins appeared in Lydia and China at about thesame time, the seventh century BCE.13. I sum up this argument in Chapter 7 of TheAscent of Humanity, drawing on the work ofLynn Margulis, Bruce Lipton, Fred Hoyle, Elisa-bet Sahtouris, and others.

84/1108

CHAPTER 2THE ILLUSION OF SCARCITY

With unabated bounty the land ofEngland blooms and grows; wavingwith yellow harvests; thick-studdedwith workshops, industrial imple-ments, with fifteen millions of work-ers, understood to be the strongest,the cunningest and the willingest ourEarth ever had; these men are here;the work they have done, the fruitthey have realized is here, abundant,exuberant on every hand of us: andbehold, some baleful fiat as of En-chantment has gone forth, saying,“Touch it not, ye workers, yemaster-workers, ye master-idlers;

none of you can touch it, no man ofyou shall be the better for it; this isenchanted fruit!”

—Thomas Carlyle, Past andPresent

It is said that money, or at least thelove of it, is the root of all evil. But whyshould it be? After all, the purpose ofmoney is, at its most basic, simply tofacilitate exchange—in other words, toconnect human gifts with human needs.What power, what monstrous perver-sion, has turned money into the oppos-ite: an agent of scarcity?

For indeed we live in a world of fun-damental abundance, a world wherevast quantities of food, energy, and ma-terials go to waste. Half the worldstarves while the other half wastesenough to feed the first half. In the

86/1108

Third World and our own ghettos,people lack food, shelter, and other ba-sic necessities and cannot afford to buythem. Meanwhile, we pour vast re-sources into wars, plastic junk, and in-numerable other products that do notserve human happiness. Obviously,poverty is not due to a lack of product-ive capacity. Nor is it due to a lack ofwillingness to help: many people wouldlove to feed the poor, to restore nature,and do other meaningful work but can-not because there is no money in it.Money utterly fails to connect gifts andneeds. Why?

For years, following conventionalopinion, I thought the answer was“greed.” Why do sweatshop factoriespush wages down to the bare minim-um? Greed. Why do people buy gas-guzzling SUVs? Greed. Why do pharma-ceutical companies suppress research

87/1108

and sell drugs that they know are dan-gerous? Greed. Why do tropical fishsuppliers dynamite coral reefs? Why dofactories pump toxic waste into therivers? Why do corporate raiders lootemployee pension funds? Greed, greed,greed.

Eventually I became uncomfortablewith that answer. For one thing, itplays into the same ideology of separa-tion that lies at the root of our civiliza-tion’s ills. It is an ideology as old as ag-riculture’s division of the world intotwo separate realms: the wild and thedomestic, the human and the natural,the wheat and the weed. It says thereare two opposing forces in this world,good and evil, and that we can create abetter world by eliminating evil. Thereis something bad in the world andsomething bad in ourselves, something

88/1108

we must extirpate to make the worldsafe for goodness.

The war against evil imbues every in-stitution of our society. In agriculture,it appears as the desire to exterminatewolves, to destroy all weeds withglyphosate, to kill all the pests. Inmedicine it is the war against germs, aconstant battle against a hostile world.In religion it is the struggle against sin,or against ego, or against faithlessnessor doubt, or against the outward pro-jection of these things: the devil, the in-fidel. It is the mentality of purifyingand purging, of self-improvement andconquest, of rising above nature andtranscending desire, of sacrificing one-self in order to be good. Above all, it isthe mentality of control.

It says that once final victory overevil is won, we will enter paradise.When we eliminate all the terrorists or

89/1108

create an impenetrable barrier to them,we will be safe. When we develop an ir-resistible antibiotic and artificial regu-lation of body processes, we will haveperfect health. When we make crimeimpossible and have a law to governeverything, we will have a perfect soci-ety. When you overcome your laziness,your compulsions, your addictions, youwill have a perfect life. Until then, youare just going to have to try harder.

In the same vein, the problem in eco-nomic life is supposedly greed, bothoutside ourselves in the form of allthose greedy people and withinourselves in the form of our owngreedy tendencies. We like to imaginethat we ourselves are not sogreedy—maybe we have greedy im-pulses, but we keep them under con-trol. Unlike some people! Some peopledon’t keep their greed in check. They

90/1108

are lacking in something fundamentalthat you and I have, some basic de-cency, basic goodness. They are, in aword, Bad. If they can’t learn to re-strain their desires, to make do withless, then we’ll have to force them to.

Clearly, the paradigm of greed is rifewith judgment of others, and with self-judgment as well. Our self-righteous an-ger and hatred of the greedy harbor thesecret fear that we are no better thanthey are. It is the hypocrite who is themost zealous in the persecution of evil.Externalizing the enemy gives expres-sion to unresolved feelings of anger. Ina way, this is a necessity: the con-sequences of keeping them bottled upor directed inward are horrific. Butthere came a time in my life when Iwas through hating, through with thewar against the self, through with thestruggle to be good, and through with

91/1108

the pretense that I was any better thananyone else. I believe humanity, col-lectively, is nearing such a time as well.Ultimately, greed is a red herring, itselfa symptom and not a cause of a deeperproblem. To blame greed and to fight itby intensifying the program of self-con-trol is to intensify the war against theself, which is just another expression ofthe war against nature and the waragainst the other that lies at the base ofthe present crisis of civilization.

Greed makes sense in a context ofscarcity. Our reigning ideology assumesit: it is built in to our Story of Self. Theseparate self in a universe governed byhostile or indifferent forces is always atthe edge of extinction, and secure onlyto the extent that it can control theseforces. Cast into an objective universeexternal to ourselves, we must competewith each other for limited resources.

92/1108

Based on the story of the separate self,both biology and economics have there-fore written greed into their basic ax-ioms. In biology it is the gene seekingto maximize reproductive self-interest;in economics it is the rational actorseeking to maximize financial self-in-terest. But what if the assumption ofscarcity is false—a projection of ourideology, and not the ultimate reality?If so, then greed is not written into ourbiology but is a mere symptom of theperception of scarcity.

An indication that greed reflects theperception rather than the reality ofscarcity is that rich people tend to beless generous than poor people. In myexperience, poor people quite oftenlend or give each other small sums that,proportionally speaking, would be theequivalent of half a rich person’s networth. Extensive research backs up this

93/1108

observation. A large 2002 survey byIndependent Sector, a nonprofit re-search organization, found that Americ-ans making less than $25,000 gave 4.2percent of their income to charity, asopposed to 2.7 percent for people mak-ing over $100,000. More recently, PaulPiff, a social psychologist at Universityof California–Berkeley, found that“lower-income people were more gen-erous, charitable, trusting and helpfulto others than were those with morewealth.”1 Piff found that when researchsubjects were given money to anonym-ously distribute between themselvesand a partner (who would never knowtheir identity), their generosity correl-ated inversely to their socioeconomicstatus.2

While it is tempting to conclude fromthis that greedy people becomewealthy, an equally plausible

94/1108

interpretation is that wealth makespeople greedy. Why would this be? In acontext of abundance greed is silly;only in a context of scarcity is it ration-al. The wealthy perceive scarcity wherethere is none. They also worry morethan anybody else about money. Couldit be that money itself causes the per-ception of scarcity? Could it be thatmoney, nearly synonymous with secur-ity, ironically brings the opposite? Theanswer to both these questions is yes.On the individual level, rich peoplehave a lot more “invested” in theirmoney and are less able to let go of it.(To let go easily reflects an attitude ofabundance.) On the systemic level, aswe shall see, scarcity is also built in tomoney, a direct result of the way it iscreated and circulated.

The assumption of scarcity is one ofthe two central axioms of economics.

95/1108

(The second is that people naturallyseek to maximize their rational self-in-terest.) Both are false; or, more pre-cisely, they are true only within a nar-row realm, a realm that we, the frog atthe bottom of the well, mistake for thewhole of reality. As is so often the case,what we take to be objective truth isactually a projection of our own condi-tion onto the “objective” world. So im-mersed in scarcity are we that we takeit to be the nature of reality. But infact, we live in a world of abundance.The omnipresent scarcity we experienceis an artifact: of our money system, ofour politics, and of our perceptions.

As we shall see, our money system,system of ownership, and general eco-nomic system reflect the same funda-mental sense of self that has, built intoit, the perception of scarcity. It is the“discrete and separate self,” the

96/1108

Cartesian self: a bubble of psychologymarooned in an indifferent universe,seeking to own, to control, to arrogateas much wealth to itself as possible, butforedoomed by its very cutoff from therichness of connected beingness to theexperience of never having enough.

The assertion that we live in a worldof abundance sometimes provokes anemotional reaction, bordering on hostil-ity, in those of my readers who believethat harmonious human coexistencewith the rest of life is impossiblewithout a massive reduction in popula-tion. They cite Peak Oil and resourcedepletion, global warming, the exhaus-tion of our farmland, and our ecologicalfootprint as evidence that the earthcannot long support industrial civiliza-tion at present population levels.

This book offers a response to thisconcern as part of a vision of a sacred

97/1108

economy. More importantly, it ad-dresses the “how” questions aswell—for example, how we will get tothere from here. For now I will offer apartial response, a reason for hope.

It is true that human activity is vastlyoverburdening the earth today. Fossilfuels, aquifers, topsoil, the capacity toabsorb pollution, and the ecosystemsthat maintain the viability of the bio-sphere are all being depleted at analarming rate. All the measures on thetable are far too little, far too late—adrop in the bucket compared to what isneeded.

On the other hand, an enormous pro-portion of this human activity is eithersuperfluous or deleterious to humanhappiness. Consider first the armamentsindustry and the resources consumed inwar: some $2 trillion dollars a year, avast scientific establishment, and the

98/1108

life energy of millions of young people,all to serve no need except one we cre-ate ourselves.

Consider the housing industry here inthe United States, with the enormousMcMansions of the last two decadesthat again serve no real human need. Insome countries a building that sizewould house fifty people. As it is, thecavernous living rooms go unused, forpeople feel uncomfortable in their inhu-man scale and seek out the comfort ofthe small den and the breakfast nook.The materials, energy, and maintenanceof such monstrosities are a waste of re-sources. Perhaps even more wasteful isthe layout of suburbia, which makespublic transportation impossible andnecessitates inordinate amounts ofdriving.

Consider the food industry, which ex-hibits massive waste at every level.

99/1108

According to a government study, farm-to-retail losses are about 4 percent,retail-to-consumer losses 12 percent,and consumer-level losses 29 percent.3Moreover, vast tracts of farmland aredevoted to biofuel production, andmechanized agriculture precludeslabor-intensive intercropping and otherintensive production techniques thatcould vastly increase productivity.4

Such figures suggest the potentialplenty available even in a world of sev-en billion people—but with a caveat:people will spend much more time (percapita) growing food, in a reversal ofthe trend of the last two centuries. Fewrealize that organic agriculture can betwo to three times more productivethan conventional agriculture—per hec-tare, not per hour of labor.5 And intens-ive gardening can be more productive(and more labor-intensive) still. If you

100/1108

like gardening and think that mostpeople would benefit from being closerto the soil, this is good news. With afew hours’ work a week, a typical sub-urban garden plot of perhaps a thou-sand square feet can meet most of afamily’s vegetable needs; double thatand it can provide substantial amountsof staples too, like potatoes, sweet pota-toes, and squash. Is the vast transcon-tinental trucking system that bringsCalifornia lettuce and carrots to the restof the country really necessary? Does itenhance life in any way?

Another type of waste comes fromthe shoddy construction and plannedobsolescence of many of our manufac-tured goods. Presently there are feweconomic incentives, and some disin-centives, to produce goods that last along time and are easy to fix, with theabsurd result that it is often cheaper to

101/1108

buy a new appliance than to repair anold one. This is ultimately a con-sequence of our money system, and itwill be reversed in a sacred economy.

On my street, every family possessesa lawnmower that is used perhaps tenhours per summer. Each kitchen has ablender that is used at most fifteenminutes per week. At any given mo-ment, about half the cars are parked onthe street, doing nothing. Most familieshave their own hedge clippers, theirown power tools, their own exerciseequipment. Because they are unusedmost of the time, most of these thingsare superfluous. Our quality of lifewould be just as high with half thenumber of cars, a tenth of the lawn-mowers, and two or three Stairmastersfor the whole street. In fact, it would behigher since we would have occasion tointeract and share.6 Even at our

102/1108

current, gratuitously high rate of con-sumption, some 40 percent of theworld’s industrial capacity stands idle.That figure could be increased to 80percent or more without any loss of hu-man happiness. All we would losewould be the pollution and tedium of alot of factory production. Of course, wewould lose a vast number of “jobs” aswell, but since these are not contribut-ing much to human well-being anyway,we could employ those people diggingholes in the ground and filling them upagain with no loss. Or, better, we coulddevote them to labor-intensive roleslike permaculture, care for the sick andelderly, restoration of ecosystems, andall the other needs of today that go tra-gically unmet for lack of money.

A world without weapons, withoutMcMansions in sprawling suburbs,without mountains of unnecessary

103/1108

packaging, without giant mechanizedmonofarms, without energy-hoggingbig-box stores, without electronic bill-boards, without endless piles ofthrowaway junk, without the overcon-sumption of consumer goods no onereally needs is not an impoverishedworld. I disagree with those environ-mentalists who say we are going tohave to make do with less. In fact, weare going to make do with more: morebeauty, more community, more fulfill-ment, more art, more music, and mater-ial objects that are fewer in number butsuperior in utility and aesthetics. Thecheap stuff that fills our lives today,however great its quantity, can onlycheapen life.

Part of the healing that a sacred eco-nomy represents is the healing of thedivide we have created between spiritand matter. In keeping with the

104/1108

sacredness of all things, I advocate anembrace, not an eschewing, of material-ism. I think we will love our thingsmore and not less. We will treasure ourmaterial possessions, honor where theycame from and where they will go. Ifyou have a treasured baseball mitt orfishing rod, you may know what I’mtalking about. Or perhaps your grand-father had a favorite set of woodwork-ing tools that he kept in perfect condi-tion for fifty years. That is how we willhonor our things. Can you imaginewhat the world would be like if thatsame care and consideration went intoeverything we produced? If every en-gineer put that much love into her cre-ations? Today, such an attitude is un-economic; it is rarely in anyone’s finan-cial interest to treat a thing as sacred.You can just buy a new baseball mitt orfishing rod, and why be too careful

105/1108

with your tools when new ones are socheap? The cheapness of our things ispart of their devaluation, casting us in-to a cheap world where everything isgeneric and expendable.

Amidst superabundance, even we inrich countries live in an omnipresentanxiety, craving “financial security” aswe try to keep scarcity at bay. We makechoices (even those having nothing todo with money) according to what wecan “afford,” and we commonly associ-ate freedom with wealth. But when wepursue it, we find that the paradise offinancial freedom is a mirage, recedingas we approach it, and that the chase it-self enslaves. The anxiety is alwaysthere, the scarcity always just one dis-aster away. We call that chase greed.Truly, it is a response to the perceptionof scarcity.

106/1108

Let me offer one more kind of evid-ence, for now meant to be suggestiverather than conclusive, for the artifici-ality or illusory nature of the scarcitywe experience. Economics, it says onpage one of textbooks, is the study ofhuman behavior under conditions ofscarcity. The expansion of the economicrealm is therefore the expansion ofscarcity, its incursion into areas of lifeonce characterized by abundance. Eco-nomic behavior, particularly the ex-change of money for goods, extendstoday into realms that were never be-fore the subject of money exchanges.Take, for example, one of the great re-tail growth categories in the last dec-ade: bottled water. If one thing isabundant on earth to the point of near-ubiquity, it is water, yet today it hasbecome scarce, something we pay for.

107/1108

Child care has been another area ofhigh economic growth in my lifetime.When I was young, it was nothing forfriends and neighbors to watch eachother’s kids for a few hours afterschool, a vestige of village or tribaltimes when children ran free. My ex-wife Patsy speaks movingly of herchildhood in rural Taiwan, where chil-dren could and did show up at anyneighbor’s house around dinner time tobe given a bowl of rice. The communitytook care of the children. In otherwords, child care was abundant; itwould have been impossible to open anafter-school day care center.

For something to become an object ofcommerce, it must be made scarce first.As the economy grows, by definition,more and more of human activityenters the realm of money, the realm ofgoods and services. Usually we

108/1108

associate economic growth with an in-crease in wealth, but we can also see itas an impoverishment, an increase inscarcity. Things we once never dreamedof paying for, we must pay for today.Pay for using what? Using money, ofcourse—money that we struggle andsacrifice to obtain. If one thing isscarce, it is surely money. Most people Iknow live in constant low-level(sometimes high-level) anxiety for fearof not having enough of it. And as theanxiety of the wealthy confirms, noamount is ever “enough.”

From this perspective, we must becautious in our indignation at suchfacts as, “Over two billion people liveon less than two dollars a day.” A lowcash income could mean that someone’sneeds are met outside the money eco-nomy, for example through traditionalnetworks of reciprocity and gifts.

109/1108

“Development” in such cases raises in-comes by bringing nonmonetary eco-nomic activity into the realm of goodsand services, with the resulting mental-ity of scarcity, competition, and anxietyso familiar to us in the West, yet so ali-en to the moneyless hunter-gatherer orsubsistence peasant.

Ensuing chapters explain the mech-anisms and meaning of the centuries-old conversion of life and the world in-to money, the progressive commodifica-tion of everything. When everything issubject to money, then the scarcity ofmoney makes everything scarce, includ-ing the basis of human life and happi-ness. Such is the life of the slave—onewhose actions are compelled by threatto survival.

Perhaps the deepest indication of ourslavery is the monetization of time. It isa phenomenon with roots deeper than

110/1108

our money system, for it depends onthe prior quantification of time. An an-imal or a child has “all the time in theworld.” The same was apparently truefor Stone Age peoples, who usually hadvery loose concepts of time and rarelywere in a hurry. Primitive languages of-ten lacked tenses, and sometimeslacked even words for “yesterday” or“tomorrow.” The comparative nonchal-ance primitive people had toward timeis still apparent today in rural, moretraditional parts of the world. Lifemoves faster in the big city, where weare always in a hurry because time isscarce. But in the past, we experiencedtime as abundant.

The more monetized society is, themore anxious and hurried its citizens.In parts of the world that are still some-what outside the money economy,where subsistence farming still exists

111/1108

and where neighbors help each other,the pace of life is slower, less hurried.In rural Mexico, everything is donemañana. A Ladakhi peasant woman in-terviewed in Helena Norberg-Hodge’sfilm Ancient Futures sums it all up in de-scribing her city-dwelling sister: “Shehas a rice cooker, a car, a tele-phone—all kinds of time-savingdevices. Yet when I visit her, she is al-ways so busy we barely have time totalk.”

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, weexperience life as short and poor.

If you were born before adult sched-ules invaded childhood and childrenwere rushed around from activity toactivity, then perhaps you still

112/1108

remember the subjective eternity ofchildhood, the afternoons that stretchedon forever, the timeless freedom of lifebefore the tyranny of calendar andclocks. “Clocks,” writes John Zerzan,“make time scarce and life short.” Oncequantified, time too could be boughtand sold, and the scarcity of all money-linked commodities afflicted time aswell. “Time is money,” the saying goes,an identity confirmed by the metaphor“I can’t afford the time.”

If the material world is fundament-ally an abundant world, all the moreabundant is the spiritual world: the cre-ations of the human mind—songs, stor-ies, films, ideas, and everything elsethat goes by the name of intellectualproperty. Because in the digital age wecan replicate and spread them at virtu-ally no cost, artificial scarcity must beimposed upon them in order to keep

113/1108

them in the monetized realm. Industryand the government enforce scarcitythrough copyrights, patents, and en-cryption standards, allowing the hold-ers of such property to profit from own-ing it.

Scarcity, then, is mostly an illusion, acultural creation. But because we live,almost wholly, in a culturally construc-ted world, our experience of thisscarcity is quite real—real enough thatnearly a billion people today are mal-nourished, and some 5,000 children dieeach day from hunger-related causes.So our responses to this scarcity—anxi-ety and greed—are perfectly under-standable. When something is abund-ant, no one hesitates to share it. Welive in an abundant world, made other-wise through our perceptions, our cul-ture, and our deep invisible stories. Ourperception of scarcity is a self-fulfilling

114/1108

prophecy. Money is central to the con-struction of the self-reifying illusion ofscarcity.

Money, which has turned abundanceinto scarcity, engenders greed. But notmoney per se—only the kind of moneywe use today, money that embodies ourcultural sense of self, our unconsciousmyths, and an adversarial relationshipwith nature thousands of years in themaking. All of these things are chan-ging today. Let us look, then, at howmoney came to so afflict our minds andways, so that we might envision howthe money system might change withthem.

1. Warner, “The Charitable-Giving Divide.”2. Piff et al., “Having Less, Giving More.”3. Buzby et al., “Supermarket Loss Estimates.”

115/1108

4. You can get some idea of the untapped po-tential of agriculture by reading F. H. King’sfascinating 1911 book, Farmers of Forty Centur-ies; Or, Permanent Agriculture in China, Korea,and Japan, which explains how these regionssustained enormous populations for millenniaon tiny amounts of land, without mechaniza-tion, pesticides, or chemical fertilizers. Instead,they relied on sophisticated crop rotation, inter-planting, and ecological relationships amongfarm plants, animals, and people. They wastednothing, including human manure. Their farm-ing was extremely labor-intensive, although, ac-cording to King, it was usually conducted at aleisurely pace. In 1907 Japan’s fifty millionpeople were nearly self-sufficient in food; Ch-ina’s land supported, in some regions, clans offorty or fifty people on a three-acre farm; in theyear 1790 China’s population was about thesame as that of the United States today!5. LaSalle et al., The Organic Green Revolution,4., citing numerous supporting studies. If you

116/1108

have the opposite impression, consider thatmany of the studies that show no benefit fromorganic agriculture are conducted by peoplewith little experience with organic farming andon land that is impoverished from decades ofchemical farming. Organic methods are not eas-ily amenable to controlled studies because theyproperly involve a long-term relationshipbetween farmer and land. It is only after years,decades, or even generations that the true bene-fits of organic agriculture become fullyapparent.6. Unfortunately, many of us are so woundedthat we prefer not to interact and share, but toretreat farther into the hell of separation andthe illusion of independence until its fabric un-ravels. As various crises converge and this hap-pens to more and more people, the urge to re-store community will grow.

117/1108

CHAPTER 3MONEY AND THE MIND

When all are isolated by egoism,there is nothing but dust, and at theadvent of a storm, nothing but mire.

—Benjamin Constant

The power to induce a collective hallu-cination of scarcity is only one of theways money affects our perceptions.This chapter will explore some of thedeep psychological and spiritual effectsof money: on the way we see the world,on our religion, our philosophy, evenour science. Money is woven into ourminds, our perceptions, our identities.

That is why, when a crisis of moneystrikes, it seems that the fabric of real-ity is unraveling, too—that the veryworld is falling apart. Yet this is alsocause for great optimism, becausemoney is a social construction that wehave the power to change. What newkinds of perceptions, and what newkinds of collective actions, would ac-company a new kind of money?

Here we are on Chapter 3, and I havenot even defined “money” yet! Mosteconomists define money by its func-tions, such as medium of exchange,unit of account, and store of value. Ac-cordingly, they put a very early date onthe origin of money, perhaps five thou-sand years ago with the emergence ofstandard commodities such as grain,oil, cattle, or gold that served thesefunctions. But when I speak of money, Iam talking about something quite

119/1108

different, something that first appearedin Greece in the seventh century BCE.That was arguably the first time thatmoney transcended mere commodity tobecome a distinct category of being.Henceforward, we could speak not onlyof what money does, but also of what itis.

Economists’ folklore holds that coinswere invented in order to provide aguarantee of weight and purity for theunderlying commodity metal. Theirvalue, this story goes, came entirelyfrom the gold or silver from which theywere made. In fact, like the barter ori-gin of money, like the assumption ofscarcity, this account of the origin ofcoinage is an economist’s fantasy. It is afantasy with an illustrious lineage to besure. Aristotle wrote,

120/1108

For the various necessaries of lifeare not easily carried about, andhence men agreed to employ intheir dealings with each othersomething which was intrinsicallyuseful and easily applicable to thepurposes of life, for example, iron,silver, and the like. Of this thevalue was at first measured simplyby size and weight, but in processof time they put a stamp upon it,to save the trouble of weighingand to mark the value.1

This account seems quite reasonable,but historical evidence seems to contra-dict it. The very first coins, minted inLydia, were made of electrum (a silver-gold alloy) that varied widely in con-sistency.2 Coinage quickly spread toGreece, where, even though coins werefairly consistent in weight and purity,

121/1108

they often had a value greater than thecommodity value of the silver fromwhich they were minted.3 Indeed, somecity-states (including Sparta) mintedcoins from base metals like iron,bronze, lead, or tin: such coins had neg-ligible intrinsic value but still func-tioned as money.4 In either case,stamped coins had a value (which, fol-lowing historian Richard Seaford, weshall call the “fiduciary value”) greaterthan an identical but unstamped disk ofmetal. Why? What was this mysteriouspower that inhered in a mere sign? Itwas not a guarantee of weight and pur-ity, nor was it an extension of the per-sonal power of a ruler or religious au-thority. Seaford observes, “Whereasseal-marks seem to embody the powerof the owner of the seal, coin-markscreate no imagined attachment between

122/1108

the coins and their source.”5 Rather,coin-marks

authenticate the metal as possess-ing a certain value. And they doso not by transmitting power (ma-gical or otherwise) to the piece ofmetal, but by imposing on it aform that recognizably assigns itto a distinct category of things,the category of authentic coins.…The coin-mark … operates in ef-fect as a mere sign.6

Signs have no intrinsic power, butderive it from human interpretation. Tothe extent a society holds such inter-pretations in common, signs or symbolsbear social power. The new kind ofmoney that emerged in ancient Greecederived its value from a social agree-ment, of which the marks on coins were

123/1108

tokens.7 This agreement is the essenceof money. This should be obvioustoday, when most money is electronicand the rest has the approximate in-trinsic value of a sheet of toilet paper,but money has been an agreement eversince the days of the ancient Greeks.Those reformers who advocate goldcoinage as a way to return to the goodold days of “real money” are trying toreturn to something that never existed,except perhaps for brief historical mo-ments almost as an ideal. I believe thatthe next step in the evolution of humanmoney will be not a return to an earlierform of currency, but its transformationfrom an unconscious to an intentionalembodiment of our agreements.

Over 5,000 years, money has evolvedfrom pure commodity, to a symbol rid-ing upon a material, to pure symboltoday. Sacred Economics seeks not to

124/1108

undo this evolution, but to fulfill it. Theagreement that is money does not standin isolation from the other systems ofsigns and symbols by which our civiliz-ation operates. We can embody in ourmoney new agreements about the plan-et, the species, and what we hold sac-red. For a long time we held “progress”sacred, the advancement of science andtechnology, the conquest of the naturalrealm. Our money system supportedthose goals. Our goals are changingnow, and with them the great meta-stories of which the agreement calledmoney is a part: the Story of Self, theStory of the People, and the Story ofthe World.

The purpose of this book is to tell anew story of money; to illuminate whatnew agreements we might embodywithin these fiduciary talismans, so thatmoney is the ally, and not the enemy,

125/1108

of the more beautiful world our heartstell us is possible.

It is no accident that ancient Greece,the place where symbolic money ori-ginated, also gave birth to the modernconception of the individual, to the no-tions of logic and reason, and to thephilosophical underpinnings of themodern mind. In his scholarly master-piece Money and the Ancient GreekMind, classics professor Richard Seafordexplores the impact of money on Greeksociety and thought, illuminating thecharacteristics that make moneyunique. Among them are that it is bothconcrete and abstract, that it is homo-geneous, impersonal, a universal aim,and a universal means, and that it isunlimited. The entrance of this new,unique power into the world had pro-found consequences, many of which arenow so deeply woven into our beliefs

126/1108

and culture, psyche and society, thatwe can barely perceive them, let alonequestion them.

Money is homogeneous in that re-gardless of any physical differencesamong coins, coins qua money areidentical (if they are of the same de-nomination). New or old, worn orsmooth, all one-drachma coins areequal. This was something new in thesixth century BCE. Whereas in archaictimes, Seaford observes, power wasconferred by unique talismanic objects(e.g., a scepter said to be handed downfrom Zeus), money is the opposite: itspower is conferred by a standard signthat wipes out variations in purity andweight. Quality is not important, onlyquantity. Because money is convertibleinto all other things, it infects themwith the same feature, turning them in-to commodities—objects that, as long

127/1108

as they meet certain criteria, are seenas identical. All that matters is howmany or how much. Money, saysSeaford, “promotes a sense of homo-geneity among things in general.” Allthings are equal, because they can besold for money, which can in turn beused to buy any other thing.

In the commodity world, things areequal to the money that can replacethem. Their primary attribute is their“value”—an abstraction. I feel a distan-cing, a letdown, in the phrase, “You canalways buy another one.” Can you seehow this promotes an antimaterialism,a detachment from the physical worldin which each person, place, and thingis special, unique? No wonder Greekphilosophers of this era began elevatingthe abstract over the real, culminatingin Plato’s invention of a world of per-fect forms more real than the world of

128/1108

the senses. No wonder to this day wetreat the physical world so cavalierly.No wonder, after two thousand years’immersion in the mentality of money,we have become so used to the replace-ability of all things that we behave as ifwe could, if we wrecked the planet,simply buy a new one.

I named this chapter “Money and theMind.” Very much like the fiduciaryvalue of money, mind is an abstractionriding a physical vehicle. Like monetaryfiduciarity, the idea of mind as a separ-ate, nonmaterial essence of being de-veloped over thousands of years, lead-ing to the modern concept of an imma-terial consciousness, a disembodiedspirit. Tellingly, in both secular and re-ligious thought, this abstraction has be-come more important than the physicalvehicle, just as the “value” of a thing is

129/1108

more important than its physicalattributes.

In the introduction I mentioned theidea that we have created a god in theimage of our money: an unseen forcethat moves all things, that animates theworld, an “invisible hand” that ordershuman activity, nonmaterial yet ubi-quitous. Many of these attributes ofGod or spirit go back to the pre-Socrat-ic Greek philosophers who developedtheir ideas at precisely the time thatmoney took over their society. Accord-ing to Seaford, they were the first toeven distinguish between essence andappearance, between the concrete andthe abstract—a distinction completelyabsent (even implicitly) from Homer.From Anaximander’s apeiron to Herac-litus’s logos to the Pythagorean doctrine“All is number,” the early Greeks em-phasized the primacy of the abstract: an

130/1108

unseen principle that orders the world.This ideology has infiltrated the DNA ofour civilization to the point where thesize of the financial sector dwarfs thereal economy; where the total value offinancial derivatives is ten times theworld’s gross domestic product; wherethe greatest rewards of our society goto the Wall Street wizards who do noth-ing but manipulate symbols. For thetrader at his computer, it is indeed asPythagoras said: “All is number.”

One manifestation of this spirit-mat-ter split that gives primacy to theformer is the idea, “Sure, economic re-form is a worthy cause, but what ismuch more important is a transforma-tion of human consciousness.” I thinkthis view is mistaken, for it is based ona false dichotomy of consciousness andaction, and ultimately of spirit and mat-ter. On a deep level, money and

131/1108

consciousness are intertwined. Each isbound up in the other.

The development of monetary ab-straction fits into a vast meta-historicalcontext. Money could not have de-veloped without a foundation of ab-straction in the form of words andnumbers. Already, number and labeldistance us from the real world andprime our minds to think abstractly. Touse a noun already implies an identityamong the many things so named; tosay there are five of a thing makes eacha unit. We begin to think of objects asrepresentatives of a category, and notunique beings in themselves. So, whilestandard, generic categories didn’t be-gin with money, money vastly acceler-ated their conceptual dominance.Moreover, the homogeneity of moneyaccompanied the rapid development ofstandardized commodity goods for

132/1108

trade. Such standardization was crudein preindustrial times, but today manu-factured objects are so nearly identicalas to make the lie of money into thetruth.

As we consider the form of themoney of the future, let us keep inmind money’s power to homogenize allthat it touches. Perhaps money shouldonly be used for that which is or shouldbe standard, quantifiable, or generic;perhaps a different kind of money, orno money at all, should be involved inthe circulation of those things that arepersonal and unique. We can only com-pare prices based on standard quantit-ies; thus, when we receive more thanthat, something immeasurable, we havereceived a bonus, something we didn’tpay for. In other words, we have re-ceived a gift. To be sure, we can buyart, but we sense that if it is mere

133/1108

commodity, we pay too much; and if itis true art, we pay infinitely too little.Similarly, we can buy sex but not love;we can buy calories but not real nour-ishment. Today we suffer a poverty ofimmeasurable things, priceless things; apoverty of the things that money can-not buy and a surfeit of the things itcan (though this surfeit is so unequallydistributed that many suffer a povertyof those things, too).8

Just as money homogenizes thethings it touches, so also does it homo-genize and depersonalize its users: “Itfacilitates the kind of commercial ex-change that is disembedded from allother relations.”9 In other words,people become mere parties to a trans-action. In contrast to the diverse motiv-ations that characterize the giving andreceiving of gifts, in a pure financialtransaction we are all identical: we all

134/1108

want to get the best deal. This homo-geneity among human beings that is aneffect of money is assumed by econom-ics to be a cause. The whole story ofmoney’s evolution from barter assumesthat it is fundamental human nature towant to maximize self-interest. In this,human beings are assumed to beidentical. When there is no standard ofvalue, different humans want differentthings. When money is exchangeablefor any thing, then all people want thesame thing: money.

Seaford writes, “Stripped of all per-sonal association, money is promiscu-ous, capable of being exchanged withanybody for anything, indifferent to allnonmonetary interpersonal relation-ships.”10 Unlike other objects, moneyretains no trace of its origins and notrace of those through whom it haspassed. Whereas a gift seems to partake

135/1108

of its giver, everyone’s money is thesame. If I have $2,000 in the bank, halffrom my friend and half from my en-emy, I cannot choose to spend my en-emy’s $1,000 first and save my friend’s.Each dollar is identical.

Wisely, perhaps, many people refuseon principle to mix business withfriendship, wary of the essential con-flict between money and personal rela-tionship. Money depersonalizes a rela-tionship, turning two people into mere“parties to an exchange” driven by theuniversal goal of maximizing self-in-terest. If I seek to maximize self-in-terest, perhaps at your expense, howcan we be friends? And when in ourhighly monetized society we meetnearly all our needs with money, whatpersonal gifts remain from which tobuild friendship?

136/1108

That the profit motive is antitheticalto any benignant personal motive isnearly axiomatic—hence the phrase,“Don’t take it personally; it’s just busi-ness.” Today, an ethical business move-ment and ethical investment movementseek to heal the opposition betweenlove and profit, but however sincere themotives, such efforts often mutate intopublic relations, “green-washing,” orself-righteousness. This is no accident.In later chapters I will describe a fatalcontradiction in the attempt to investethically, but for now just note yournatural suspicion of it, and in general ofany claim to “do well by doing good.”

Any time we come across a seem-ingly altruistic enterprise, we tend tothink, “What’s the catch?” How arethey secretly making money from this?When are they going to ask me formoney? The suspicion, “He’s actually

137/1108

doing it for the money” is nearly uni-versal. We are quick to descry financialmotives in everything people do, andwe are deeply moved when someonedoes something so magnanimous or sonaively generous that such motive isobviously absent. It seems irrational,even miraculous, that someone wouldactually give without contrivance of re-turn. As Lewis Hyde puts it, “In the em-pires of usury the sentimentality of theman with the soft heart calls to us be-cause it speaks of what has been lost.”11

The near-universality of the suspicionof an ulterior profit motive reflectsmoney as a universal aim. Imagineyourself back in school, speaking to thecareer counselor, discussing what yourgifts are and how you might use themto make a living (i.e., to convert theminto money). This habit of thought runsdeep: when my teenage son Jimi shows

138/1108

me the computer games he makes, Isometimes find myself thinking abouthow he might commercialize them andabout which programming skills hecould develop next to be more market-able. Almost any time someone gets anexciting creative idea, the thought,“How can we make money from this?”follows close behind. But when profitbecomes the aim, and not a mere sideeffect, of artistic creation, the creationceases to be art, and we become sel-louts. Expanding this principle to life ingeneral, Robert Graves warns, “Youchoose your jobs to provide you with asteady income and leisure to render theGoddess whom you adore valuablepart-time service. Who am I, you willask, to warn you that she demandseither whole-time service or none atall?”12

139/1108

Money as a universal aim is embed-ded in our language. We speak of “cap-italizing” on our ideas and use “gratuit-ous,” which literally means receivedwith thanks (and not payment), as asynonym for unnecessary. It is embed-ded in economics to be sure, in the as-sumption that human beings seek tomaximize a self-interest that is equival-ent to money. It is even embedded inscience, where it is a cipher forreproductive self-interest. Here, too, thenotion of a universal aim has takenhold.

That there is even such a thing as auniversal aim to life (be it money orsomething else) is not at all obvious.This idea apparently arose at about thesame time money did; perhaps it wasmoney that suggested it to philosoph-ers. Socrates used a money metaphorexplicitly in proposing intelligence as

140/1108

universal aim: “There is only one rightcurrency for which we ought to ex-change all these other things [pleasuresand pains]—intelligence.”13 In religionthis corresponds to the pursuit of an ul-timate aim, such as salvation or en-lightenment, from which all other goodthings flow. How like the unlimited aimof money! I wonder what the effectwould be on our spirituality if we gaveup on the pursuit of a unitary, abstractgoal that we believe to be the key toeverything else. How would it feel torelease the endless campaign to im-prove ourselves, to make progress to-ward a goal? What would it be like justto play instead, just to be? Like wealth,enlightenment is a goal that knows nolimit, and in both cases the pursuit of itcan enslave. In both cases, I think thatthe object of the pursuit is a spurious

141/1108

substitute for a diversity of things thatpeople really want.14

In a fully monetized society, in whichnearly everything is a good or a service,money converts the multiplicity of theworld into a unity, a “single thing thatis the measure of, and exchangeablewith, almost anything else.”15 Theapeiron, the logos, and similar concep-tions were all versions of an underlyingunity that gives birth to all things. It isthat from which all things arise and towhich all things return. As such it isnearly identical with the ancientChinese conception of the Tao, whichgives birth to yin and yang, and then tothe ten thousand things. Interestingly,the semilegendary preceptor of Taoism,Lao Tzu, lived at approximately thesame time as the pre-Socratic philo-sophers—which is also more or less thetime of the first Chinese coinage. In any

142/1108

event, today it is still money that givesbirth to the ten thousand things.Whatever you want to build in thisworld, you start with an investment,with money. And then, when you havefinished your project, it is time to sellit. All things come from money; allthings return to money.

Money is therefore not only a univer-sal aim; it is a universal means as well,and indeed it is largely because it is auniversal means that it is also a univer-sal end, of which one can never havetoo much. Or at least, that is how weperceive it. Many times I’ve been wit-ness to discussions about creating an in-tentional community or launching someother project, only for it to end with adisheartening admission that it willnever happen because, “Where are wegoing to get the money?” Money isquite understandably seen as the

143/1108

crucial factor in determining what wecan create: after all, it can buy virtuallyany good, can induce people to performvirtually any service. “Everything hasits price.” Money can even, it seems,purchase intangibles such as socialstatus, political power, and divinegoodwill (or if not that, at least the fa-vor of religious authorities, which is thenext best thing). We are quite accus-tomed to seeing money as the key tothe fulfillment of all our desires. Howmany dreams do you have that you as-sume you could fulfill if only (and onlyif) you had the money? Thus we mort-gage our dreams to money, turning itfrom means to end.

I will not advocate the abolition ofmoney. Money has exceeded its properbounds, become the means to attainthings that should never be infected byits homogeneity and depersonalization;

144/1108

meanwhile, as we have universalized itas means, those things that money trulycannot buy have become unattainable,and no matter how much money wehave, we can obtain only their semb-lance. The solution is to restore moneyto its proper role. For indeed there arethings that human beings can createonly with money, or with some equival-ent means of coordinating human activ-ity on a mass scale. In its sacred form,money is the implement of a story, anembodied agreement that assigns rolesand focuses intention. I will return tothis theme later as I describe whatmoney might look like in a sacredeconomy.

Because there is no apparent limit towhat money can buy, our desire formoney tends to be unlimited as well.The limitless desire for money wasabundantly apparent to the ancient

145/1108

Greeks. At the very beginning of themoney era, the great poet and reformerSolon observed, “Of wealth, there is nolimit that appears to man, for those ofus who have the most wealth are eagerto double it.” Aristophanes wrote thatmoney is unique because in all otherthings (such as bread, sex, etc.) there issatiety, but not of money.

“How much is enough?” a friendonce asked of a billionaire he knew.The billionaire was stumped. The reas-on that no amount of money can everbe enough is that we use it to fulfillneeds that money cannot actually ful-fill. As such it is like any other addict-ive substance, temporarily dulling thepain of an unmet need while leavingthe need unmet. Increasing doses arerequired to dull the pain, but noamount can ever be enough. Todaypeople use money as a substitute for

146/1108

connection, for excitement, for self-re-spect, for freedom, and for much else.“If only I had a million dollars, then I’dbe free!” How many talented peoplesacrifice their youth hoping for an earlyretirement to a life of freedom, only tofind themselves, at midlife, enslaved totheir money?

When the primary function of moneyis as a medium of exchange, it is sub-ject to the same limits as the goods forwhich it is exchanged, and our desirefor it is limited by our satiety. It iswhen money takes on the additionalfunction of store-of-value that our de-sire for it becomes unlimited. One ideaI will therefore explore is the decoup-ling of money as medium-of-exchangefrom money as store-of-value. This ideahas ancient roots going back to Aris-totle, who distinguished between twokinds of wealth-getting: for the sake of

147/1108

accumulation, and for the sake of meet-ing other needs.16 The former kind ofwealth-getting, he says, is “unnatural”and, moreover, bears no limit.

Unlike physical goods, the abstrac-tion of money allows us, in principle, topossess unlimited quantities of it. Thusit is easy for economists to believe inthe possibility of endless exponentialgrowth, where a mere number repres-ents the size of the economy. The sumtotal of all goods and services is a num-ber, and what limit is there on thegrowth of a number? Lost in abstrac-tion, we ignore the limits of nature andculture to accommodate our growth.Following Plato, we make the abstrac-tion more real than the reality, fixingWall Street while the real economy lan-guishes. The monetary essence of thingsis called “value,” which, as an abstrac-ted, uniform essence, reduces the

148/1108

plurality of the world. All things are re-duced to what they are worth. Thisgives the illusion that the world is aslimitless as numbers are. For a price,you can buy anything, even the pelt ofan endangered species.17

Implicit in the unlimit of money isanother kind of limitlessness: that ofthe human domain, the part of theworld that belongs to human beings.What kind of things, after all, do webuy and sell for money? We buy andsell property, things that we own,things that we perceive as belonging tous. Technology has constantly widenedthat domain, making things availablefor ownership that were never attain-able or even conceivable before: miner-als deep within the earth, bandwidthon the electromagnetic spectrum, se-quences of genes. Contemporaneouswith technological extension of our

149/1108

reach was the progression of the men-tality of property, as things like land,water rights, music, and stories enteredthe realm of the owned. The unlimit ofmoney implies that the realm of theowned can grow indefinitely, andtherefore that the destiny of mankind isto conquer the universe, to bringeverything into the human domain, tomake the whole world ours. This des-tiny is part of what I have described asthe myth of Ascent, part of our definingStory of the People. Today, that story israpidly becoming obsolete, and weneed to invent a money system alignedwith the new story that will replaceit.18

The features of money that I’ve dis-cussed are not necessarily bad. By help-ing to homogenize or standardize all ittouches, by serving as a universalmeans, money has enabled human

150/1108

beings to accomplish wonders. Moneyhas played a key role in the rise of tech-nological civilization, but perhaps, aswith technology, we have barely begunto learn to use this potent creative in-strument for its true purpose. Moneyhas fostered the development of stand-ardized things like machine compon-ents and microchips—but do we wantour food to be homogeneous as well?Money’s impersonality fosters coopera-tion over vast social distances, helpingcoordinate the labor of millions ofpeople who are mostly strangers toeach other—but do we want our rela-tionships with the people in our ownneighborhoods to be impersonal too?Money as universal means enables us todo nearly anything, but do we want itto be an exclusive means too, so thatwithout it we can do nearly nothing?The time has come to master this tool,

151/1108

as humanity steps into an intentional,conscious new role on the earth.

1. Aristotle. Politics, book 1, part 9.2. Seaford, Money and the Early Greek Mind,132–3.3. Ibid., 137.4. Ibid., 139–45.5. Ibid., 119.6. Ibid.7. The exception was coins used for foreigntrade—coins that circulated outside the rangeof a social agreement. Such coins indeed de-pended on the intrinsic value of their underly-ing metal. Yet even here, a broader social per-ception of value was necessary to give themvalue, since silver and gold were not intrinsic-ally very useful as metals.8. This surfeit is reflected in the persistentproblem of “overcapacity” that afflicts nearlyevery industry, which is why solutions to the

152/1108

economic crisis usually involve stimulatingdemand.9. Seaford, Money and the Early Greek Mind,151.10. Seaford, Money and the Early Greek Mind,155.11. Hyde, The Gift, 182.12. Graves, The White Goddess, 15.13. Plato, Tht. 146d. Cited by Seaford, Moneyand the Early Greek Mind, 242.14. Among the greatest of unmet needs today isfor connection, both to other people and tonature. Ironically, money, with its abstractionand impersonality, attenuates our connectionsto both. Spirituality, when conceived as an in-dividual pursuit best done apart from theworld, does the same. Can we conceive of a dif-ferent kind of money that bears the oppositeeffects?15. Seaford, Money and the Early Greek Mind,150.16. Aristotle, Politics, book 1, section 9.

153/1108

17. The reader may have noticed a paradox: welive in a world of abundance, as described inChapter 2, yet we are also depleting a limitedbiosphere. To resolve that paradox, considerthat most of our excess production and con-sumption serve no real need, but are driven bythe perception of scarcity and the existentialloneliness of the separate self cut off fromnature and community.18. The same goes for the other defining storyof our civilization, “the discrete and separateself.” Our money system reifies this story, too,by dissolving personal ties, setting us into com-petition, and disconnecting us from both com-munity and nature.

154/1108

CHAPTER 4THE TROUBLE WITHPROPERTY

What would be the result in heavenitself if those who get there first insti-tuted private property in the surfaceof heaven, and parceled it out in ab-solute ownership among themselves,as we parcel out the surface of theearth?

—Henry George

Man did not make the earth, and,though he had a natural right to oc-cupy it, he had no right to locate ashis property in perpetuity any part ofit; neither did the Creator of the

earth open a land-office, fromwhence the first title-deeds shouldissue.

—Thomas Paine

THE URGE TO OWNWe have lived in an Age of Separation.One by one, our bonds to community,nature, and place have dissolved, ma-rooning us in an alien world. The lossof these bonds is more than a reductionof our wealth, it is a reduction of ourvery being. The impoverishment wefeel, cut off from community and cutoff from nature, is an impoverishmentof our souls. That is because, contraryto the assumptions of economics, bio-logy, political philosophy, psychology,and institutional religion, we are not in

156/1108

essence separate beings having relation-ships. We are relationship.

I once heard Martín Prechtel, speak-ing of his village in Guatemala, explain,“In my village, if you went to the medi-cine man with a sick child, you wouldnever say, ‘I am healthy, but my childis sick.’ You would say, ‘My family issick.’ Or if it were a neighbor, youmight say, ‘My village is sick.’ ” Nodoubt, in such a society, it would beequally inconceivable to say, “I amhealthy, but the forest is sick.” To thinkanyone could be healthy when her fam-ily, her village, or indeed the land, thewater, or the planet were not, would beas absurd as saying, “I’ve got a fatal liv-er disease, but that’s just my liver—Iam healthy!” Just as my sense of selfincludes my liver, so theirs includedtheir social and natural community.

157/1108

The modern self, in contrast, is a dis-crete and separate subject in a universethat is Other. This self is the EconomicMan of Adam Smith; it is the embodiedsoul of religion; it is the selfish gene ofbiology. It underlies the convergingcrises of our time, which are all vari-ations on the theme of separation—sep-aration from nature, from community,from lost parts of ourselves. It underliesall the usual culprits blamed for the on-going destruction of ecology and polity,such as human greed or capitalism. Oursense of self entails, “More for me isless for you”; hence we have aninterest-based money system embody-ing precisely that principle. In older,gift-based societies, the opposite wastrue.

The urge to own grows as a naturalresponse to an alienating ideology thatsevers felt connections and leaves us

158/1108

alone in the universe. When we excludeworld from self, the tiny, lonely iden-tity that remains has a voracious needto claim as much as possible of that lostbeingness for its own. If all the world,all of life and earth, is no longer me, Ican at least compensate by making itmine. Other separate selves do thesame, so we live in a world of competi-tion and omnipresent anxiety. It is builtinto our self-definition. This is the defi-cit of being, the deficit of soul, intowhich we are born.

Trapped in the logic of me and mine,we seek to recover some tiny fraction ofour lost wealth by expanding and pro-tecting the separate self and its exten-sion: money and property. Those wholack the economic means to inflate theself often inflate the physical self in-stead, which is one reason why obesitydisproportionately afflicts the poor.

159/1108

Addictions to shopping, to money, andto acquisition arise from the same basicsource as do addictions to food: bothcome from loneliness, from the pain ofmerely existing cut off from most ofwhat we are.

Looking out upon the strip mines andthe clear-cuts and the dead zones andthe genocides and the debased con-sumer culture, we ask, What is the ori-gin of this monstrous machine thatchews up beauty and spits out money?The discrete and separate self, survey-ing a universe that is fundamentallyOther, naturally treats the natural andhuman world as a pile of instrumental,accidental stuff. The rest of the world isfundamentally not-self.1 Why shouldwe care about it, beyond our own fore-seeable utility? So it was that Descartes,a pioneering articulator of the modernsense of self, articulated as well the

160/1108

ambition to become the “lords and pos-sessors” of nature. As the latter wordimplies, the idea of property occursquite naturally to the separate self.

Our rigid, narrow, self/other distinc-tion is coming to an end, victim of itsown premises. As the mystics havetaught, the separate self can be main-tained only temporarily, and at greatcost. And we have maintained it a longtime, and built a civilization upon itthat seeks the conquest of nature andhuman nature. The present conver-gence of crises has laid bare the futilityof that goal. It portends the end of civil-ization as we know it, and the instaura-tion of a new state of human beingnessdefined by a more fluid, more inclusivesense of self.

One theory of the origin of propertyassociates it with the notion ofautonomy, or self-sovereignty, that

161/1108

emerged slowly out of our communaltribal past. Charles Avila describes thelogic this way: “If I am my own, andmy labor power belongs to me, thenwhat I make is mine.”2 Here then is anideological prerequisite for any conceptof property, that “I am my own,” whichis by no means a universal precept inhuman societies. In other societies, theclan, the tribe, the village, or even thecommunity of all life may have takenpriority over the individual conceptionof the self, in which case your laborpower does not belong to you, but tosomething greater.3 The institution ofproperty, therefore, is not the root ofour present malady, but a symptom ofour disconnection and isolation. Thisbook, therefore, does not seek to abol-ish property (for to do so would addressthe symptom rather than the cause) but

162/1108

to transform it as part of a larger trans-formation of human beingness.

Other thinkers, notably WilhelmReich and Genevieve Vaughan, link theorigin of property to the emergence ofmale dominance and patriarchal soci-ety.4 While I believe these argumentshave merit, I have chosen not to ex-plore herein the sexual dimensions ofmoney and property, a subject de-serving of its own treatise. Each institu-tion of our Age of Separation is tied toall the others; alienation from nature,the body, and the sacred feminineechoes the alienation from the worldthat property implies when it makesthings detachable objects of commerce.

The urge to own diminishes as oursense of connectedness and gratitudegrows, and we realize that our laborpower is not our own, and what I makeis not properly mine. Is not my ability

163/1108

to labor, and my life itself, a gift too? Inthat realization, we desire to give ourcreations to all that have contributed toour being and granted us the gift of life.

Certain socialist philosophers haveturned this desire, motivated by gratit-ude, into an obligation instead, and in-to a justification for state expropriationof individual labor. We owe a “debt tosociety,” and the state becomes thedebt collector. In less extreme form, itjustifies the income tax—also an expro-priation of individual labor. In bothcases, we are compelled through forceto give. Can we instead create an eco-nomic system that liberates, celebrates,and rewards the innate urge to give?That is what this book describes: a sys-tem that rewards flow and not accumu-lation, creating and not owning, givingand not having.

164/1108

THE ORIGINAL ROBBERYThe sovereignty of the individual wasbut a first step toward the modernconcept of property, for most things onthis earth do not exist through anyone’slabor. By the logic of “what I make ismine,” anything that existed independ-ent of human effort could belong to noone. To claim ownership of such athing—the land, the rivers, the animals,the trees—would be tantamount totheft, just as I am a thief if I seize own-ership of something you make.

A distinguished line of economicthought has arisen from this realiza-tion, whose most notable exponentswere P. D. Proudhon, Karl Marx, HenryGeorge, and Silvio Gesell. “Property isrobbery,” proclaimed Proudhon: tracingback the origin of any piece of propertythrough a succession of “legitimate”

165/1108

transfers, we eventually get to the firstowner—the one who simply took it, theone who separated it off from the realmof “ours” or “God’s” into the realm of“mine.” Usually this happened by force,as in the seizure of the vast lands of allNorth America in the last three centur-ies. This story has played itself out invarious forms for millennia all over theworld. After all, before Roman timesthere was no such thing as a deed. Landwas like the air and water; it could notbe owned. The first owners thereforecould not have acquired it legitimately.They must have taken it.

It is often argued that land ownershipis a natural consequence of agriculture.While the hunter-gatherer has madelittle investment in her land, the farmerhas put labor into making it more pro-ductive (of food for humans, that is). Itwould be patently unjust for the farmer

166/1108

to labor all year only to have“gatherers” come in at harvest time andlive off the harvest. Private property issupposed to give people an incentive tomake improvements upon the land. Butwouldn’t it be more just if there weresome way to own the improvements,and not the land itself?

Originally, land rights were almostalways held in common, accruing to thevillage or tribe, and not the individual.In the great agrarian civilizations suchas Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Zhou Dyn-asty China, there was little concept ofprivate land ownership. All land wasthe property of the king, and becausethe king was the representative of thedivine on earth, all land was the prop-erty of God.

There is a vast conceptual gulfbetween having a right to the fruits ofone’s labor as applied to land and

167/1108

owning the land itself. In the West, theabsolute concept of land ownershipseems to have originated in Rome, fer-tilized, perhaps, by the Greek concep-tion of the individual. It was in Romethat land first came under what theycalled dominium, “the ultimate right,the right which had no right behind it,the right which legitimated all others,while itself having no need of legitima-tion … the right ‘of using, enjoying,and abusing’—ius utendi, fruendi, ab-utendi.”5

In the East, explicit land ownershipbegan somewhat earlier, at least inconcept. In China it dates back at leastto the reign of Shang Yang in the fourthcentury BCE and perhaps before,though even then a time prior to landownership was still a matter of historic-al memory, as evidenced by Confucianstatements that it was improper to sell

168/1108

land in “ancient times.”6 India as wellprobably knew private ownership ofland by the sixth century BCE, thoughthe evidence is somewhat contradict-ory.7 In any event, the vast majority ofland in India was communally ownedup until the time of British rule.8

In Medieval Europe, the bulk of theland was owned either in common orby feudal lords who did not “own” theland in the full modern sense, as an ali-enable commodity to freely buy andsell. They had certain rights to the land,which could be transferred to vassals inexchange for various services, shares ofcrops, and eventually for money. InEngland, free alienation of land wasgenerally not possible until the fif-teenth century.9 Thereafter, the vastcommunal lands of England rapidlycame under private ownership thanksto the Enclosure Acts, a process

169/1108

paralleled across the continent, for ex-ample through the “emancipation” ofthe serfs. Lewis Hyde writes,

Whereas before a man could fishin any stream and hunt in anyforest, now he found there wereindividuals who claimed to be theowners of these commons. Thebasis of land tenure had shifted.The medieval serf had been al-most the opposite of a propertyowner: the land had owned him.He could not move freely fromplace to place, and yet he had in-alienable rights to the piece ofland to which he was attached.Now men claimed to own the landand offered to rent it out at a fee.While a serf could not be removedfrom his land, a tenant could beevicted not only through failure to

170/1108

pay the rent but merely at thewhim of the landlord.10

As with so many social reforms, thefreeing of the serfs was another step inthe consolidation of economic andpolitical power in the hands of thealready powerful. By one means or an-other, people who had for generationsfreely grazed their herds, collected fire-wood, and hunted on the lands aroundthem could no longer do so.11 Theselands had been a commons, the propertyof all and of none. Forever after, theybecame property.

If property is robbery, then a legalsystem dedicated to the protection ofprivate property rights is a system thatperpetuates a crime. By making prop-erty sacrosanct we validate the originaltheft. This should not be too surprisingif the laws were made by the thieves

171/1108

themselves to legitimize their ill-gottengains. Such was indeed the case: inRome and elsewhere, it was the richand powerful who both seized the landand made the laws.

Lest the reader think I am launchinga Marxist diatribe, let me hasten to addthat I am not advocating the abolitionof private property. For one thing, thewhole mentality of abolition involves afervid, abrupt, jarring change imposedforcefully on the unwilling. Secondly,private property is but a symptom of adeeper malady (Separation), and if weaddress that symptom from the mind-set of Separation, of conquest, of over-coming evil, we will end up with thesame iniquities in different forms. Fin-ally, even on the economic level, theproblem is not private property per se,but the unfair advantages of owning it.Even though it is wrong for someone to

172/1108

benefit from mere ownership of whatwas once common, everyone benefitswhen resources go toward those whowill use them the best. These includethe land, soil, minerals, aquifers, andcapacity of the atmosphere to absorbwaste. We need an economic systemthat disallows profit-by-owning yet re-wards the entrepreneur’s spirit thatsays, “I know a way to use it better,”and allows that spirit free rein. Marxistsystems not only eliminate profit fromexclusive control of scarce capital re-sources; they also eliminate profit fromtheir efficacious use. The result is ineffi-ciency and stagnation. Can we rewardthose who put resources to best usewithout rewarding the mere fact ofownership? This book describes amoney system that preserves the free-dom of private property without

173/1108

allowing its owners to accrue unfairadvantages.

Wherever and whenever it happened,the privatization of land soon broughtwith it a concentration of ownership. Inthe early days of ancient Rome, landwas common (not personal) property,except for a small homestead plot: “Thecorn land was of public right.”12 AsRome expanded through conquest, thenew lands did not stay “public” verylong but soon migrated into the handsof the wealthiest families—the patri-cian class—setting the norm for manycenturies to come. Their estates alsogrew at the expense of the original ple-beian freeholds, whose owners werefrequently called away to serve in thelegions, and which in any case couldnot compete economically with thecheap slave labor of the patrician es-tates. They accumulated

174/1108

insurmountable debts and, becauseland had become an alienable commod-ity, were forced off their homesteadsand into beggary, banditry, or, if theywere fortunate, the urban craftprofessions.

When the fortunes of the Empireturned and the supply of slaves driedup, many large landholders turned totenant farmers, the coloni, to farm theirfields. Bound by debt, these tenantseventually became the Medieval serfs.Think of it this way: if you owe me aninsurmountable debt, then you are ob-liged to pay at least as much of it asyou can. The proceeds of your labor,forever after, belong to me. How simil-ar this is to the United States bank-ruptcy laws as promulgated in theBankruptcy “Reform” Act of 2005,which compel the person declaringbankruptcy to commit a portion of

175/1108

future wages to creditors.13 How simil-ar as well to the plight of Third Worldcountries, who are compelled to re-structure their economies and devotetheir entire economic surplus towardthe perpetual servicing of debt. Theseare the modern counterparts of theserfs, bound to work for the owners ofmoney just as the serfs worked for theowners of land. Their condition isknown as “debt peonage.”

The parallel between ancient Romeand the present day is striking. Now asthen, wealth is increasingly concen-trated in the hands of the few. Now asthen, people must go into lifelong debtthat they can never pay off just to haveaccess to the necessities of life. Then itwas through access to land; today it isthrough access to money. The slaves,serfs, and tenants gave a lifetime oflabor to the enrichment of the

176/1108

landowners; today the proceeds of ourlabor go to the owners of money.

In the history of radical thought, therealization that property is theft usuallyaccompanies a rage and desire for ven-geance against the thieves. Matters arenot so simple, though. The owners ofwealth, whether inherited or not, areborn into a role that is created and ne-cessitated by the great invisible storiesof our civilization that compel us toturn the world into property and moneywhether we are aware of doing so ornot.

Let us not waste our psychic energyhating the rich, or even the originalplunderers. Cast in their station, wewould have enacted the same role.Indeed, most of us participate, in oneway or another, in the ongoing theft ofthe commons. Let us not hate, lest weprolong the Age of Separation even

177/1108

further and lest we, like the Bolsheviks,perpetrate a revolution that is insuffi-ciently deep, and so re-create the oldorder in a different, distorted form.Still, let us not lose sight of the natureand effects of the unconscious crime ofproperty, so that we may return ourworld to its original and still-latentabundance.

The transformation from a right tobenefit into outright ownership of landwas a gradual one, whose terminus isthe practice of selling land for money.Let’s keep in mind that this was a con-ceptual transformation (the landdoesn’t admit to being owned), a hu-man projection onto reality. Land own-ership (and indeed all forms of owner-ship) says more about our perception ofthe world than about the nature of thething owned. The transition from theearly days, when ownership of land was

178/1108

as unthinkable as ownership of the sky,sun, and moon, to the present day,when nearly every square foot of theearth is subject to ownership of onesort or another, is really just the storyof our changing view of ourselves in re-lation to the universe.

THE GEORGIST TRADITIONThe distinction between the right to useand outright ownership echoes theprimitive distinction between thatwhich is produced through human ef-fort and that which is there already; itpersists today in the distinctionbetween “real” and “personal” prop-erty, and it is a basis for thousands ofyears of reformist thought.

Since the Roman Empire developedthe legal basis of property rights as we

179/1108

know them today, it is unsurprisingthat it also produced some of the earli-est critics of property. In the third andfourth centuries, the early leaders ofthe Christian church were especiallyclear that the things of the earth werefor all to share. Ambrose wrote, “Richand poor alike enjoy the splendid orna-ments of the universe … The house ofGod is common to rich and poor,” and“The Lord our God has willed this earthto be the common possession of all andits fruit to support all.”14 Elsewhere hewrites that private property

is not according to nature, fornature has brought forth all thingsfor all in common. Thus God hascreated everything in such a waythat all things be possessed incommon. Nature therefore is the

180/1108

mother of common right, usurpa-tion of private right.15

Others of the Christian Fathers, notablyJohn Chrysostom, Augustine, Basil theGreat, and Clement, weighed in withsimilar views, encouraging followers tofollow Jesus’s teachings quite literallyand give all their possessions to thepoor. Theirs was not a detached philo-sophy: many of these leaders did ex-actly that. Ambrose, Basil, andAugustine had been men of consider-able wealth before entering the clergy,and they gave it all away.

The teachings of its founders not-withstanding, eventually the Church it-self acquired considerable property andallied itself with imperial power. Theteachings of Jesus became otherworldlyideals that were not seriously recom-mended to anyone, and the Kingdom of

181/1108

God was transported from earth toHeaven. This was a major step in theconceptual separation of spirit and mat-ter that has contributed to making ma-teriality, and especially money, profanetoday. Even more ironically, mostpeople today who profess to followChristian teachings have turnedeverything inside out and associate so-cialism with atheism and privatewealth with God’s favor.

The early Church fathers made fre-quent reference to the distinctionbetween what people produce throughtheir own effort and what was given tohumanity by God for all to use in com-mon. Many social and economic criticsof the last several centuries echoed thisearly indignation at the appropriationof the commons and developed creativeproposals to remedy it. One such earlycritic, Thomas Paine, wrote,

182/1108

And as it is impossible to separatethe improvement made by cultiva-tion from the earth itself, uponwhich that improvement is made,the idea of landed property arosefrom that parable connection; butit is nevertheless true, that it isthe value of the improvement,only, and not the earth itself, thatis individual property.… Everyproprietor, therefore, of cultivatedlands, owes to the community aground-rent (for I know of no bet-ter term to express the idea) forthe land which he holds.16

The first economist to develop thisidea fully was Henry George, in his elo-quent 1879 classic Progress and Poverty.He started with essentially the samepremise as Paine and the earlyChristians:

183/1108

But who made the earth that anyman can claim such ownership ofit, or any part of it, or the right togive, sell or bequeath it? Since theearth was not made by us, but isonly a temporary dwelling placeon which one generation of menfollow another; since we findourselves here, are manifestlyhere with equal permission of theCreator, it is manifest that no onecan have any exclusive right ofownership in land, and that therights of all men to land must beequal and inalienable. There mustbe exclusive right of possession ofland, for the man who uses itmust have secure possession ofland in order to reap the productsof his labor. But his right of pos-session must be limited by theequal right of all, and should

184/1108

therefore be conditioned upon thepayment to the community by thepossessor of an equivalent for anyspecial valuable privilege thus ac-corded him.17

Why should someone profit from theuse-value of land by the mere fact ofowning it, especially when the origin ofthat ownership is based on ancient in-justice? Accordingly, Henry Georgeproposed his famous Single Tax—essen-tially a 100-percent tax on the “eco-nomic rent” deriving from land. Thiswas to be implemented through a taxon the value of land as distinct fromimprovements upon it; for example,land would be taxed but not buildingsor crops. It was called “single” becausehe advocated the abolition of all othertaxes, reasoning that it is just as muchtheft to tax legitimate private property

185/1108

as it is to profit from something that be-longs to all. George’s writings sparked amassive political movement that almostgot him elected to the New York may-or’s office, but of course the establishedmoney power fought him at everyturn.18 His ideas have been sporadicallyadopted around the world (the twoplaces I’ve spent most of my life,Taiwan and Pennsylvania, both levytaxes on the underlying value of land)and have greatly influenced economicthought.

One of his admirers, Silvio Gesell,proposed a near-equivalent to George’sland tax: the public ownership of allland, available for private leasing at arate that would approximate the eco-nomic rent.19 Gesell’s reasoning is com-pelling and remarkably prescient in itsunderstanding of ecology and the

186/1108

connected self. Read this extraordinarypassage from 1906:

We frequently hear the phrase:Man has a natural right to theearth. But that is absurd, for itwould be just as correct to saythat man has a right to his limbs.If we talk of rights in this connec-tion we must also say that a pine-tree has the right to sink its rootsin the earth. Can man spend hislife in a balloon? The earth be-longs to, and is an organic part ofman. We cannot conceive manwithout the earth any more thanwithout a head or a stomach. Theearth is just as much a part, an or-gan, of man as his head. Where dothe digestive organs of man beginand end? They have no beginningand no end, but form a closed

187/1108

system without beginning or end.The substances which man re-quires to maintain life are indi-gestible in their raw state andmust go through a preparatory di-gestive process. And this preparat-ory work is not done by themouth, but by the plant. It is theplant which collects and trans-mutes the substances so that theymay become nutriment in theirfurther progress through the di-gestive canal. Plants and the spacethey occupy are just as much apart of man as his mouth, histeeth or his stomach.…

How, then, can we suffer indi-vidual men to confiscate for them-selves parts of the earth as theirexclusive property, to erect barri-ers and with the help of watch-dogs and trained slaves to keep us

188/1108

away from parts of the earth, fromparts of ourselves—to tear, as itwere, whole limbs from our bod-ies? Is not such a proceeding equi-valent to self-mutilation?20

Gesell goes on, with great rhetoricalflourish, to say that this mutilation iseven worse than the amputation of abody part, for wounds of the body heal,but

the wound left … by the amputa-tion of a piece of land festersforever, and never closes. At everyterm for the payment of rent, onevery Quarter Day, the woundopens and the golden bloodgushes out. Man is bled white andgoes staggering forward. The am-putation of a piece of land fromour body is the bloodiest of all

189/1108

operations; it leaves a gaping, fes-tering wound which cannot healunless the stolen limb is graftedon again.

I think this is a wound we all feel, notonly as the rent built into the cost ofeverything we buy, but also as a spir-itual disenfranchisement. Some timeago I was driving with a woman fromFrance down the country roads of cent-ral Pennsylvania. The gentle mountainsand broad valleys beckoned to us, sowe decided to walk them. It seemed asif the ground was begging for our feet,wanting to be tread. We decided to finda place to pull over and walk. We drovefor an hour, but we never did find afield or forest that wasn’t festoonedwith “No Trespassing” signs. Every timeI see one I feel a twinge, a loss. Anysquirrel is freer than I am, any deer.

190/1108

These signs apply to humans only.Herein lies a universal principle: the re-gime of property, the enclosure of theunowned, has made us all poorer. Thepromise of freedom inherent in thatbroad, verdant landscape was a mirage.Woody Guthrie’s words ring true:

There was a big high wall there thattried to stop me.The sign was painted, it said privateproperty.But on the back side it didn’t saynothing.That side was made for you andme.21

After three hundred years of econom-ic expansion, we are so impoverishedthat we lack the wealth and freedom ofa squirrel. The indigenous people wholived here before the Europeans arrived

191/1108

had the run of the land. They had thesimple freedom to say, “Let us climbthat mountain. Let us swim in that lake.Let us fish that river.” Not even thewealthiest among us have that freedomtoday. Even a billion-dollar landholdingis smaller than the domain of thehunter-gatherer.22

The situation is different in most ofEurope; in Sweden, for instance, theright of Allemansrätt allows individualsto walk, pick flowers, camp for a day ortwo, swim, or ski on private land (butnot too near a dwelling). I met a horseenthusiast who described how, in Ire-land, all the gates to private farm lanesand pastures are unlocked.“Trespassing” is not a concept; the landis open to all. The riders are respectfulof the farmer and the land in turn,sticking to the perimeters to avoid dis-turbing animals and pasture. Hearing of

192/1108

this system, I don’t think any Americancan look out upon the vast expanses ofthis country with their gates, fences,and no-trespassing signs without a feel-ing of confinement or loss. Can you feelGesell’s “wound”—that the very landhas been severed from us?

Gesell’s huge contribution beyondGeorge was to apply parallel thinkingbeyond land to money, inventing a newkind of money system that I will de-scribe, after due groundwork, later inthis book as a key element of a sacredeconomy.

Controversial among progressives ofhis time, Henry George’s insistence ontaxing only land makes even less sensetoday because so many other commonshave been brought into the realm ofprivate property.23 Hyde’s “marketingof formerly inalienable properties” hasgone far beyond land to encompass

193/1108

nearly everything essential to humanexistence and human joy. Our connec-tions to nature, to culture, and to com-munity have been riven, separated offand sold back to us. I have so far fo-cused on the land, but nearly every oth-er commons has suffered the same fate.Intellectual property offers the most ob-vious example, and the royalties thatderive from owning it play a role simil-ar to land rent. (If you think intellectu-al property differs from land because itis created by humans, read on!) Butthere is one form of ownership thatcontains and supersedes the rest: theownership of money. In the realm offinance, interest plays the role of royal-ties and rents, ensuring that the wealththat flows from human creativity andlabor flows primarily to those who ownmoney. Money is just as criminal in itsorigins as are other forms of

194/1108

property—an ongoing robbery thatboth impels and embodies the expropri-ation of the commons.

To restore sacredness to economy, weneed to redress this robbery, because itis ultimately a theft and a reduction ofa divine gift. It is the conversion ofwhat was once sacred, unique, and per-sonal into the status of commodity. It isnot immediately obvious that the rightto profit from mere ownership ofmoney is just as illegitimate as the rightto profit from the mere ownership ofland. After all, money, unlike land, is ahuman creation. We earn money fromthe application of our human gifts, ourown energy, time, and creativity.Surely the proceeds from this laborrightfully belong to the laborer? Surely,therefore, not all money is illegitimatein its ultimate origin?

195/1108

This view is naive. In fact, money isdeeply and irretrievably implicated inthe conversion of the land commons in-to private property, the final and defin-ing stage of which is its reduction tothe status of just another commoditythat can be bought and sold. So toohave other elements of our natural andcultural bequest been cordoned off,turned into property, and finally, as“goods and services,” into money. Thisis not to say that it is immoral to workfor money; it is, rather, immoral formoney to work for you. What rental ison land, so interest is on money. Moneyis the corpse of the commons, the em-bodiment of all that was once commonand free, turned now into property ofthe purest form. The next severalchapters will substantiate this claim,describing exactly how and whyinterest-bearing money, by nature,

196/1108

usurps the commons, ruins the planet,and reduces the vast majority of hu-manity to peonage.

1. As above, so below. Having made nature intoan adversary, or at best a pile of “resources,” itis no surprise that we manifest the same rela-tionship within our bodies. The defining dis-eases of our time are the autoimmune diseases,the somatization of our self-other confusion.Just as the village, the forest, and the planet areinseparable parts of ourselves that we mistakeas other, so our immune systems reject our ownbody tissues. What we do to nature, we do toourselves, inescapably.2. Avila, Ownership, 5.3. Even today, we have a spiritual sense thatour labor is indeed not our own. It comesthrough in our desire to work for somethinggreater than ourselves—that is, to dedicate ourlabor to a cause beyond our rational self-

197/1108

interest. Religious people might describe it as“giving one’s life to God.” Another way of put-ting it is that we have a need to make a gift ofour labor and its products, and of all the skillsand talents that inform it. We then feel fulfilled,serene in the knowledge that we are fulfillingour purpose here on earth. Intuitively, we knowthat our gifts must be given in turn, and nothoarded for the brief and illusory aggrandize-ment of the separate self.4. See, for example, Reich’s Sex-Pol andVaughan’s “Gift Giving as the Female Principlevs. Patriarchal Capitalism.”5. Avila, Ownership, 20.6. Xu, Ancient China in Transition, 112. Thisbook seeks to interpret the Confucian positionas a criticism of concentration of ownership.Deng, “A Comparative Study on Land Owner-ship,” 12. Deng maintains that prior to then,alienation of land was forbidden, since it wasall the property of the king. Deng also arguesthat in practice, land was generally not

198/1108

alienable or fungible at least through the medi-eval Song Dynasty.7. Altekar, State and Government in Ancient In-dia, 273–4.8. Kuhnen, Man and Land, Sec. 2.1.1 and 2.1.2.9. Deng, “A Comparative Study on Land Owner-ship,” 10.10. Hyde, The Gift, 121.11. Of course, the peasants resisted their dis-possession from the commons, fomenting thebloody struggle known in Germany as the Peas-ants’ War. It is a struggle reenacted time andagain around the globe whenever people resistthe incursion of property rights into yet anothersphere of human relationship. As Hyde puts it,“the Peasants’ War was the same war that theAmerican Indians had to fight with theEuropeans, a war against the marketing offormerly inalienable properties.”12. Avila, Ownership, 16, quoting a ancientsource from H. F. Jolowicz and Barry Nicholas,

199/1108

Historical Introduction to the Study of RomanLaw, 139.13. Moreover, many types of debt, such as taxdebt, alimony debt, and student loans, are notaffected by bankruptcy. At the present writing,student loan debt in the United States exceedscredit card debt, posing a huge burden ongraduating students.14. In Psalmum CXVIII Expositio, 8, 22, PL15:1303, cited by Avila, Ownership, 72.15. Avila, Ownership, 74.16. Paine, Agrarian Justice, par. 11–12.17. George “The Single Tax.”18. Another reason for his political defeat wasthat George was rigidly dogmatic, refusingpolitical alliance with anyone who did not un-compromisingly endorse his Single Tax.19. Economic rent refers to the proceeds of own-ership, such as rents, royalties, dividends, andinterest.

200/1108

20. Gesell, The Natural Economic Order, part 2,chapter 5, “The Case for the Nationalization ofLand.”21. From “This Land is Your Land.” This verseis usually omitted from the songbooks.22. The reader might bring up the territorialityof animals, many of whom are not free to roam.Not all animals are territorial, however, andthose that are often exhibit group territoriality,not individual territoriality. So it was with hu-mans for most of our existence. At the veryleast, each person had the freedom of the entiretribal territory. Shall we today shrink our territ-ory down to the level of the nuclear family? Orshall we expand our tribe to include the wholeearth?23. There are other significant problems withGeorge’s program. In particular, it is very diffi-cult to separate the value of land from thevalue of improvements upon it, especially be-cause the intrinsic value of land is determinednot only by its physical characteristics, but also

201/1108

by its location relative to other pieces of landbearing human improvements. By building onyour land, you attract others to build nearby,thus raising the value of your own land andcreating a disincentive to build in the firstplace. This is one reason why I prefer SilvioGesell’s leasing approach to solving the prob-lem of economic rent.

202/1108

CHAPTER 5THE CORPSE OF THECOMMONS

We cry shame on the feudal baronwho forbade the peasant to turn aclod of earth unless he surrenderedto his lord a fourth of his crop. Wecall those the barbarous times. But ifthe forms have changed, the rela-tions have remained the same, andthe worker is forced, under the nameof free contract, to accept feudal ob-ligations. For, turn where he will, hecan find no better conditions.Everything has become private prop-erty, and he must accept, or die ofhunger.

—Peter Kropotkin

At the foundation of every great for-tune lies a great crime.

—Leo Tolstoy

Despite land’s obvious independence ofhuman effort for its existence, land isnot so different from any other kind ofproperty. Let us first consider materialproperty—anything made of metal,wood, plastic, plants or animals, miner-als, and so on. Are these anything otherthan pieces of the earth, alteredthrough the application of human ef-fort? The distinction between land andimprovements thereupon—the distinc-tion between that which already existsand that which human effort cre-ates—is no more or less valid for landthan for any other material good. All

204/1108

that we use and all that we own con-sists of modified bits of earth. Togetherthey are “natural capital”—the wealthand goodness that nature has be-queathed upon us. Originally none of itwas property; it came into that realm astechnology lengthened our grasp andthe mentality of separation intensifiedour will to own. Today, forms of natur-al capital that we barely knew existedhave become property: the electromag-netic spectrum, sequences of DNA, and,indirectly, ecological diversity and theearth’s capacity to absorb industrialwaste.1

Whether it has been made into a dir-ect subject of property, as in land, oil,and trees, or whether it is still a com-mons that we draw on to create otherproperty, such as the open sea, the ori-ginal Great Commons has been sold off:converted first into property and then

205/1108

into money. It is this final step thatconfirms that something has indeedcompleted its metamorphosis into prop-erty. To be able to freely buy and sellsomething means that it has been disso-ciated from its original matrix of rela-tionships; in other words, that it has be-come “alienable.” That is why moneyhas become a proxy for land and allother property, and why charging rent-al (interest) for its use bears the sameeffects and partakes of the same ancientinjustice as does charging rent on land.

CULTURAL AND SPIRITUALCAPITALNatural capital is one of four broad cat-egories of the commonwealth that alsocomprises social, cultural, and spiritualcapital. Each consists of things that

206/1108

were once free, part of self-sufficiencyor the gift economy, that we now payfor. The robbery then is not from moth-er earth, but from mother culture.

The most familiar of these otherforms of capital in the economic dis-course is cultural capital, which goes bythe term intellectual property. In formertimes, the vast fund of stories, ideas,songs, artistic motifs, images, and tech-nical inventions formed a commonsthat everyone could draw upon forpleasure and productivity, or incorpor-ate into yet other innovations. In theMiddle Ages, minstrels would listen toeach other’s songs and borrow newtunes that they liked, modify them, andcirculate them back into the commonsof music. Today artists and their cor-porate sponsors scramble to copyrightand protect each new creation, and vig-orously prosecute anyone who tries to

207/1108

incorporate those songs into their own.The same happens in every creativesphere.2

The moral justification for intellectu-al property is, again, “If I am my own,and my labor power belongs to me,then what I make is mine.” But evengranting the premise that “I am myown,” the implicit assumption thatartistic and intellectual creations ariseex nihilo from the mind of the creator,independent of cultural context, is ab-surd. Any intellectual creation (includ-ing this book) draws on bits and piecesof the sea of culture around us, andfrom the fund of images, melodies, andideas that are deeply imprinted uponthe human psyche, or perhaps even in-nate to it. As Lewis Mumford puts it, “Apatent is a device that enables one manto claim special financial rewards forbeing the last link in the complicated

208/1108

social process that produced the inven-tion.”3 The same is true of songs, stor-ies, and all other cultural innovations.By making them private property, weare walling off something that is notours. We are stealing from the culturalcommons. And because, like land,pieces of the cultural commons arethemselves productive of continuedwealth, this theft is an ongoing crimethat contributes to the divide betweenthe haves and the have-nots, the own-ers and the renters, the creditors andthe debtors. The Russian anarchistPeter Kropotkin made this general pointeloquently:

Every machine has had the samehistory—a long record of sleeplessnights and of poverty, of disillu-sions and of joys, of partial im-provements discovered by several

209/1108

generations of nameless workers,who have added to the original in-vention these little nothings,without which the most fertileidea would remain fruitless. Morethan that: every new invention isa synthesis, the resultant of innu-merable inventions which havepreceded it in the vast field ofmechanics and industry.

Science and industry, know-ledge and application, discoveryand practical realization leadingto new discoveries, cunning ofbrain and of hand, toil of mindand muscle—all work together.Each discovery, each advance,each increase in the sum of hu-man riches, owes its being to thephysical and mental travail of thepast and the present.

210/1108

By what right then can any onewhatever appropriate the leastmorsel of this immense whole andsay—This is mine, not yours?4

Such considerations inform my desireto make my books freely available on-line and to forgo some of the normalcopyrights. I could not have writtenthis book outside a vast organic matrixof ideas, a commonwealth of culturalcapital that I cannot rightfully enclose.5

Spiritual capital is more subtle. Itrefers to our mental and sensuous capa-cities, for example, the ability to con-centrate, to create worlds of the ima-gination, and to derive pleasure fromexperiencing life. When I was young, inthe very last days before television andvideo games came to dominate Americ-an childhood, we created our ownworlds with intricate story lines,

211/1108

practicing the psychic technologies thatadults can use to fashion their lives andtheir collective reality: forming a vis-ion, telling a story around that visionthat assigns meanings and roles, play-ing out those roles, and so on. Today,those worlds of the imagination comeprefabricated from TV studios and soft-ware companies, and children wanderthrough cheap, gaudy, often violentworlds created by distant strangers.These come with prefabricated imagesas well, and the ability to form theirown images (we call this ability imagin-ation) atrophies. Unable to envision anew world, the child grows up accus-tomed to accepting whatever reality ishanded her.6 Could this, perhaps, becontributing to the political passivity ofthe American public?

Another depletion of spiritual capitalcomes via the intense sensory

212/1108

stimulation of electronic media.Modern action films, for instance, areso fast-paced, so loud, so grossly stimu-lating, that older movies seem boring incomparison, not to mention books orthe world of nature. Despite my best ef-forts to limit their exposure to modernexcesses, my children can barely standto watch any film made before 1975.Once habituated to intense stimulation,in its absence we get the withdrawalsymptom we call boredom. We becomedependent, and therefore must pay toacquire something that was once avail-able simply by virtue of being alive. Ababy or a hunter-gatherer will be fas-cinated by the slow processes of nature:a twig floating on the water, a bee visit-ing a flower, and other things that arebeyond the anemic attentiveness ofmodern adults. Just as the Romancoloni had to pay to use the land they

213/1108

needed to survive, so also must mostpeople today pay the owners of the pro-cesses, media, and capital necessary tocreate the extreme sensory stimulationthat they need to feel alive.

It may not be readily apparent thatspiritual capital constitutes a commons.What has really been appropriated hereis a locus of attention. The capabilitiesof the human mind that I call spiritualcapital do not exist in isolation; it is ourupbringing, our nurture, our culturalsurroundings that foster and directthem. Our ability to imagine and to ob-tain sensory fulfillment is to a great de-gree a collective ability, one today thatwe can no longer exercise from thefreely available sources of mind andnature, but must purchase from theirnew owners.

The collective attention of the humanrace is a commons like the land or the

214/1108

air. Like them, it is a raw material ofhuman creativity. To make a tool, to doany work, to do anything at all requiresthat one place attention on that taskrather than on some other. The ubi-quity of advertising and media in oursociety is a co-optation of the collectivehuman attention, and a depletion of ourdivine bequest. On the road, every-where my eyes turn, there is a bill-board. On the subway, on the internet,on the street, commercial messagesreach out to “capture” our attention.They infiltrate our very thoughts, ournarratives, our inner dialog, and viathese, our emotions, desires, and be-liefs, turning all toward the making ofproduct and profit. Our attention ishardly our own anymore, so easily dothe powers of politics and commercemanipulate it.

215/1108

After it has been so long manipu-lated, chopped up, habituated to in-tense stimuli, and jerked around fromone lurid but empty object to another,our attention is so fragmented we can-not sustain it long enough to createanything independent of the programsthat surround us. We lose our capacityto sustain thought, understand nuance,and put ourselves in another person’sshoes. Susceptible to any simplistic nar-rative with immediate emotional ap-peal, we are easy targets not just for ad-vertising, but for propaganda, dem-agoguery, and fascism. In various ways,all of these serve the money power.

216/1108

THE STRIP-MINING OFCOMMUNITYThe most important type of capital forpurposes of this discussion is social cap-ital. Social capital refers primarily torelationships and skills, the “services”that people once provided for them-selves and each other in a gift eco-nomy, such as cooking, child care,health care, hospitality, entertainment,advice, and the growing of food, mak-ing of clothes, and building of houses.As recently as one or two generationsago, many of these functions were farless commoditized than they are today.When I was a child, most people I knewseldom ate at restaurants, and neigh-bors took care of each other’s childrenafter school. Technology has been in-strumental in bringing human relation-ships into the realm of “services,” just

217/1108

as it has brought deeper and more ob-scure pieces of the earth into the realmof goods. For example, the technologyof the phonograph and radio helpedturn music from something peoplemade for themselves into somethingthey paid for. Storage and transporta-tion technologies have done the samefor food processing. In general, the finedivision of labor that accompanies tech-nology has made us dependent onstrangers for most of the things we use,and makes it unlikely that our neigh-bors depend on us for anything we pro-duce. Economic ties thus become di-vorced from social ties, leaving us withlittle to offer our neighbors and littleoccasion to know them.

The monetization of social capital isthe strip-mining of community. Itshould not be surprising that money isdeeply implicated in the disintegration

218/1108

of community, because money is theepitome of the impersonal. Convert twodistinct forests into money, and theybecome the same. Applied to cultures,the same principle is fast creating aglobal monoculture where every serviceis a paid service. When money mediatesall our relationships, we too lose ouruniqueness to become a standard con-sumer of standard goods and services,and a standard functionary performingother services. No personal economicrelationships are important because wecan always “pay someone else to do it.”No wonder, strive as we might, we findit so hard to create community. Nowonder we feel so insecure, so replace-able. It is all because of the conversion,driven, as we shall see, by interest, ofthe unique and sacred into the monet-ized and generic. In The Ascent of Hu-manity I wrote,

219/1108

“We don’t really need each oth-er.” … What better descriptioncould there be of the loss of com-munity in today’s world? We don’treally need each other. We don’tneed to know the person whogrows, ships, and processes ourfood, makes our clothing, buildsour house, creates our music,makes or fixes our car; we don’teven need to know the personwho takes care of our babieswhile we are at work. We are de-pendent on the role, but only in-cidentally on the person fulfillingthat role. Whatever it is, we canjust pay someone to do it (or paysomeone else to do it) as long aswe have money. And how do weget money? By performing someother specialized role that, morelikely than not, amounts to

220/1108

someone paying us to dosomething for them …

The necessities of life have beengiven over to specialists, leavingus with nothing meaningful to do(outside our own area of expert-ise) but to entertain ourselves.Meanwhile, whatever functions ofdaily living that remain to us aremostly solitary functions: drivingplaces, buying things, paying bills,cooking convenience foods, doinghousework. None of these demandthe help of neighbors, relatives, orfriends. We wish we were closerto our neighbors; we think ofourselves as friendly people whowould gladly help them. But thereis little to help them with. In ourhouse-boxes, we are self-suffi-cient. Or rather, we are self-suffi-cient in relation to the people we

221/1108

know but dependent as never be-fore on total strangers living thou-sands of miles away.

The commoditization of social rela-tionships leaves us with nothing to dotogether but to consume. Joint con-sumption does nothing to build com-munity because it requires no gifts. Ithink the oft-lamented vacuity of mostsocial gatherings arises from the incho-ate knowledge, “I don’t need you.” Idon’t need you to help me consumefood, drink, drugs, or entertainment.Consumption calls upon no one’s gifts,calls forth none of anyone’s true being.Community and intimacy cannot comefrom joint consumption, but only fromgiving and cocreativity.

When libertarians invoke the sanctityof private property, they unintention-ally create a need for the very Big

222/1108

Government they so despise. For in theabsence of community bonds, the atom-ized individuals that remain depend onremote authority—a legally constitutedstate—for many of the social functionsthat community structures once ful-filled: security, dispute resolution, andthe allocation of collective social capit-al. The propertization and privatizationof the economic realm leaves us, tocoin a phrase, helplessly independ-ent—independent of anyone we know,and dependent on impersonal, coerciveinstitutions that govern from afar.

When I ask people what is missingmost from their lives, the most commonanswer is “community.” But how canwe build community when its buildingblocks—the things we do for each oth-er—have all been converted intomoney? Community is woven fromgifts. Unlike money or barter

223/1108

transactions, in which there are no ob-ligations remaining after the transac-tion, gifts always imply future gifts.When we receive, we owe; gratitude isthe knowledge of having received andthe desire to give in turn. But what isthere now to give? Not the necessitiesof life, not food, shelter, or clothing,not entertainment, not stories, nothealth care: everyone buys these.Hence the urge to get away from it all,to return to a more self-sufficient lifewhere we build our own houses andgrow our own food and make our ownclothes, in community. Yet while thereis value in this movement, I doubt thatmany people will start doing things thehard way again just in order to havecommunity. There is another solutionbesides reversing the specialization oflabor and the machine-based efficiencyof the modern age, and it springs from

224/1108

the fact that money does not meetmany of our needs at all. Very import-ant needs go unmet today, and money,because of its impersonal nature, is in-capable of meeting them. The com-munity of the future will arise from theneeds that money inherently cannotmeet.

You can see now why I call money“the corpse of the commons.” The con-version of natural, cultural, social, andspiritual capital into money is the ful-fillment of its power, described byRichard Seaford, to homogenize all thatit touches. “In reducing individuality tohomogeneous impersonality,” hewrites, “the power of money resemblesthe power of death.”7 Indeed, whenevery forest has been converted intoboard feet, when every ecosystem hasbeen paved over, when every humanrelationship has been replaced by a

225/1108

service, the very processes of planetaryand social life will cease. All that willbe left is cold, dead money, as fore-warned by the myth of King Midas somany centuries ago. We will bedead—but very, very rich.

THE CREATION OF NEEDSEconomists would say that such thingsas phonographs and bulldozers and therest of technology have enriched us,creating new goods and services thatdid not exist before. On a deep level,though, the human needs these thingsmeet are nothing new. They just meetthem in a different way—a way that wemust now pay for.

Consider telecommunications. Hu-man beings do not have an abstractneed for long-distance communication.

226/1108

We have a need to stay in contact withpeople with whom we share emotionaland economic ties. In past times, thesepeople were usually close by. A hunter-gatherer or fourteenth-century Russianpeasant would have had little use for atelephone. Telephones began to meet aneed only when other developments intechnology and culture spread humanbeings farther apart and splintered ex-tended families and local communities.So the basic need they meet is notsomething new under the sun.

Consider another technological offer-ing, one to which my children, to mygreat consternation, seem irresistiblyattracted: massively multiplayer onlinefantasy role-playing games. The needthese meet is not anything new either.Preteens and teenagers have a strongneed to go exploring, to have adven-tures, and to establish an identity via

227/1108

interactions with peers that referencethis exploration and adventure. In pasttimes, this happened in the actual out-doors. When I was a child we had noth-ing like the freedom of generations be-fore us, as you might read about in TomSawyer, yet still my friends and I wouldsometimes wander for miles, to a creekor an unused quarry pit, an un-developed hilltop, the train tracks.Today, one rarely finds groups of kidsroaming around, when every bit of landis fenced and marked with no-tres-passing signs, when society is obsessedwith safety, and when children areoverscheduled and driven to perform.Technology and culture have robbedchildren of something they deeplyneed—and then, in the form of videogames, sold it back to them.

I remember the day I realized whatwas happening. I happened to watch an

228/1108

episode of the Pokémon televisionshow, which is basically about threekids roaming around having magicaladventures. These on-screen, fictitious,trademarked characters were havingthe magical adventures that real chil-dren once had but now must pay (viaadvertising) for the privilege of watch-ing. As a result, GDP has grown. New“goods and services” (by definition,things that are part of the money eco-nomy) have been created, replacingfunctions that were once fulfilled forfree.

A little reflection reveals that nearlyevery good and service available todaymeets needs that were once met forfree. What about medical technology?Compare our own poor health with themarvelous health enjoyed by hunter-gatherers and primitive agriculturalists,and it is clear that we are purchasing,

229/1108

at great expense, our ability to physic-ally function. Child care? Food pro-cessing? Transportation? The textile in-dustry? Space does not permit me toanalyze each of these for what necessit-ies have been stolen and sold back tous. I will offer one more piece of evid-ence for my view: if the growth ofmoney really were driving the techno-logical and cultural meeting of newneeds, then wouldn’t we be more ful-filled than any humans before us?

Are people happier now, more ful-filled, for having films rather than tri-bal storytellers, MP3 players ratherthan gatherings around the piano? Arewe happier eating mass-produced foodrather than that from a neighbor’s fieldor our own garden? Are people happierliving in prefab units or McMansionsthan they were in old New England

230/1108

stone farmhouses or wigwams? Are wehappier? Has any new need been met?

Even if it has not, I won’t discard theentire corpus of technology, despite allthe ruin it has wrought upon natureand humanity. In fact, the achieve-ments of science and technology domeet important needs, needs that arekey drivers of sacred economics. Theyinclude the need to explore, to play, toknow, and to create what we in theNew Economy movement call “reallycool stuff.” In a sacred economy, sci-ence, technology, and the specializationof labor that goes along with them willcontinue to be among the agents for themeeting of these needs. We can see thishigher purpose of science and techno-logy already, like a recessive gene thatcrops up irrepressibly in spite of itsendless commercialization. It is in theheart of every true scientist and

231/1108

inventor: the spirit of wonder, excite-ment, and the thrill of novelty. Everyinstitution of the old world has a coun-terpart in the new, the same note at an-other octave. We are not calling for arevolution that will eradicate the oldand create the new from scratch. Thatkind of revolution has been tried be-fore, with the same results each time,because that mentality is itself part ofthe old world. Sacred economics is partof a different kind of revolution en-tirely, a transformation and not apurge. In this revolution, the loserswon’t even realize they have lost.

Up until today, very few of theproducts of our economy and techno-logy have served the aforementionedneeds. Not only are our needs for play,exploration, and wonder underfulfilled,but great anxiety and struggle accom-pany even the meeting of our physical

232/1108

needs. This contradicts economists’ as-sertion that even if no new needs havebeen met, technology and the divisionof labor allow us to meet existing needsmore efficiently. A machine, it is said,can do the work of a thousand men; acomputer can coordinate the work of athousand machines. Accordingly, futur-ists since the eighteenth century havepredicted an imminent age of leisure.That age has never arrived, and indeedhas seemed in the last thirty-five yearsto recede even farther into the distance.Something obviously is not working.

One of the two primary assumptionsof economics is that human beings nor-mally act in their rational self-interestand that this self-interest correspondsto money. Two people will only makean exchange (e.g., buying somethingfor money) if it benefits both to do so.The more exchanges that are

233/1108

happening, then, the more benefits arebeing had. Economists therefore associ-ate money with Benthamite“utility”—that is, the good. That is onereason why economic growth is the un-questioned holy grail of economicpolicy—when the economy grows, theworld’s supposed goodness level rises.What politician wouldn’t want to takecredit for economic growth?

Economic logic says that when a newgood or service comes into being, thefact that someone is willing to pay forit means that it must be to someone’sbenefit. In a certain narrow sense, thisis true. If I steal your car keys, it maybe to your benefit to buy them backfrom me. If I steal your land, it may beto your benefit to rent it back so youcan survive. But to say that moneytransactions are evidence of an overallrise in utility is absurd; or rather, it

234/1108

assumes that the needs they meet wereoriginally unmet. If we are merely pay-ing for something once providedthrough self-sufficiency or the gift eco-nomy, then the logic of economicgrowth is faulty. Herein lies a hiddenideological motivation for the assump-tion that primitive life was, in Hobbes’swords, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish,and short.” Such a past would justifythe present, which actually bears all ofHobbes’s qualities in various ways.What is life in the Great Indoors of sub-urbia, if not solitary? What is life inequatorial Africa, if not short?8 And hasany age rivaled the last century in itsnastiness and brutality? Perhaps theHobbesian view that the past was aharsh survival struggle is an ideologicalprojection of our own condition.

For the economy to grow, the realmof money-denominated goods and

235/1108

services must grow too. Money mustmeet more and more of our needs.Gross domestic product, after all, isdefined as the sum total of the goodsand services a nation produces. Onlythose exchanged for money count.

If I babysit your children for free,economists don’t count it as a service oradd it to GDP. It cannot be used to paya financial debt; nor can I go to the su-permarket and say, “I watched myneighbors’ kids this morning, so pleasegive me food.” But if I open a day carecenter and charge you money, I havecreated a “service.” GDP rises and, ac-cording to economists, society has be-come wealthier. I have grown the eco-nomy and raised the world’s level ofgoodness. “Goods” are those things youpay money for. Money = Good. Thathas been the equation of our time.

236/1108

The same is true if I cut down aforest and sell the timber. While it isstill standing and inaccessible, it is nota good. It only becomes “good” when Ibuild a logging road, hire labor, cut itdown, and transport it to a buyer. Iconvert a forest to timber, a commod-ity, and GDP goes up. Similarly, if I cre-ate a new song and share it for free,GDP does not go up and society is notconsidered wealthier, but if I copyrightit and sell it, it becomes a good. Or Ican find a traditional society that usesherbs and shamanic techniques forhealing, destroy their culture and makethem dependent on pharmaceuticalmedicine that they must purchase, evictthem from their land so they cannot besubsistence farmers and must buy food,and clear the land and hire them on abanana plantation—and I have madethe world richer. I have brought

237/1108

various functions, relationships, andnatural resources into the realm ofmoney.

Any time someone pays for anythingshe once received as a gift or did her-self, the world’s “goodness” level rises.Each tree cut down and made into pa-per, each idea captured and made intointellectual property, each child whouses video games instead of creatingworlds of the imagination, each humanrelationship turned into a paid service,depletes a bit of the natural, cultural,spiritual, and social commons and con-verts it into money.

It is true that it is more efficient (interms of labor-hours) for day care pro-fessionals to care for three dozen kidsthan for a bunch of stay-at-home par-ents to do it themselves. It is also moreefficient to farm thousand-acre fieldswith megatractors and chemicals than

238/1108

it is to raise the same amount of foodon a hundred small holdings usinghand tools. But all this efficiency hasneither given us more leisure nor metany fundamentally new need. The effi-ciency ends up meeting the old needs inendless, obscene elaboration, eventu-ally reaching the extreme of closets fullof clothes and shoes that are barelyworn before entering the landfill.

The limited character of humanneeds presented problems from thevery beginning of the industrial era, ap-pearing first in the textile industry.After all, how many garments does oneperson really need? The solution to thelooming crisis of overproduction was tomanipulate people into overfulfillingtheir need for clothes. Enter the fashionindustry, which, in a surprisingly con-scious and cynical way, encouragedwould-be dandies to stay up with the

239/1108

fashions. Part of the reason that peopleembraced this is because clothing occu-pies a special place in all cultures, ful-filling various sacred, joyful, somber,and playful needs and contributinggreatly to the deeper need for socialidentity. It is as natural to adorn ourbodies as it is to spice our food. Thepoint is that no new need was beingfulfilled. More and more production isdevoted toward meeting the same need,endlessly elaborated.

Moreover, the same industrializationthat brought the mass production oftextiles also caused the social disinteg-ration that shattered traditional com-munities and made people susceptibleto the fashion industry. I described thisin a somewhat broader context in TheAscent of Humanity:

240/1108

To introduce consumerism to apreviously isolated culture it isfirst necessary to destroy its senseof identity. Here’s how: Disrupt itsnetworks of reciprocity by intro-ducing consumer items from theoutside. Erode its self-esteem withglamorous images of the West. De-mean its mythologies throughmissionary work and scientificeducation. Dismantle its tradition-al ways of transmitting localknowledge by introducing school-ing with outside curricula. Des-troy its language by providingthat schooling in English or anoth-er national or world language.Truncate its ties to the land by im-porting cheap food to make localagriculture uneconomic. Then youwill have created a people hungryfor the right sneaker.

241/1108

The crisis of overproduction that occurswhen one need has been generally ful-filled is resolved by exporting it ontosome other need. An equivalent way oflooking at it is that one type after an-other of natural, social, cultural, andspiritual commonwealth is convertedinto property and money. When the so-cial capital of clothes-making (i.e., theskills and traditions and the means fortheir transmission) is turned into acommodity, and no one is makingclothes outside the money economy anymore, then it is time to sell even moreclothes by destroying other identity-sustaining social structures. Identity be-comes a commodity, and clothes andother consumer items its proxy.

The social ecology of the gift—theshared skills, customs, and social struc-tures that meet each other’s needs—isjust as rich a source of wealth, and

242/1108

bears just as many veins of treasure, asdo the natural ecology and the earthunderlying it. The question is, whathappens when all of these forms ofcommon capital are tapped out? Whathappens when there are no more fish toturn into seafood, no more forests toturn into paper, no more topsoil to turninto corn syrup, no longer anythingpeople do for each other for free?

On the face of it, this should not be acrisis at all. Why must we keep grow-ing? If all our needs are met with in-creasing efficiency, why can’t we justwork less? Why has the promised age ofleisure never arrived? As we shall see,in our present money system, it willnever arrive. No new technologicalwonder will be enough. The money sys-tem we have inherited will always com-pel us to choose growth over leisure.

243/1108

One might say that money has metone need that was truly unmet be-fore—the need for the human species togrow and to operate on a scale of mil-lions or billions. Our need for food, mu-sic, stories, medicine, and so forth maybe no more satisfied than in the StoneAge, but we can, for the first time, cre-ate things that require the coordinatedefforts of millions of specialists aroundthe globe. Money has facilitated the de-velopment of a metahuman organism ofseven billion cells, the collective bodyof the human species. It is like a signal-ing molecule, coordinating the contri-butions of individuals and organiza-tions toward purposes that no smallergrouping could ever achieve. All theneeds that money has created or trans-ferred from the personal to the stand-ard and generic have been part of thisorganismic development. Even the

244/1108

fashion industry has been part of it, asa means for creating identity and asense of belonging extending acrossvast social distances.

Like a multicellular organism, hu-manity as a collective being needs or-gans, subsystems, and the means to co-ordinate them. Money, along with sym-bolic culture, communication techno-logy, education, and so forth, has beeninstrumental in developing these. It hasalso been like a growth hormone, bothstimulating growth and governing theexpression of that growth. Today, itseems, we are reaching the limits ofgrowth, and therefore the end of hu-manity’s childhood. All of our organsare fully formed; some, indeed, haveoutlived their usefulness and may re-vert to vestigial form. We are maturing.Perhaps we are about to turn our new-found creative power of billions

245/1108

towards its mature purpose. Perhaps,accordingly, we need a different kind ofmoney, one that continues to coordin-ate the vastly complex metahuman or-ganism but no longer compels it togrow.

THE MONEY POWERAll of the myriad forms of propertytoday have one defining feature in com-mon: all of them can be bought andsold for money. All are the equivalentof money, for whoever owns money canown any other form of capital and theproductive power that goes along withit. And each of these forms, remember,arose from the commons, was once un-owned by any person, and was eventu-ally stripped from the commons andmade property. The same thing that

246/1108

happened to land has happened toeverything else and has brought thesame concentration of wealth andpower in the hands of those who ownit. As the early Christian fathers, Proud-hon, Marx, and George knew, it is im-moral to rob someone of his propertyand then make him pay you to use it.Yet that is what happens any time youcharge rent on land or interest onmoney. No accident, then, that nearlyall world religions impose prohibitionson usury. Someone should not benefitfrom merely owning what existed be-fore ownership, and money today is theembodiment of all that existed beforeownership, the distilled essence ofproperty.

However, the anti-interest moneysystems I will propose and describe inthis book are not motivated by meremorality. Interest is more than just the

247/1108

proceeds of a crime, more even thanthe ongoing income from a crimealready committed. It is also the engineof continued robbery; it is a force thatcompels us all, however kind in our in-tentions, into willing or unwilling com-plicity in the strip-mining of the earth.

In my travels, firstly my inward jour-neying and then as a speaker andwriter, I have oft encountered a deepanguish and helplessness borne of theubiquity of the world-devouring ma-chine and of the near-impossibility ofavoiding participation in it. To give oneexample among millions, people whorage against Wal-Mart still shop there,or at other stores equally a part of theglobal predation chain, because theyfeel they cannot afford to pay doublethe price or to do without. And what ofthe electricity that powers myhouse—coal ripped out of the tops of

248/1108

mountains? What of the gas that getsme places and gets deliveries to me if Igo “off-grid”? I can minimize my parti-cipation in the world-devouring ma-chine, but I cannot avoid it entirely. Aspeople become aware that merely liv-ing in society means contributing to theevils of the world, they often gothrough a phase of desiring to find acompletely isolated and self-sufficientintentional community—but what gooddoes that do, while Rome burns? Sowhat, if you are not contributing yourlittle part to the pollution that is over-whelming the earth? It proceeds apacewhether you live in the forest and eatroots and berries or in a suburb and eatfood trucked in from California.9 Thedesire for personal exculpation from thesins of society is a kind of fetish, akinto solar panels on a 4,000-square-foothouse.

249/1108

Laudable though the impulse may be,movements to boycott Wal-Mart or re-form health care or education or polit-ics or anything else quickly become ex-ercises in futility as they run up againstthe money power. To make any impactat all feels like a grueling upstreamswim, and as soon as we rest, some newoutrage, some new horror sweeps usaway again, some new stripping ofnature, community, health, or spirit forthe sake of money.

What, exactly, is this “moneypower”? It is not, as it sometimes mayseem, an evil cabal of bankers con-trolling the world through the Bilder-berg Council, the Trilateral Commis-sion, and other instruments of the “Illu-minati.” In my travels and correspond-ence, I sometimes run into people whohave read books by David Icke and oth-ers that make a persuasive case for an

250/1108

ancient global conspiracy dedicated toa “New World Order,” symbolized bythe all-seeing eye atop the pyramid,controlling every government andevery institution, and run behind thescenes by a small, secret coterie ofpower-hungry monsters who counteven the Rothschilds and Rockefellersamong their puppets. I must be very na-ive, or very ignorant, not to compre-hend the true nature of the problem.

While I confess to being naive, I amnot ignorant. I have read much of thismaterial and come away unsatisfied.While it is clear that there is muchmore to such events as 9/11 and theKennedy assassinations than we havebeen told, and that the financial in-dustry, organized crime, and politicalpower are closely interlinked, I findthat generally speaking, conspiracy the-ories give too much credit to the ability

251/1108

of humans to successfully manage andcontrol complex systems. Somethingmysterious is certainly going on, andthe “coincidences” that people like Ickecite defy conventional explanation, butif you’ll allow a moment’s indulgencein metaphysics, I think ultimately whatis happening is that our deep ideologiesand belief systems, and their uncon-scious shadows, generate a matrix ofsynchronicities that looks very muchlike a conspiracy. It is in fact a conspir-acy with no conspirators. Everyone is apuppet, but there are no puppet-masters.

Moreover, the appeal of conspiracytheories, which are usually nonfalsifi-able, is just as much psychological as itis empirical. Conspiracy theories have adark allure because they tap into ourprimal outrage and identify somethingonto which to channel it, something to

252/1108

blame and something to hate. Unfortu-nately, as numerous revolutionarieshave discovered when they topple theoligarchs, our hatred is misplaced. Thetrue culprit is much deeper and muchmore pervasive. It transcends conscioushuman agency, and even the bankersand oligarchs live under its thrall. Thetrue culprit is the alien overlords thatrule the world from their flying saucers.Just kidding.10 The true culprit, thetrue puppet-master that manipulatesour elites from behind the scenes, is themoney system itself: a credit-based,interest-driven system that arises fromthe ancient, rising tide of separation;that generates competition, polariza-tion, and greed; that compels endlessexponential growth; and, most import-antly, that is coming to an end in ourtime as the fuel for that growth—social,

253/1108

natural, cultural, and spiritual capit-al—runs out.

The next few chapters describe thisprocess and the dynamics of interest,reframing the current economic crisisas the culmination of a trend centuriesin the making. Thus revealed, we canbetter understand how to create notjust a new money system, but a newkind of money system, one that has theopposite effects of ours today: sharinginstead of greed, equality instead of po-larization, enrichment of the commonsinstead of its stripping, and sustainabil-ity instead of growth. As well, this newkind of money system will embody aneven deeper shift that we see happen-ing today, a shift in human identity to-ward a connected self, bound to all be-ing in the circle of the gift. Any moneythat is part of this Reunion, this Great

254/1108

Turning, surely deserves to be calledsacred.

1. Pollution credits and similar schemes seek toconvert the earth’s absorptive capacity intoproperty. Even without them, however, it isalready an invisible, embedded component ofevery manufactured product, an essential inputof which there is a limited supply. Evenwithout explicit property rights, this absorptivecapacity is being taken from the commons.2. Filmmakers, for instance, need entire “rightsclearance” legal departments in order to makesure they haven’t inadvertently used somecopyrighted image in their movie. These couldinclude images of designer furniture, buildings,brand logos, and clothing—almost everythingin the built environment. The result has been tostifle creativity and relegate much of the mostinteresting art illegal. (This is inevitable whenart uses the stuff of life around us for its subject

255/1108

and that stuff is in the realm of propertyalready.)3. Mumford, Technics and Civilization, 142. Ofcourse, the person at the last stage of the inven-tion process deserves reward for his or her in-genuity and toil, but the social context mustalso be acknowledged. This is decreasingly thecase as patent and copyright periods have ex-panded from their original decade or two to, insome cases, upwards of a century.4. Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread, chapter 1.5. A detailed discussion of intellectual propertyrights is beyond the scope of this book. Cer-tainly, I have made a contribution to this mat-rix of ideas (at least I think I have!) and deserveto be sustained in my work. However, to pre-vent other people from incorporating my writ-ing and other creations into new creations oftheir own feels miserly. Practically speaking, Iadvocate a broad expansion of the “fair use”doctrine and a dramatic shortening of the termfor copyrights and patents.

256/1108

6. Or she accepts no reality at all, discountingeverything as just so many images and symbols.On the one hand, this allows her to “seethrough the bullshit.” On the other hand, itleaves her cynical and jaded.7. Seaford, Money and the Early Greek Mind,157.8. Modern life is short, too: despite relativelylong life spans, life seems short to a busy, hur-ried person.9. Nonetheless, the efforts people are making toreduce their complicity in the wrecking of theworld are very important on the level of ritual.Ritual consists of the manipulation of symbolsin order to affect reality—even money is an im-plement of ritual—and therefore wield greatpractical power. So please don’t allow mywords to dissuade you from boycotting Wal-Mart. For a deeper discussion, see my essay“Rituals for Lover Earth” online, preferablyafter having read through Chapter 8 of thisbook.

257/1108

10. Well, not entirely. The imputation of nefari-ous control to extraterrestrial or demonic entit-ies encodes a valid insight: that the source ofevil in our world is beyond conscious humanagency. There are puppet-masters, but they aresystems and ideologies, not people. As for ex-traterrestrials, I have trouble answering thequestion of whether I “believe in them.” Per-haps the question of whether they “exist”smuggles in ontological assumptions that aren’ttrue, especially that there is an objective back-drop in which things objectively either exist ordo not exist. So usually I just say “yes.”

258/1108

CHAPTER 6THE ECONOMICS OF USURY

In spite of the holy promises ofpeople to banish war once and forall, in spite of the cry of millions“never again war” in spite of all thehopes for a better future I have thisto say: If the present monetary sys-tem based on interest and compoundinterest remains in operation, I dareto predict today that it will take lessthan twenty-five years until we havea new and even worse war. I canforesee the coming developmentclearly. The present degree of tech-nological advancement will quicklyresult in a record performance of

industry. The buildup of capital willbe fast in spite of the enormouslosses during the war, and throughthe oversupply [of money] the in-terest rate will be lowered [until themoney speculators refuse to lowertheir rates any further]. Money willthen be hoarded [causing predictabledeflation], economic activities willdiminish, and increasing numbers ofunemployed persons will roam thestreets … within these discontentedmasses, wild, revolutionary ideaswill arise and with it also the poison-ous plant called “Super National-ism” will proliferate. No country willunderstand the other, and the endcan only be war again.

—Silvio Gesell (1918)

260/1108

We are faced with a paradox. On theone hand money is properly a token ofgratitude and trust, an agent of themeeting of gifts and needs, a facilitatorof exchanges among those who other-wise could make none. As such itshould make us all richer. Yet it doesnot. Instead, it has brought insecurity,poverty, and the liquidation of our cul-tural and natural commons. Why?

The cause of these things lies deepwithin the very heart of today’s moneysystem. They are inherent in the waysmoney today is created and circulated,and the centerpiece of that system isusury, better known as interest. Usuryis the very antithesis of the gift, for in-stead of giving to others when one hasmore than one needs, usury seeks touse the power of ownership to gaineven more—to take from others ratherthan to give. And as we shall see, it is

261/1108

just as contrary to the gift in its effectsas it is in its motivation.

Usury is built into the very fabric ofmoney today, from the moment of itsinception. Money originates when theFederal Reserve (or the ECB or othercentral bank) purchases interest-bear-ing securities (traditionally, Treasurynotes, but more recently all kinds ofmortgage-backed securities and otherfinancial junk) on the open market. TheFed or central bank creates this newmoney out of thin air, at the stroke of apen (or computer keyboard). For ex-ample, when the Fed bought $290 bil-lion in mortgage-backed securities fromDeutsche Bank in 2008, it didn’t use ex-isting money to do it; it created newmoney as an accounting entry inDeutsche Bank’s account. This is thefirst step in money creation. Whateverthe Fed or central bank purchases, it is

262/1108

always an interest-bearing security. Inother words, it means that the moneycreated accompanies a correspondingdebt, and the debt is always for morethan the amount of money created.

The kind of money just described isknown as the “monetary base,” or M0.It exists as bank reserves (and physicalcash). The second step occurs when abank makes a loan to a business or indi-vidual. Here again, new money is cre-ated as an accounting entry in the ac-count of the borrower. When a bank is-sues a business a $1 million loan, itdoesn’t debit that amount from someother account; it simply writes thatamount into existence. One million dol-lars of new money is created—and morethan one million dollars of debt.1 Thisnew money is known as M1 or M2 (de-pending on what kind of account it isin). It is money that actually gets spent

263/1108

on goods and services, capital equip-ment, employment, and so forth.

The above description of how moneyis created, while widely accepted, is notfully accurate. I discuss the subtleties inthe appendix. It will suffice for now be-cause it is accurate enough for the pur-pose of describing the effects of usury.

AN ECONOMIC PARABLEUsury both generates today’s endemicscarcity and drives the world-devouringengine of perpetual growth. To explainhow, I will begin with a parable createdby the extraordinary economic vision-ary Bernard Lietaer entitled “TheEleventh Round,” from his book The Fu-ture of Money.

Once upon a time, in a small vil-lage in the Outback, people used

264/1108

barter for all their transactions.On every market day, peoplewalked around with chickens,eggs, hams, and breads, and en-gaged in prolonged negotiationsamong themselves to exchangewhat they needed. At key periodsof the year, like harvests orwhenever someone’s barn neededbig repairs after a storm, peoplerecalled the tradition of helpingeach other out that they hadbrought from the old country.They knew that if they had aproblem someday, others wouldaid them in return.

One market day, a stranger withshiny black shoes and an elegantwhite hat came by and observedthe whole process with a sardonicsmile. When he saw one farmerrunning around to corral the six

265/1108

chickens he wanted to exchangefor a big ham, he could not refrainfrom laughing. “Poor people,” hesaid, “so primitive.” The farmer’swife overheard him and chal-lenged the stranger, “Do you thinkyou can do a better job handlingchickens?” “Chickens, no,” re-sponded the stranger, “But thereis a much better way to eliminateall that hassle.” “Oh yes, how so?”asked the woman. “See that treethere?” the stranger replied.“Well, I will go wait there for oneof you to bring me one large cow-hide. Then have every family visitme. I’ll explain the better way.”

And so it happened. He took thecowhide, and cut perfect leatherrounds in it, and put an elaborateand graceful little stamp on eachround. Then he gave to each

266/1108

family 10 rounds, and explainedthat each represented the value ofone chicken. “Now you can tradeand bargain with the rounds in-stead of the unwieldy chickens,”he explained.

It made sense. Everybody wasimpressed with the man with theshiny shoes and inspiring hat.

“Oh, by the way,” he addedafter every family had receivedtheir 10 rounds, “in a year’s time,I will come back and sit underthat same tree. I want you to eachbring me back 11 rounds. That11th round is a token of appreci-ation for the technological im-provement I just made possible inyour lives.” “But where will the11th round come from?” askedthe farmer with the six chickens.

267/1108

“You’ll see,” said the man with areassuring smile.

Assuming that the populationand its annual production remainexactly the same during that nextyear, what do you think had tohappen? Remember, that 11thround was never created. There-fore, bottom line, one of each 11families will have to lose all itsrounds, even if everybody man-aged their affairs well, in order toprovide the 11th round to 10others.

So when a storm threatened thecrop of one of the families, peoplebecame less generous with theirtime to help bring it in before dis-aster struck. While it was muchmore convenient to exchange therounds instead of the chickens onmarket days, the new game also

268/1108

had the unintended side effect ofactively discouraging the spontan-eous cooperation that was tradi-tional in the village. Instead, thenew money game was generatinga systemic undertow of competi-tion among all the participants.

This parable begins to show howcompetition, insecurity, and greed arewoven into our economy because of in-terest. They can never be eliminated aslong as the necessities of life are de-nominated in interest-money. But let uscontinue the story now to show how in-terest also creates an endless pressurefor perpetual economic growth.

There are three primary ways Li-etaer’s story could end: default, growthin the money supply, or redistributionof wealth. One of each eleven familiescould go bankrupt and surrender their

269/1108

farms to the man in the hat (thebanker), or he could procure anothercowhide and make more currency, orthe villagers could tar-and-feather thebanker and refuse to repay the rounds.The same choices face any economybased on usury.

So imagine now that the villagersgather round the man in the hat andsay, “Sir, could you please give us someadditional rounds so that none of usneed go bankrupt?”

The man says, “I will, but only tothose who can assure me they will payme back. Since each round is worth onechicken, I’ll lend new rounds to peoplewho have more chickens than the num-ber of rounds they already owe me.That way, if they don’t pay back therounds, I can seize their chickens in-stead. Oh, and because I’m such a niceguy, I’ll even create new rounds for

270/1108

people who don’t have additionalchickens right now, if they can per-suade me that they will breed morechickens in the future. So show meyour business plan! Show me that youare trustworthy (one villager can create‘credit reports’ to help you do that). I’lllend at 10 percent—if you are a cleverbreeder, you can increase your flock by20 percent per year, pay me back, andget rich yourself, too.”

The villagers ask, “That sounds OK,but since you are creating the newrounds at 10 percent interest also, therestill won’t be enough to pay you backin the end.”

“That won’t be a problem,” says theman. “You see, when that time arrives,I will have created even more rounds,and when those come due, I’ll createyet more. I will always be willing tolend new rounds into existence. Of

271/1108

course, you’ll have to produce morechickens, but as long as you keep in-creasing chicken production, there willnever be a problem.”

A child comes up to him and says,“Excuse me, sir, my family is sick, andwe don’t have enough rounds to buyfood. Can you issue some new roundsto me?”

“I’m sorry,” says the man, “but I can-not do that. You see, I only createrounds for those who are going to payme back. Now, if your family has somechickens to pledge as collateral, or ifyou can prove you are able to work alittle harder to breed more chickens,then I will be happy to give you therounds.”

With a few unfortunate exceptions,the system worked fine for a while. Thevillagers grew their flocks fast enoughto obtain the additional rounds they

272/1108

needed to pay back the man in the hat.Some, for whatever reason—ill fortuneor ineptitude—did indeed go bankrupt,and their more fortunate, more efficientneighbors took over their farms andhired them as labor. Overall, though,the flocks grew at 10 percent a yearalong with the money supply. The vil-lage and its flocks had grown so largethat the man in the hat was joined bymany others like him, all busily cuttingout new rounds and issuing them toanyone with a good plan to breed morechickens.

From time to time, problems arose.For one, it became apparent that noone really needed all those chickens.“We’re getting sick of eggs,” the chil-dren complained. “Every room in thehouse has a feather bed now,” com-plained the housewives. In order tokeep consumption of chicken products

273/1108

growing, the villagers invented allkinds of devices. It became fashionableto buy a new feather mattress everymonth, and bigger houses to keep themin, and to have yards and yards full ofchickens. Disputes arose with other vil-lages that were settled with huge egg-throwing battles. “We must create de-mand for more chickens!” shouted themayor, who was the brother-in-law ofthe man in the hat. “That way we willall continue to grow rich.”

One day, a village old-timer noticedanother problem. Whereas the fieldsaround the village had once been greenand fertile, now they were brown andfoul. All the vegetation had beenstripped away to plant grain to feed thechickens. The ponds and streams, oncefull of fish, were now cesspools of stink-ing manure. She said, “This has to stop!

274/1108

If we keep expanding our flocks, wewill soon drown in chicken shit!”

The man in the hat pulled her asideand, in reassuring tones, told her,“Don’t worry, there is another villagedown the road with plenty of fertilefields. The men of our village are plan-ning to farm out chicken production tothem. And if they don’t agree … well,we outnumber them. Anyway, youcan’t be serious about ending growth.Why, how would your neighbors payoff their debts? How would I be able tocreate new rounds? Even I would gobankrupt.”

And so, one by one, all the villagesturned to stinking cesspools surround-ing enormous flocks of chickens that noone really needed, and the villagesfought each other for the few remaininggreen spaces that could support a fewmore years of growth. Yet despite their

275/1108

best efforts to maintain growth, its pacebegan to slow. As growth slowed, debtbegan to rise in proportion to income,until many people spent all their avail-able rounds just paying off the man inthe hat. Many went bankrupt and hadto work at subsistence wages for em-ployers who themselves could barelymeet their obligations to the man in thehat. There were fewer and fewer peoplewho could afford to buy chickenproducts, making it even harder tomaintain demand and growth. Amid anenvironment-wrecking superabundanceof chickens, more and more people hadbarely enough on which to live, leadingto the paradox of scarcity amidstabundance.

And that is where things stand today.

276/1108

THE GROWTH IMPERATIVEI hope it is clear how this story mapsonto the real economy. Because of in-terest, at any given time the amount ofmoney owed is greater than the amountof money already existing. To makenew money to keep the whole systemgoing, we have to breed more chick-ens—in other words, we have to createmore “goods and services.” The princip-al way of doing so is to begin sellingsomething that was once free. It is toconvert forests into timber, music intoproduct, ideas into intellectual prop-erty, social reciprocity into paidservices.

Abetted by technology, the commodi-fication of formerly nonmonetary goodsand services has accelerated over thelast few centuries, to the point todaywhere very little is left outside the

277/1108

money realm. The vast commons,whether of land or of culture, has beencordoned off and sold—all to keep pacewith the exponential growth of money.This is the deep reason why we convertforests to timber, songs to intellectualproperty, and so on. It is why two-thirds of all American meals are nowprepared outside the home. It is whyherbal folk remedies have given way topharmaceutical medicines, why childcare has become a paid service, whydrinking water has been the number-one growth category in beverage sales.

The imperative of perpetual growthimplicit in interest-based money iswhat drives the relentless conversion oflife, world, and spirit into money. Com-pleting the vicious circle, the more oflife we convert into money, the morewe need money to live. Usury, notmoney, is the proverbial root of all evil.

278/1108

Let’s examine how this happens in abit more detail. Just like the man in thehat, a bank or any other lender will or-dinarily agree to lend you money onlyif there is a reasonable expectation youwill pay it back. This expectation couldbe based on expected future income,collateral, or a good credit rating. Seri-ous consequences for default enforcethis expectation. The repayment of debtdepends not only on the ability to doso, but on various forms of social, eco-nomic, and legal pressure. Courts canorder the seizure of assets to meet con-tractual debt obligations, and, while wedon’t have debtors’ prisons any more,2delinquent debtors suffer endless har-assment at the hands of collection agen-cies, as well as denial of apartments,employment, and security clearances.Many people also feel a moral obliga-tion to repay their debts. This is

279/1108

natural: in gift economies as well, thosewho have received are under social andmoral pressure to give.

The money to repay principle and in-terest comes from selling goods and ser-vices, or it could come from furtherborrowing. Any time you use money,you are essentially guaranteeing, “Ihave performed a service or provided agood of equivalent value to the one Iam buying.” Any time you borrowmoney, you are saying that you willprovide an equivalent good/service inthe future. In theory, this should be toeveryone’s benefit, because it allowsthe connecting of gifts and needs notonly across space and profession, butacross time as well. Credit-based moneyexchanges goods now for goods in thefuture. This is not inconsistent with giftprinciples. I receive now; later I give.

280/1108

The problems start with interest.Because interest-bearing debt accom-panies all new money, at any giventime, the amount of debt exceeds theamount of money in existence. The in-sufficiency of money drives us intocompetition with each other and con-signs us to a constant, built-in state ofscarcity. It is like a game of musicalchairs, with never enough room foranyone to be secure. Debt-pressure isendemic to the system. While somemay repay their debts, overall the sys-tem requires a general and growingstate of indebtedness.

Constant, underlying debt-pressuremeans there will always be people whoare insecure or desperate—people un-der pressure to survive, ready to cutdown the last forest, catch the last fish,sell someone a sneaker, liquidatewhatever social, natural, cultural, or

281/1108

spiritual capital is still available. Therecan never be a time when we reach“enough” because in an interest-baseddebt system, credit exchanges not just“goods now for goods in the future,”but goods now for more goods in the fu-ture. To service debt or just to live,either you take existing wealth fromsomeone else (hence, competition) oryou create “new” wealth by drawingfrom the commons.

Here is a concrete example to illus-trate how this works. Suppose you goto the bank and say, “Mr. Banker, Iwould like a $1 million loan so I canbuy this forest to protect it from log-ging. I won’t generate any income fromthe forest that way, so I won’t be ableto pay you interest. But if you need themoney back, I could sell the forest andpay you back the million dollars.” Un-fortunately, the banker will have to

282/1108

decline your proposal, even if her heartwants to say yes. But if you go to thebank and say, “I’d like a million dollarsto purchase this forest, lease bulldozers,clear-cut it, and sell the timber for atotal of $2 million, out of which I’ll payyou 12 percent interest and make a tidyprofit for myself, too,” then an astutebanker will agree to your proposal. Inthe former instance, no new goods andservices are created, so no money ismade available. Money goes towardthose who create new goods and ser-vices. This is why there are many pay-ing jobs to be had doing things that arecomplicit in the conversion of naturaland social capital into money, and fewjobs to be had reclaiming the commonsand protecting natural and culturaltreasures.

Generalized, the relentless pressureon debtors to provide goods and

283/1108

services is an organic pressure towardeconomic growth (defined as growth intotal goods and services exchanged formoney). Here’s another way to see it:because debt is always greater thanmoney supply, the creation of moneycreates a future need for even moremoney. The amount of money mustgrow over time; new money goes tothose who will produce goods and ser-vices; therefore, the volume of goodsand services must grow over time aswell.

So it is not just that the apparent lim-itlessness of money, observed since an-cient Greek times, allows us to believein the possibility of eternal growth. Infact, our money system necessitates andcompels that growth. Most economistsconsider this endemic growth-pressureto be a good thing. They say that it cre-ates a motivation to innovate, to

284/1108

progress, to meet more needs withever-increasing efficiency. An interest-based economy is fundamentally, unal-terably a growth economy, and exceptfor a very radical fringe, most econom-ists and probably all policy makers seeeconomic growth as a demonstration ofsuccess.

The whole system of interest-bearingmoney works fine as long as thevolume of goods and services ex-changed for money keeps pace with itsgrowth. But what happens if it doesn’t?What happens, in other words, if therate of economic growth is lower thanthe rate of interest? Like the people inthe parable, we must consider this in aworld that appears to be reaching thelimits of growth.

285/1108

THE CONCENTRATION OFWEALTHBecause economic growth is almost al-ways lower than the rate of interest,what generally happens in such condi-tions is no mystery. If debtors cannot,in aggregate, make interest paymentsfrom the new wealth they create, theymust turn over more and more of theirexisting wealth to their creditors and/or pledge a greater and greater propor-tion of their current and future incometo debt service. When their assets anddiscretionary income are exhausted,they must go into default. It can be noother way, when the average return oninvestment is lower than the averageinterest rate paid to obtain the capitalinvested. Defaults are inevitable for acertain proportion of borrowers.

286/1108

In theory at least, defaults are not ne-cessarily a bad thing: they bring negat-ive consequences for decisions thatdon’t further the general good—that is,that don’t result in more efficient pro-duction of goods that people want.Lenders will be cautious not to lend tosomeone who is unlikely to contributeto the economy, and borrowers will beunder pressure to act in ways that docontribute to the economy. Even in azero-interest system, people might de-fault if they make dumb decisions, butthere wouldn’t be a built-in, organic ne-cessity for defaults.

Aside from economists, no one likesdefaults—least of all creditors, sincetheir money disappears. One way toprevent a default, at least temporarily,is to lend the borrower even moremoney so she can continue making pay-ments on the original loan. This might

287/1108

be justified if the borrower is facing atemporary difficulty or if there is reas-on to believe that enough higher pro-ductivity is around the corner to payback all the loans. But often, lenderswill throw in good money after bad justbecause they don’t want to write downthe losses from defaults, which couldindeed send them into bankruptcythemselves. As long as the borrower isstill making payments, the lender canpretend that everything is normal.

This is essentially the situation theworld economy has occupied for thelast several years. After years, or evendecades, of interest rates far exceedingeconomic growth, with no compensat-ory rise in defaults, we face an enorm-ous debt overhang. The government, atthe behest of the financial industry(i.e., the creditors, the owners ofmoney), has done its best to prevent

288/1108

defaults and keep the full value of thedebts on the books, hoping that re-newed economic growth will allowthem to continue to be serviced.3 Wewill “grow our way out of debt,” theyhope.

At the political level, then, the samepressure exists to create “economicgrowth” as it does on the level of theindividual or business. The debtor isunder pressure to sell something, ifonly his labor, in order to obtain moneyto pay debt. That is essentially whatgrowth-friendly policies do aswell—they make this “sellingsomething” easier; that is, they facilit-ate the conversion of natural, social,and other capital into money. When werelax pollution controls, we ease theconversion of the life-sustaining atmo-sphere into money. When we subsidizeroads into old-growth forests, we ease

289/1108

the conversion of ecosystems intomoney. When the International Monet-ary Fund (IMF) pressures governmentsto privatize social services and cutspending, it pushes the conversion ofsocial capital into money.

That is why, in America, Democratsand Republicans are equally eager to“open new markets,” “enforce intellec-tual property rights,” and so on. That isalso why any item of the commons thatis unavailable to exploitation, such asoil in the Alaskan Wildlife Refuge, localfood economies protected by tariffs, ornature preserves in Africa, must endureconstant assault from politicians, cor-porations, or poachers. If the moneyrealm stops growing, then the middlepassage between defaults and polariza-tion of wealth narrows to nothing, res-ulting in social unrest and, eventually,revolution. Without growth, there is no

290/1108

other alternative when debts increaseexponentially in a finite world.

If this growth, this conversion ofcommonwealth into money, happens ata rate faster than the rate of interest,then everything is fine (at least fromthe financial perspective, if not the hu-man or ecological perspective). If thereis enough demand for chickens andenough natural resources to feed them,villagers can borrow at 10 percent toincrease their chicken flock by 20 per-cent. To use conventional language,capital investment brings a return inexcess of the cost of capital; therefore,the borrower gains wealth beyond theportion that goes to the creditor. Suchwas the case in frontier days, whenthere was plenty of the unowned ripefor the taking. Such is still the case in asociety where social relationships arenot fully monetized—in economic

291/1108

parlance this is called an “undevelopedmarket.” Only with economic growthcan “all boats rise”—the creditors getricher and richer, and the borrowerscan prosper as well.

But even in good times, growth israrely fast enough to keep pace with in-terest. Imagine now that the villagerscan only increase their flocks by 5 per-cent a year. Instead of paying a portionof new growth to the bankers, now theyhave to pay (on average) all of it, plus aportion of their existing wealth and/orfuture earnings. Concentration ofwealth—both income and assets—is aninescapable corollary of debt growingfaster than goods and services.

Economic thinkers since the time ofAristotle have recognized the essentialproblem. Aristotle observed that sincemoney is “barren” (i.e., it does notleave offspring like cattle or wheat do),

292/1108

it is unjust to lend it at interest. Theresulting concentration of wealth hadbeen seen many times already by 350BCE, and it would happen many timesthereafter. It happened again in Romantimes. As long as the empire was ex-panding rapidly, acquiring new landsand new tribute, everything workedpassably well, and there was no ex-treme concentration of wealth. It wasonly when the growth of the empireslowed that concentration of wealth in-tensified and the once-extensive class ofsmall farmers, the backbone of the le-gions, entered debt peonage. It was notlong before the empire became a slaveeconomy.

I need not belabor the parallelsbetween Rome and the world today. Asgrowth has slowed, many today, bothindividuals and nations, are entering astate similar to Roman debt peonage. A

293/1108

larger and larger proportion of incomegoes toward the servicing of debt, andwhen that does not suffice, preexistingassets are collateralized and then seizeduntil there are none left. Thus it is thatU.S. home equity has declined withoutinterruption for half a century, from 85percent in 1950 to about 40 percenttoday (including the one-third who owntheir houses free and clear). In otherwords, people don’t own their ownhomes anymore. Most people I knowdon’t own their own cars either but es-sentially rent them from banks via autoloans. Even corporations labor under anunprecedented degree of leverage, sothat a large proportion of their revenuegoes to banks and bondholders. Thesame is true of most nations, with theirballooning debt-to-GDP ratios. Onevery level we are, increasingly, slaves

294/1108

to debt, the fruits of our labors going toour creditors.

Even if you carry no debt, interestcosts factor into the price of nearlyeverything you buy. For example,around 10 percent of U.S. governmentspending (and tax dollars) is devoted tointerest on the national debt. If yourent your home, most of the rental costgoes to cover the landlord’s highest ex-pense—the mortgage on the property.When you eat a meal at a restaurant,the prices reflect in part the cost of cap-ital for the restaurateur. Moreover, thecosts of the restaurant’s electricity, foodsupply, and rent also include the in-terest that those suppliers pay on capit-al, too, and so on down the line. All ofthis money is a kind of a tribute, a taxon everything we buy, that goes to theowners of money.

295/1108

Interest comprises about six compon-ents: a risk premium, the cost of mak-ing a loan, an inflation premium, a li-quidity premium, a maturation premi-um, and a zero-risk interest premium.4A more sophisticated discussion of theeffects of interest might distinguishamong these components, and concludethat only the latter three—and particu-larly the last—are usurious. Withoutthem, concentration of wealth is nolonger a given because that portion ofthe money doesn’t stay in the hands ofthe lenders. (Growth pressure wouldstill exist, though.) In our present sys-tem, however, all six contribute to pre-vailing interest rates. That means thatthose who have money can increasetheir wealth simply by virtue of havingmoney. Unless borrowers can increasetheir wealth just as fast, which is onlypossible in an expanding economy,

296/1108

then wealth will concentrate in thehands of the lenders.

Let me put it simply: a portion of theinterest rate says, “I have money andyou need it, so I am going to chargeyou for access to it—just because I can,just because I have it, and you don’t.”In order to avoid polarization ofwealth, this portion must be lower thanthe economic growth rate; otherwise,the mere ownership of money allowsone to increase wealth faster than theaverage marginal efficiency of product-ive capital investment. In other words,you get rich faster by owning ratherthan producing. In practice, this isnearly always the case, because wheneconomic growth speeds up, the au-thorities push interest rates higher. Therationale is to prevent inflation, but itis also a device to keep increasing thewealth and power of the owners of

297/1108

money.5 Absent redistributive meas-ures, the concentration of wealth in-tensifies through good times and bad.

As a general rule, the more moneyyou have, the less urgent you are tospend it. Ever since the time of ancientGreece, people have therefore had whatKeynes called a “liquidity preference”:a preference for money over goods, ex-cept when goods are urgently needed.This preference is inevitable whenmoney becomes a universal means andend. Interest reinforces liquidity prefer-ence, encouraging those who alreadyhave money to keep it. Those who needmoney now must pay those who do not,for the use of their money. This pay-ment—interest on the loan—must comefrom future earnings. This is anotherway to understand how interest siphonsmoney from the poor to the rich.

298/1108

One might be able to justify payinginterest on long-term, illiquid, risky in-vestments, for such interest is actually akind of compensation for forgoing li-quidity. It is in keeping with gift prin-ciples, in that when you give a gift youoften receive a greater gift in return(but not always and never with abso-lute assurance; hence, risk). But in thepresent system, even government-in-sured demand deposits and short-termrisk-free government securities bear in-terest, allowing “investors” to profitwhile essentially keeping the money forthemselves. This risk-free component isadded as a hidden premium to all otherloans, ensuring that those who own willown more and more.6

The dual pressures I have de-scribed—toward growth of the moneyrealm, and toward the polarization ofwealth—are two aspects of the same

299/1108

force. Either money grows by devour-ing the nonmonetized realm, or it can-nibalizes itself. As the former is ex-hausted, the pressure of the latter in-creases, and concentration of wealth es-calates. When that happens, anotherpressure arises to rescue the system: re-distribution of wealth. After all, ever-increasing polarization of wealth andmisery is not sustainable.

WEALTH REDISTRIBUTIONAND CLASS WARWithout wealth redistribution, socialchaos is unavoidable in an interest-bearing, debt-based money system, es-pecially when growth slows. Nonethe-less, wealth redistribution always hap-pens against the resistance of thewealthy, for it is their wealth that is

300/1108

being redistributed. Economic policytherefore reflects a balancing actbetween the redistribution and preser-vation of wealth, tending over time to-ward the minimum amount of redistri-bution necessary to maintain socialorder.

Traditionally, liberal governmentsseek to ameliorate concentration ofwealth with redistributive policies suchas progressive income taxes, estatetaxes, social welfare programs, highminimum wages, universal health care,free higher education, and other socialprograms. These policies are redis-tributive because while the taxes falldisproportionately on the wealthy, theexpenditures and programs benefit allequally, or even favor the poor. Theycounteract the natural tendency towardthe concentration of wealth in aninterest-based system. In the short term

301/1108

at least, they also run counter to the in-terests of the wealthy, which is why, inthe present conservative political cli-mate, such policies are characterized asclass warfare.

In opposing redistributive policies,conservative governments seem to seeconcentration of wealth as a goodthing. You might too, if you arewealthy, because concentration ofwealth means more you for and less foreveryone else. Hired help is cheaper.Your relative wealth, power, and priv-ilege are greater.7 Governments servingthe (short-term) interests of the wealthytherefore advocate the opposite of theaforementioned distributive policies:flat-rate income taxes, reduction of es-tate taxes, curtailment of social pro-grams, privatized health care, and soforth.

302/1108

In the 1930s, the United States andmany other countries faced a choice:either redistribute wealth gentlythrough social spending and taxing therich, or let the concentration of wealthproceed to the point of revolution andviolent redistribution. By the 1950s,most countries had adopted the socialcompromise forged in the New Deal:the rich got to stay on top, but they hadto give up through taxation an amountoffsetting the profits of ownership ofcapital. The compromise worked for awhile, as long as growth stayed high asit did through the early 1970s.

However, even this gentle solutionbears many undesirable consequences.High income taxes penalize those whoearn a lot rather than those who merelyown a lot. They also set up an unendingbattle between tax authorities and cit-izens, who usually end up finding ways

303/1108

to avoid paying at least some of theirtaxes, employing tens of thousands oflawyers and accountants in the process.Is this a good use of our human re-sources? Moreover, it is a system inwhich we are giving with one hand tothe owners of money and taking awaywith the other.

In an interest-based system, class waris inevitable, whether in muted or ex-plicit form. The short-term interests ofthe holders of wealth oppose the in-terests of the debtor class. At thepresent writing, the balance has swungto the wealthy, as their political repres-entatives have dismantled the mosaic ofredistributive social programs as-sembled in the 1930s in most Westerncountries. For a while, in thepost–World War II era, high growth ob-scured the inherency of class warfare,but that era is over. Until the money

304/1108

system undergoes a fundamentalchange, we can expect class warfare tointensify in coming years. This bookaims to change the basic ground rulesand remove the basis of class warfareentirely.

As the social contract forged in the1930s breaks down and debt levelsreach crisis proportions, more radicalmeasures may become necessary. In an-cient times, some societies addressedthe polarization of wealth with a peri-odic nullification of debts. Examples in-clude the Solonic Seisachtheia, the“shaking off of burdens,” in whichdebts were canceled and debt peonageabolished, and the jubilee of the an-cient Hebrews. “At the end of everyseven years thou shalt make a release.And this is the manner of the release:Every creditor that lendeth ought untohis neighbor shall release it; he shall

305/1108

not exact it of his neighbor, or of hisbrother; because it is called the Lord’srelease” (Deuteronomy 15:1–2). Both ofthese ancient practices were muchmore radical than bankruptcy becausethe debtor got to keep his possessionsand collateral. Under Solon, lands wereeven restored to their original owners.

A more recent example of debt nulli-fication has been the partial annulmentof the foreign debts of impoverished,disaster-stricken nations. For example,the IMF, World Bank, and Inter-Americ-an Development Bank canceled Haiti’sforeign debt in 2008. A broader move-ment has existed for decades to cancelThird World debt generally but so farhas gained little traction.

A related form of redistribution isbankruptcy, in which a debtor is re-leased from obligation, usually after theforfeiture to creditors of most of his

306/1108

property. This is nonetheless a nominaltransfer of wealth from creditor to debt-or, since the amount of the property isless than the debt owed. In recenttimes, it has become much more diffi-cult in the United States to declare truepersonal bankruptcy, as the laws (re-written at the behest of credit card is-suers) now force the debtor onto a pay-ment plan that assigns a portion of herincome to the creditor far into the fu-ture.8 Increasingly, debts become ines-capable, a lifelong claim on the labor ofthe debtor, who occupies a state of pe-onage. Unlike the Seisachtheia and Ju-bilee, bankruptcy transfers assets to thecreditor, who then controls both phys-ical and financial capital. The formerdebtor has little choice but to go intodebt again. Bankruptcies are a merehiccup in the concentration of wealth.

307/1108

More extreme is outright debt repudi-ation—refusal to pay a debt or transfercollateral to the creditor. Ordinarily, ofcourse, the creditor can sue and employthe force of the state to seize the debt-or’s property. Only when the legal sys-tem and the legitimacy of the state be-gin to fall apart is personal debt repudi-ation possible.9 Such unraveling revealsmoney and property as the social con-ventions that they are. Stripped of allthat is based on the conventional inter-pretation of symbols, Warren Buffett isno wealthier than I am, except maybehis house is bigger. To the extent that itis his because of a deed, even that is amatter of convention.

At the present writing, debt repudi-ation is not much of an option forprivate citizens. For sovereign nations itwould seem to be a different matter en-tirely. In theory, countries with a

308/1108

resilient domestic economy and re-sources to barter with neighbors cansimply default on their sovereign debts.In practice, they rarely do. Rulers,democratic or otherwise, usually allythemselves with the global financial es-tablishment and receive rich rewardsfor doing so. If they defy it, they faceall kinds of hostility. The press turnsagainst them; the bond markets turnagainst them; they get labeled as “irre-sponsible,” “leftist,” or “undemocratic”;their political opposition receives sup-port from the global powers that be;they might even find themselves thetarget of a coup or invasion. Any gov-ernment that resists the conversion ofits social and natural capital intomoney is pressured and punished. Thatis what happened in Haiti whenAristide resisted neoliberal policies andwas overthrown in a coup in 1991 and

309/1108

again in 2004; it happened in Hondurasin 2009; it has happened all over theworld, hundreds and hundreds of times.(It failed in Cuba and more recently inVenezuela, which has so far escapedthe invasion stage.) Most recently, inOctober 2010 a coup barely failed inEcuador as well—Ecuador, the countrythat repudiated $3.9 billion in 2008and subsequently restructured it at 35cents on the dollar. Such is the fate ofany nation that resists the debt regime.

Ex-economist John Perkins describesthe basic strategy in Confessions of anEconomic Hit Man: first bribes to rulers,then threats, then a coup, then, if allelse fails, an invasion. The goal is to getthe country to accept and make pay-ments on loans—to go into debt andstay there. Whether for individuals ornations, the debt often starts out with amegaproject—an airport or road system

310/1108

or skyscraper, a home renovation orcollege education—that promises greatfuture rewards but actually enrichesoutside powers and springs the debttrap. In the old days, military powerand forced tribute were the instrumentsof empire; today it is debt. Debt forcesnations and individuals to devote theirproductivity toward money. Individualscompromise their dreams and work atjobs to keep up with their debts. Na-tions convert subsistence agricultureand local self-sufficiency, which do notgenerate foreign exchange, into exportcommodity crops and sweatshop pro-duction, which do.10 Haiti has been indebt since 1825, when it was forced tocompensate France for the property(i.e., slaves) lost in the slave revolt of1804. When will it pay off its debt?Never.11 When will any of the ThirdWorld pay off its debt and devote its

311/1108

productivity to its own people? Never.When will most of you pay off your stu-dent loans, credit cards, and mort-gages? Never.

Nonetheless, whether on the sover-eign or personal level, the time of debtrepudiation may be closer than wethink. The legitimacy of the status quois wearing thin, and when just a fewdebtors repudiate their debt, the restwill follow suit. There is even a soundlegal basis for repudiation: the principleof odious debt, which says that fraudu-lently incurred debts are invalid. Na-tions can dispute debts incurred by dic-tators who colluded with lenders to en-rich themselves and their cronies andbuilt useless megaprojects that didn’tserve the nation. Individuals can dis-pute consumer and mortgage loans soldthem through deceptive lending

312/1108

practices. Perhaps a time is soon com-ing when we will shake off ourburdens.

INFLATIONA final way to redistribute wealth isthrough inflation. On the face of it, in-flation is a covert, partial form of debtannulment because it allows debts to berepaid in currency that is less valuablethan it was at the time of the originalloan. It is an equalizing force, reducingthe value of both money and debt overtime. However, matters are not assimple as they might seem. For onething, inflation is usually accompaniedby rising interest rates, both becausemonetary authorities raise rates to“combat inflation” and because poten-tial lenders would rather invest in

313/1108

inflation-proof commodities than lendtheir money at interest below the infla-tion rate.12

Standard economics says inflationresults from an increase in the moneysupply without a corresponding in-crease in the supply of goods. How,then, to increase the money supply? In2008–2009, the Federal Reserve cut in-terest rates to near zero and vastly in-creased the monetary base withoutcausing any appreciable inflation. Thatwas because the banks did not increaselending, which puts money in the handsof people and businesses who wouldspend it. Instead, all of the new moneysat as excess bank reserves or sloshedinto equities markets; hence the rise instock prices from March to August2009.13

It is no wonder, given the lack ofcreditworthy borrowers and economic

314/1108

growth, that low interest rates havedone little to spur lending. Even if theFed bought every treasury bond on themarket, increasing the monetary basetenfold, inflation still might not result.To have inflation, the money must bein the hands of people who will spendit. Is money that no one spends stillmoney? Is money a miser buries in ahole and forgets still money?14 OurNewtonian-Cartesian intuitions seemoney as a thing; actually, it is a rela-tionship. When it is concentrated in fewhands, we become less related, less con-nected to the things that sustain andenrich life.

The Fed’s bailout programs mostlyput money into the hands of the banks,where it has remained. In times of eco-nomic recession, to get money topeople who will spend it, it is necessaryto bypass the private credit-creation

315/1108

process that says, “Thou shalt have ac-cess to money only if you will produceeven more of it.” The main way to dothat is through fiscal stimulus—that is,government spending. Such spending isindeed potentially inflationary. Why isinflation bad? No one likes to see risingprices, but if incomes are rising just asfast, what harm is done? The harm isdone only to people who have savings;those who have debts actually benefit.What ordinary people fear is price in-flation without wage inflation. If bothprices and wages rise, then inflation isessentially a tax on idle money, redis-tributing wealth away from the wealthyand counteracting the effects of in-terest.15 We will return later to this be-neficial aspect of inflation when weconsider negative-interest moneysystems.

316/1108

Standard theory says that govern-ment can fund inflationary spendingeither through taxation or deficitspending. Why would tax-fundedspending be inflationary? After all, itjust takes money from some people andgives it to others. It is inflationary onlyif it takes from the rich and gives to thepoor—to those who will spend itquickly. By the same token, deficitspending is only inflationary if themoney goes to those who will spend itand not, for example, to large banks. Ineither case, inflation is more a con-sequence or symptom of wealth redis-tribution than a means to achieve it.16

Inflation, then, cannot be seen as sep-arate from more basic forms of wealthredistribution. It is no accident thatpolitical conservatives, traditionallyguardians of the wealthy, are the keen-est “deficit hawks.” They oppose deficit

317/1108

spending, which tends to put money inthe hands of those who owe, not thosewho own. Failing that, once deficitspending has already happened, theyargue for retrenchment, the raising ofinterest rates and the repayment ofpublic debts, which is essentiallywealth redistribution in reverse. Invok-ing the specter of inflation, they maketheir arguments even when there is nosign whatever of actual inflation.

In principle, any government with asovereign currency can create unlim-ited amounts of money without needfor taxation, simply by printing it orforcing the central bank to buy zero-in-terest bonds. Yes, it would be inflation-ary—wages and prices would rise, andthe relative worth of stored wealthwould fall. That governments insteaduse the mechanism of interest-bearingbonds to create money is a key

318/1108

indicator of the nature of our moneysystem. Here, at the very heart of agovernment’s sovereign powers, a trib-ute to the owners of money is rendered.

Why should government pay interestto the wealthy for the sovereign priv-ilege of issuing currency? Since ancienttimes, the right to issue coinage wasconsidered a sacred or political func-tion that established a locus of socialpower. It is clear where that powerrests today. “Permit me to issue andcontrol the money of a nation, and Icare not who makes its laws,” saidMeyer Rothschild. Today, money servesprivate wealth. That indeed is the fun-damental principle of usury. Yet theage of usury is coming to an end; soon,money shall serve another master.

319/1108

MORE FOR YOU IS LESS FORMEThe systemic causes of the greed, com-petition, and anxiety so prevalent todaycontradict some of the New Age teach-ings I regularly come across—that“Money is just a form of energy,” that“Everyone can have monetary abund-ance if they simply adopt an attitude ofabundance.” When New Age teacherstell us to “release our limiting beliefsaround money,” to “shed the mentalityof scarcity,” to “open to the flow ofabundance,” or to become rich throughthe power of positive thinking, they areignoring an important issue. Their ideasdraw from a valid source: the realiza-tion that the scarcity of our world is anartifact of our collective beliefs, and notthe fundamental reality; however, they

320/1108

are inherently inconsistent with themoney system we have today.

Here is a well-articulated example ofthis kind of thinking, from The Soul ofMoney by Lynn Twist:

Money itself isn’t bad or good,money itself doesn’t have poweror not have power. It is our inter-pretation of money, our interac-tion with it, where the real mis-chief is and where we find thereal opportunity for self-discoveryand personal transformation.17

Lynn Twist is a visionary philanthropistwho has inspired many to use moneyfor good. But can you imagine howthese words might sound to someonewho is destitute for want of money?When I was broke a couple years ago, Iremember feeling annoyed at well-

321/1108

meaning spiritual friends who told memy problem was “an attitude ofscarcity.” When the economy of an en-tire country like Latvia or Greece col-lapses and millions go bankrupt, shallwe blame it all on their attitudes? Whatabout poor, hungry children—do theyhave scarcity mentality too?

Later in the book, Twist describestoxic scarcity attitudes as follows: “It’slike the child’s game of musical chairs,with one seat short of the number ofpeople playing. Your focus is on notlosing and not being the one who endsup at the end of the scramble without aseat.”18

But as I have described, the moneysystem is a game of musical chairs, amad scramble in which some are neces-sarily left out. On a deep level, though,Twist is right. She is right insofar as themoney system is an outgrowth of our

322/1108

attitude of scarcity—an attitude thatrests on an even deeper foundation: thebasic myths and ideologies of our civil-ization that I call the Story of Self andStory of the World. But we can’t justchange our attitudes about money; wemust change money too, which after allis the embodiment of our attitudes. Ul-timately, work on self is inseparablefrom work in the world. Each mirrorsthe other; each is a vehicle for the oth-er. When we change ourselves, our val-ues and actions change as well. Whenwe do work in the world, internal is-sues arise that we must face or berendered ineffective. Thus it is that wesense a spiritual dimension to the plan-etary crisis, calling for what AndrewHarvey calls “Sacred Activism.”

The money system we have today isthe manifestation of the scarcity men-tality that has dominated our

323/1108

civilization for centuries. When thatmentality changes, the money systemwill change to embody a new con-sciousness. In our current money sys-tem, it is mathematically impossible formore than a minority of people to livein abundance, because the money cre-ation process maintains a systemicscarcity. One man’s prosperity is anoth-er man’s poverty.

One of the principles of “prosperityprogramming” is to let go of the guiltstemming from the belief that you canonly be wealthy if another is poor, thatmore for me is less for you. The prob-lem is that under today’s money systemit is true! More for me is less for you.The monetized realm grows at the ex-pense of nature, culture, health, andspirit. The guilt we feel around moneyis quite justified. Certainly, we can cre-ate beautiful things, worthy

324/1108

organizations, and noble causes withmoney, but if we aim to earn moneywith these goals in mind, on some levelwe are robbing Peter to pay Paul.

Please understand here that I do notmean to deter you from opening to theflow of abundance. To the con-trary—because when enough people dothis, the money system will change toconform to the new belief. Today’smoney system rests on a foundation ofSeparation. It is as much an effect as itis a cause of our perception that we arediscrete and separate subjects in a uni-verse that is Other. Opening to abund-ance can only happen when we let goof this identity and open to the richnessof our true, connected being. This newidentity wants no part of usury.

Here is an extreme example that il-lustrates the flaw in “prosperity pro-gramming” and, indirectly, in the

325/1108

present money system. Some years ago,a woman introduced me to a very spe-cial organization she had joined, called“Gifting.” Basically, the way it workedis that first, you “gift” $10,000 to theperson who invites you. Then you findfour people to each “gift” you with$10,000, and then each of them goesout and brings the gifting concept tofour more people, who each “gift” themwith $10,000. Everyone ends up with anet $30,000. The program literature ex-plained this as a manifestation of uni-versal abundance. All that is required isthe right expansive attitude. Needlessto say, I jumped at the opportunity.Just kidding. Instead I asked the wo-man, “But aren’t you just taking moneyfrom your friends?”

“No,” she replied, “because they aregoing to end up making $30,000 too, as

326/1108

long as they fully believe in the prin-ciples of gifting.”

“But they are going to make thatmoney from their friends. Eventuallywe’re going to run out of people, andthe last ones who joined will lose$10,000. You are essentially taking itfrom them, stealing it, and using a lan-guage of gifting to do so.”

You may be surprised to learn that Inever heard from that woman again.Her indignation and denial mirror thatof the beneficiaries of the money eco-nomy as a whole, which itself bears astructural similarity to her pyramidscheme. To see it, imagine that each$10,000 entrance fee were created asan interest-bearing debt (which in factit is). You have to bring in more peopleunder you, or you lose your property.The only way those “at the bottom” canavoid penury is to find even more

327/1108

people to draw into the money eco-nomy, for example through coloniza-tion—ahem, I mean “opening up newmarkets to free trade”—and througheconomic growth: converting relation-ship, culture, nature, and so on intomoney. This delays the inevitable, andthe inevitable—an intensifying polariz-ation of wealth—rears its ugly headwhenever growth slows. The peoplewho have been left holding the debtbag have no way to pay it off: no oneelse to take the money from, and noth-ing to convert into new money. That, aswe shall see, is the root of the econom-ic, social, and ecological crisis our civil-ization faces today.

1. I have purposely left out issues such as mar-gin reserve requirements, capital requirements,and so forth that limit a bank’s ability to extend

328/1108

loans because they are not directly relevant tothe discussion of interest in this chapter.2. Actually, they are making a covert comebackin some U.S. states as people are incarceratedfor failing to heed court summons for nonpay-ment of debts. See White, “America’s NewDebtor Prison.”3. Even after it is obvious that these debt-basedassets are junk and the debts will never be re-paid, the authorities do their best to hide thisfact and maintain them at face value.4. Actually, interest doesn’t consist of “compon-ents”—this is an analytic fiction—but we canpretend it does. Most authorities list only threeor five components of interest. I won’t offerdefinitions here—you can look them up your-self—except for the most relevant, the zero-riskinterest premium. That is equivalent to the rateon short-term U.S. government securities (T-bills), which have essentially zero risk and fullliquidity. One might say that there is risk heretoo, but if things unravel to the point where the

329/1108

U.S. government is incapable of printingmoney, then no asset class would be safe.5. The new means of keeping interest ratesabove growth is the Fed’s new power to offerinterest on bank reserves. Currently at nearzero, the Fed plans to raise these rates whenthe economy starts growing (see, e.g., Keisterand McAndrews, “Why Are Banks Holding SoMany Excess Reserves?”). This will ensure thatany new wealth created through economicgrowth will accrue to the banks and bondhold-ers who benefited from the Fed’s liquidity facil-ity giveaways.6. The situation has grown far worse in recentyears, as the category of risk-free investmentshas expanded to include all kinds of financialjunk that the government has decided to backup. By ensuring the solvency of risk-taking fin-ancial institutions and the liquidity of their fin-ancial offerings, the government has effectivelyincreased the risk-free rewards of owningmoney and accelerated the concentration of

330/1108

wealth. No longer is the Fed Funds rate or T-bill rate the benchmark of risk-free interest.The concept of moral hazard that has come upin the context of “too big to fail” financial insti-tutions isn’t just a moral issue. When risky,high-interest bets are not actually risky, thenthose with the money to make such bets will in-crease their wealth far faster than (and at theexpense of) everyone else. Moral hazard is ashortcut to extreme concentration of wealth.7. The conservative argument that puttingmoney in the hands of the wealthy will spur in-creased investment, more jobs, and prosperityfor all holds only if the rate of return on capitalso invested exceeds the prevailing interest rateon risk-free financial investment. As the relent-less concentration of wealth in the absence ofredistribution demonstrates, such circumstancesare rare, and they will become rarer if not ex-tinct as we near the limits of growth.

331/1108

8. Moreover, some types of debts, such as stu-dent loans and tax debts, cannot be dischargedthrough bankruptcy.9. There are signs of the beginnings of such anunraveling, in the U.S. mortgage documenta-tion crisis of 2010. Here, the web of agreementsthat constitutes a mortgage came under ques-tion. Mortgages had been split into so manypieces that it became difficult to prove who ac-tually owned the property. The corpus of con-tracts, laws, regulations, and documentationpractices began to crumble under the weight ofits own complexity.10. It is no accident that World Bank policypermits agricultural loans only for the develop-ment of export crops. Crops that are consumeddomestically do not generate foreign exchangewith which to service the loans.11. Since the writing of this chapter, Haiti’s for-eign debt was annulled by a world sympatheticto its plight following the earthquake. Now thecountry has uncommitted income and

332/1108

assets—perfect targets for collateralization asthe basis for renewed debt.12. Moreover, many loans today have variableinterest rates, often indexed to inflation (thereare now even inflation-indexed treasury bonds.)13. Moreover, many loans today have variableinterest rates, often indexed to inflation (thereare now even inflation-indexed treasury bonds.)14. Economists try to deal with this questionthrough the concept of “velocity of money.” Asthe Appendix describes, the distinction betweenmoney supply and money velocity breaks downunder close scrutiny.15. There are some other negative effects of in-flation, such as “menu costs” (from the need tokeep changing prices), accounting difficulties,and others. In the case of very high infla-tion—above the carry cost of commodities—itcan result in hoarding. These considerationsplay a role in envisioning negative-interestmoney systems.

333/1108

16. The only kind of inflation that does not res-ult from wealth redistribution arises from short-ages of goods caused by war or embargo. Inthis scenario, which sometimes leads to hyper-inflation, there is no equalizing effect since therich simply hoard inflation-proof commodities.17. Twist, 19.18. Ibid., 49.

334/1108

CHAPTER 7THE CRISIS OF CIVILIZATION

We have bigger houses but smallerfamilies;more conveniences, but less time.We have more degrees but less sense;more knowledge but less judgment;more experts, but more problems;more medicines but less healthiness.We’ve been all the way to the moonand back,but have trouble in crossing thestreet to meet our new neighbor.We built more computers to holdmore copies than ever,But have less real communication;We have become long on quantity,

but short on quality.These are times of fast foods butslow digestion;Tall men but short characters;Steep profits but shallow relation-ships.It’s a time when there is much in thewindowBut nothing in the room.

—Authorship unknown

The financial crisis we are facing todayarises from the fact that there is almostno more social, cultural, natural, andspiritual capital left to convert intomoney. Centuries of near-continuousmoney creation have left us so destitutethat we have nothing left to sell. Ourforests are damaged beyond repair, oursoil depleted and washed into the sea,our fisheries fished out, and the

336/1108

rejuvenating capacity of the earth to re-cycle our waste saturated. Our culturaltreasury of songs and stories, of imagesand icons, has been looted and copy-righted. Any clever phrase you canthink of is already a trademarked slo-gan. Our very human relationships andabilities have been taken away from usand sold back, so that we are now de-pendent on strangers, and therefore onmoney, for things few humans everpaid for until recently: food, shelter,clothing, entertainment, child care,cooking. Life itself has become a con-sumer item.

Today we sell away the last vestigesof our divine endowment: our health,the biosphere and genome, even ourown minds. Pythagoras’s dictum, “Allthings are number,” has nearly cometrue: the world has been converted intomoney. This is the process that is

337/1108

culminating in our age. It is almostcomplete, especially in America and the“developed” world. In the “developing”world (notice how these terms assumeour own economic system as the destin-ation of other societies) there still re-main people who live substantially ingift cultures, where natural and socialwealth is not yet the subject of prop-erty. Globalization is the process ofstripping away these assets, to feed themoney machine’s insatiable, existentialneed to grow. Yet this strip-mining ofother lands is running up against itslimits too, both because there is almostnothing left to take and because ofgrowing pockets of effective resistance.

The result is that the supply ofmoney—and the corresponding volumeof debt—has for several decades out-stripped the production of goods andservices that it promises. It is deeply

338/1108

related to the problem of overcapacityin classical economics. To defer theMarxian crisis of capital—a viciouscircle of falling profits, falling wages,depressed consumption, and overpro-duction in mature industries—into thefuture, we must constantly developnew, highprofit industries and markets.The continuation of capitalism as weknow it depends on an infinite supplyof these new industries, which essen-tially must convert infinite new realmsof social, natural, cultural, and spiritualcapital into money. The problem is thatthese resources are finite, and thecloser they come to exhaustion, themore painful their extraction becomes.Therefore, contemporaneous with thefinancial crisis we have an ecologicalcrisis and a health crisis. They are in-timately interlinked. We cannot convertmuch more of the earth into money, or

339/1108

much more of our health into money,before the basis of life itself isthreatened.

An ancient Chinese myth helps illu-minate what is happening. There was amonster, it is said, called the tao tie,which was possessed of an insatiableappetite. It consumed every creaturearound it, even the earth itself, yet itwas still hungry. So it turned finally toits own body, eating its arms, legs, andtorso, leaving nothing but the head.

A head cannot live without its body.Faced with the exhaustion of the non-monetized commonwealth that it con-sumes, financial capital has turned todevour its own body: the industrial eco-nomy that it was supposed to serve. Ifincome from production of goods andservices is insufficient to service debt,then creditors seize assets instead. Thisis what has happened both in the

340/1108

American economy and globally. Mort-gages, for example, were originally apath toward owning your own homefree and clear, starting with 20 percentequity. Today few ever dream of actu-ally one day repaying their mortgage,but only of endlessly refinancing it, ineffect renting the house from the bank.Globally, Third World countries findthemselves in a similar situation, asthey are forced to sell off national as-sets and gut social services under IMFausterity programs. Just as you mightfeel your entire productive labor is inthe service of debt repayment, so istheir entire economy directed towardproducing commodity goods to repayforeign debt.

IMF austerity measures are exactlyanalogous to a court-imposed debt-pay-ment plan. They say, “You are going tohave to make do with less, work

341/1108

harder, and devote a greater proportionof your income to debt payments. Youwill give me everything you own andturn over all your future earnings tome!” Worker pensions, teacher salaries,minerals, oil—all are turned to debtservice. The forms of slavery havechanged over the years, but not the es-sential directive. The irony is that inthe long term, austerity measures don’teven benefit the creditors. They chokeoff economic growth by reducing con-sumption, demand, and business invest-ment opportunities. Jobs evaporate,commodity prices fall, and the debtorpeople and nations are less able thanever to make their payments.

Incapable of thinking beyond theshort term, the money interests loveausterity because the debtor is essen-tially saying, “We will devote more ofour labor and resources toward the

342/1108

servicing of debt.” It allows unservice-able debts to be serviced just a littlewhile longer. This is what is happeningin Europe at the time of this writing(2010), as governments slash pensionsand agree to privatize social services sothat they can assure bondholders thatthey will be paid. The rumblings of aus-terity are audible here in America too,in the form of alarums about the feder-al deficit. From within the logic of bondmarkets and budget deficits, the casefor greater fiscal responsibility is unas-sailable. From outside that logic, it isabsurd: are we to be forced by merenumbers, mere interpretation of bits, toerode the standard of living of themany for the sake of preserving thewealth of the few?

Eventually, debtors run out of dispos-able income and seizable assets. Thecrash underway today should have

343/1108

actually happened many years ago, ex-cept that various phony and inflated as-sets were created to keep it going alittle longer as the financial tao tie can-nibalized itself, covering debt withmore debt. The efforts to shore up thisedifice cannot work, because it mustkeep growing—all those debts bear in-terest. Yet the authorities keep trying.When you hear the phrase “rescue thefinancial system,” translate it in yourmind into “keep the debts on thebooks.” They are trying to find a wayfor you (and debtor nations too) tokeep paying and for the debt to keepgrowing. A debt pyramid cannot growforever, because eventually, after allthe debtors’ assets are gone, and alltheir disposable income devoted to debtpayments, creditors have no choice butto lend debtors the money to maketheir payments. Soon the outstanding

344/1108

balance is so high that they have toborrow money even to pay interest,which means that money is no longerflowing, and can no longer flow, fromdebtor to creditor. This is the finalstage, usually short, though prolongedin our day by Wall Street’s financial“wizardry.” The loans and any derivat-ives built on them begin to lose theirvalue, and debt deflation ensues.

Essentially, the proximate financialcrisis and the deeper growth crisis ofcivilization are connected in two ways.Interest-based debt-money compels eco-nomic growth, and a debt crisis is asymptom that shows up whenevergrowth slows.

The present crisis is the final stage ofwhat began in the 1930s. Successivesolutions to the fundamental problemof keeping pace with money that ex-pands with the rate of interest have

345/1108

been applied, and exhausted. The firsteffective solution was war, a state thathas been permanent since 1940. Unfor-tunately, or rather fortunately, nuclearweapons and a shift in human con-sciousness have limited the solution ofendless military escalation. Warbetween the great powers is no longerpossible. Other solu-tions—globalization, technology-en-abled development of new goods andservices to replace human functionsnever before commoditized,technology-enabled plunder of naturalresources once off limits, and finallyfinancial autocannibalism—have simil-arly run their course. Unless there arerealms of wealth I have not considered,and new depths of poverty, misery, andalienation to which we might plunge,the inevitable cannot be delayed muchlonger.

346/1108

The credit bubble that is blamed asthe source of our current economicwoes was not a cause of them at all, butonly a symptom. When returns on cap-ital investment began falling in theearly 1970s, capital began a desperatesearch for other ways to maintain itsexpansion. When each bubblepopped—commodities in the late1970s, S&L real estate investments inthe 1980s, the dotcom stocks in the1990s, and real estate and financial de-rivatives in the 2000s—capital immedi-ately moved on to the next, maintain-ing an illusion of economic expansion.But the real economy was stagnating.There were not enough needs to meetthe overcapacity of production, notenough social and natural capital left toconvert into money.

To maintain the exponential growthof money, either the volume of goods

347/1108

and services must be able to keep pacewith it, or imperialism and war must beable to escalate indefinitely. All havereached their limit. There is nowhere toturn.

Today, the impasse in our ability toconvert nature into commodities andrelationships into services is not tem-porary. There is little more we can con-vert. Technological progress and refine-ments to industrial methods will nothelp us take more fish from theseas—the fish are mostly gone. It willnot help us increase the timber har-vest—the forests are already stressed tocapacity. It will not allow us to pumpmore oil—the reserves are drying up.We cannot expand the service sec-tor—there are hardly any things we dofor each other that we don’t pay foralready. There is no more room for eco-nomic growth as we have known it;

348/1108

that is, no more room for the conver-sion of life and the world into money.Therefore, even if we follow the moreradical policy prescriptions from theleft, hoping by an annulment of debtsand a redistribution of income to igniterenewed economic growth, we can onlysucceed in depleting what remains ofour divine bequest of nature, culture,and community. At best, economicstimulus will allow a modest, short-lived expansion as the functions thatwere demonetized during the recessionare remonetized. For example, becauseof the economic situation, some friendsand I cover for each other’s child careneeds, whereas in prosperous times wemight have sent our kids to preschool.Our reciprocity represents an opportun-ity for economic growth: what we dofor each other freely can be convertedinto monetized services. Generalized to

349/1108

the whole society, this is only an oppor-tunity to grow back to where we werebefore, at which point the same crisiswill emerge again. “Shrink in order togrow,” the essence of war and defla-tion, is only effective, and decreasinglyso, as a holding action while newrealms of unmonetized social and nat-ural capital are accessed.

The current problem is thereforemuch deeper than today’s conventionalwisdom holds. Consider this typical ex-ample from a financial journal:

[Paul] Volcker is right. The collat-eralized debt obligations,collateralized mortgage-backed se-curities, and other computer-spawned complexities andplaythings were not the solutionsto basic needs in the economy,but to unslaked greed on Wall

350/1108

Street. Without them, bankswould have had no choice but tocontinue to devote their capitaland talents to meeting real needsfrom businesses and consumers,and there would have been nocrisis, no crash, and no reces-sion.”1

This describes only the most superficiallevel of a deeper problem of which thecollateralized debt obligations (CDOs)and so forth are mere symptoms. Thedeeper problem was that there were in-sufficient “real needs” to which bankscould devote their capital, because onlythose needs that will generate profitsbeyond the interest rate constitute validlending opportunities. In an economyplagued by overproduction, such oppor-tunities are rare. So, the financial in-dustry played numbers games instead.

351/1108

The CDOs and so on were a symptom,not a cause, of the financial crisis thatoriginated in the impossibility of eco-nomic growth keeping pace withinterest.

Various pundits have observed thatBernard Madoff’s Ponzi scheme was notso different from the financial in-dustry’s pyramid of mortgaged-basedderivatives and other instruments,which themselves formed a bubble that,like Madoff’s, could only sustain itselfthrough an unceasing, indeed exponen-tially growing, influx of new money. Assuch, it is a symbol of our times—andeven more than people suppose. It isnot only the Wall Street casino eco-nomy that is an unsustainable pyramidscheme. The larger economic system,based as it is on the eternal conversionof a finite commonwealth into money,is unsustainable as well. It is like a

352/1108

bonfire that must burn higher and high-er, to the exhaustion of all availablefuel. Only a fool would think that a firecan burn ever-higher when the supplyof fuel is finite. To extend the meta-phor, the recent deindustrialization andfinancialization of the economy amountto using the heat to create more fuel.According to the second law of thermo-dynamics, the amount created is alwaysless than the amount expended to cre-ate it. Obviously, the practice of bor-rowing new money to pay the principaland interest of old debts cannot lastvery long, but that is what the economyas a whole has done for ten years now.

Yet even abandoning this folly, westill must face the depletion of fuel (re-member, I mean not literal energysources, but any bond of nature or cul-ture that can be turned into a commod-ity). Most of the proposals for

353/1108

addressing the present economic crisisamount to finding more fuel. Whetherit is drilling more oil wells, paving overmore green space, or spurring con-sumer spending, the goal is to reigniteeconomic growth—that is, to expandthe realm of goods and services. Itmeans finding new things for which wecan pay. Today, unimaginably to ourforebears, we pay even for our waterand our songs. What else is left to con-vert into money?

As far as I know, the first economistto recognize the fundamental problemand its relation to the money systemwas Frederick Soddy, a Nobel laureateand pioneer of nuclear chemistry whoturned his attention to economics in the1920s. Soddy was among the first todebunk the ideology of infinite expo-nential economic growth, extending thereasoning of Thomas Malthus beyond

354/1108

population to economics. Herman Dalydescribes Soddy’s view succinctly:

The idea that people can live offthe interest of their mutual in-debtedness … is just another per-petual motion scheme—a vulgardelusion on a grand scale. Soddyseems to be saying that what isobviously impossible for the com-munity—for everyone to live oninterest—should also be forbiddento individuals, as a principle offairness. If it is not forbidden, orat least limited in some way, thenat some point the growing liens ofdebt holders on the limited reven-ue will become greater than thefuture producers of that revenuewill be willing or able to support,and conflict will result. The con-flict takes the form of debt

355/1108

repudiation. Debt grows at com-pound interest and as a purelymathematical quantity encountersno limits to slow it down. Wealthgrows for a while at compound in-terest, but, having a physical di-mension, its growth sooner orlater encounters limits.2

This association of economic growthwith resource consumption is especiallycommon today among Peak Oil theor-ists, who forecast economic collapse asoil production begins its “long descent.”Their critics contend that economicgrowth can and does happen independ-ent of energy use, thanks to technology,miniaturization, efficiency improve-ments, and so on. Since 1960, U.S. eco-nomic growth has outstripped energyuse, a trend that accelerated in the1980s (see Figure 1). Germany has

356/1108

done even better, having essentially flatenergy use since 1991 despite consider-able economic growth. However, thisobjection only illustrates a larger point.Yes, it is possible to maintain economicgrowth by displacing it from the con-sumption of one part of the commonsto another—by burning gas instead ofoil or by commoditizing human servicesor intellectual property instead of thecod fishery—but aggregated over thetotality of the social, natural, cultural,and spiritual commons, the basic argu-ment of Peak Oil remains valid. Insteadof Peak Oil, we are facing PeakEverything.

When the financial crisis hit in 2008,the first government response, the bail-out and monetary stimulus, was an at-tempt to uphold a tower of debt upondebt that far exceeded its real economicfoundation. As such, its apparent

357/1108

success was temporary, a postponementof the inevitable: “pretend and extend,”as some on Wall Street call it. The al-ternative, economic stimulus, isdoomed for a deeper reason. It will failbecause we are “maxed out”: maxedout on nature’s capacity to receive ourwastes without destroying the ecologic-al basis of civilization; maxed out onsociety’s ability to withstand any moreloss of community and connection;maxed out on our forests’ ability towithstand more clear-cuts; maxed outon the human body’s capacity to stayviable in a depleted, toxic world. Thatwe are also maxed out on our creditonly reflects that we have nothing leftto convert into money. Do we reallyneed more roads and bridges?3 Can wesustain more of them, and more of theindustrial economy that goes along?Government stimulus programs will at

358/1108

best prolong the current economic sys-tem for two or three years, with per-haps a brief period of growth as wecomplete the pillage of nature, spirit,body, and culture. When these vestigesof the commonwealth are gone, thennothing will be able to stop the GreatUnraveling of the money system.

GDP and Energy Consumption1949–1999

359/1108

Figure 1. Source: U.S. Department of Energy,2000.

Although the details and timeline ofthis unraveling are impossible to pre-dict, I think we will first experiencepersistent deflation, stagnation, andwealth polarization, followed by socialunrest, hyperinflation, or currency col-lapse. At that moment, the alternativeswe are exploring today will come intotheir own, offering an opportunity tobuild a new and sacred economy. Thefarther the collapse proceeds, the moreattractive the proposals of this bookwill become.

In the face of the impending crisis,people often ask what they can do toprotect themselves. “Buy gold? Stock-pile canned goods? Build a fortified

360/1108

compound in a remote area? Whatshould I do?” I would like to suggest adifferent kind of question: “What is themost beautiful thing I can do?” You see,the gathering crisis presents a tremend-ous opportunity. Deflation, the destruc-tion of money, is only a categorical evilif the creation of money is a categoricalgood. However, you can see from theexamples I have given that the creationof money has in many ways impover-ished us all. Conversely, the destructionof money has the potential to enrich us.It offers the opportunity to reclaimparts of the lost commonwealth fromthe realm of money and property.

We see this happening every timethere is an economic recession. Peoplecan no longer pay for various goodsand services, and so have to rely onfriends and neighbors instead. Wherethere is no money to facilitate

361/1108

transactions, gift economies reemergeand new kinds of money are created.Ordinarily, though, people and institu-tions try to hang on to the old ways aslong as possible. The habitual first re-sponse to economic crisis is to makeand keep more money—to acceleratethe conversion of anything you can intomoney. On a systemic level, the debtsurge is generating enormous pressureto extend the commodification of thecommonwealth. We can see this hap-pening with the calls to drill for oil inAlaska, commence deep-sea drilling,and so on. The time is here, though, forthe reverse process to begin in earn-est—to remove things from the realmof goods and services and return themto the realm of gifts, reciprocity, self-sufficiency, and community sharing.Note well: this is going to happen any-way in the wake of a currency collapse,

362/1108

as people lose their jobs or become toopoor to buy things. People will helpeach other, and real communities willreemerge.

Even if you care mostly about the se-curity of your own future, communityis probably the best investment you canmake. When the financial system un-ravels, most investments become merepieces of paper or electronic data files.They derive value only from the web ofsocial agreements that contains and in-terprets them. Even physical golddoesn’t provide much security whenthings get really bad. In times of ex-treme crisis, governments typically con-fiscate private gold holdings—Hitler,Lenin, and Roosevelt all did so. If eventhe government falls apart, then peoplewith guns will come and take your goldor any other store of wealth.

363/1108

I sometimes read the financial web-site Zero Hedge for its remarkable in-sight into the pretenses and machina-tions of the financial power elite. Inthat website’s dim view, no asset classexcept physical gold and other physicalcommodities is safe today. I agree withits logic as far as it goes, but it does notgo far enough. If the system breaksdown to the point of hyperinflation,then the institution of property—asmuch a social convention as moneyis—will break down too. In times of so-cial turmoil, I can’t imagine anythingmore dangerous than possessing a fewhundred ounces of gold. Really the onlysecurity is to be found in community:the gratitude, connections, and supportof the people around you. If you havewealth now, I recommend, as your in-vestment advisor, that you use it to

364/1108

enrich the people around you in lastingways.

In the meantime, before the collapseof the current system, anything we doto protect some natural or social re-source from conversion into money willboth hasten the collapse and mitigateits severity. Any forest you save fromdevelopment, any road you stop, anycooperative playgroup you establish;anyone you teach to heal themselves,or to build their own house, cook theirown food, or make their own clothes;any wealth you create or add to thepublic domain; anything you renderoff-limits to the world-devouringMachine will help shorten theMachine’s life span. And when themoney system collapses, if you alreadydo not depend on money for some por-tion of life’s necessities and pleasures,then the collapse of money will pose

365/1108

much less of a harsh transition for you.The same applies on the social level.Any form of natural wealth, whetherbiodiversity, fertile soil, or clean water,and any community or social institutionthat is not a vehicle for the conversionof life into money, will sustain and en-rich life after money.

I am referring to money as we knowit. I will soon describe a money systemthat does not drive the conversion of allthat is good, true, and beautiful intomoney. It enacts a fundamentally dif-ferent human identity, a fundamentallydifferent sense of self, from what dom-inates today. No more will it be truethat more for me is less for you. On apersonal level, the deepest possible re-volution we can enact is a revolution inour sense of self, in our identity. Thediscrete and separate self of Descartesand Adam Smith has run its course and

366/1108

is becoming obsolete. We are realizingour own inseparability, from each otherand from the totality of all life. Usurybelies this union, for it seeks growth ofthe separate self at the expense ofsomething external, something other.Probably everyone reading this bookagrees with the principles of intercon-nectedness, whether from a spiritual oran ecological perspective. The time hascome to live it. It is time to enter thespirit of the gift, which embodies thefelt understanding of nonseparation. Itis becoming abundantly obvious thatless for you (in all its dimensions) isalso less for me. The ideology of per-petual gain has brought us to a state ofpoverty so destitute that we are gaspingfor air. That ideology, and the civiliza-tion built upon it, is what is collapsingtoday.

367/1108

Resisting or postponing the collapsewill only make it worse. Finding newways to grow the economy will onlyconsume what is left of our wealth. Letus stop resisting the revolution in hu-man beingness. If we want to outlastthe multiple crises unfolding today, letus not seek to survive them. That is themind-set of separation; that is resist-ance, a clinging to a dying past. In-stead, let us shift our perspective to-ward reunion and think in terms ofwhat we can give. What can we eachcontribute to a more beautiful world?That is our only responsibility and ouronly security.

I will develop this theme—right live-lihood and right investing—later in thisbook. We can engage in conscious, pur-poseful money destruction in place ofthe unconscious destruction of moneythat happens in a collapsing economy.

368/1108

If you still have money to invest, investit in enterprises that explicitly seek tobuild community, protect nature, andpreserve the cultural commonwealth.Expect a zero or negative financial re-turn on your investment—that is agood sign that you are not unintention-ally converting even more of the worldto money. Whether or not you havemoney to invest, you can also reclaimwhat was sold away by taking steps outthe money economy. Anything youlearn to do for yourself or for otherpeople, without paying for it; any util-ization of recycled or discarded materi-als; anything you make instead of buy,give instead of sell; any new skill ornew song or new art you teach yourselfor another will reduce the dominion ofmoney and grow a gift economy to sus-tain us through the coming transition.The world of the Gift, echoing primitive

369/1108

gift societies, the web of ecology, andthe spiritual teachings of the ages, isnigh upon us. It tugs on ourheartstrings and awakens our generos-ity. Shall we heed its call, before the re-mainder of earth’s beauty is consumed?

1. Coxe, 13.2. Daly, “The Economic Thought of FrederickSoddy,” 475.3. Some might say that Third World countriesdo need more roads and bridges to raise theirstandard of living. Consider, however, that biginfrastructure projects, exemplary of WorldBank investment, are key to the integration offormerly autonomous economies into the globalcommodity economy. Perhaps what they needis not more roads and bridges. Perhaps whatthey need is protection from the depredationsof the global commodity economy, of whichroads and bridges are an agent.

370/1108

CHAPTER 8THE TURNING OF THE AGE

For at least another hundred yearswe must pretend to ourselves and toeveryone that fair is foul and foul isfair; for foul is useful and fair is not.Avarice and usury and precautionmust be our gods for a little longerstill.

—John Maynard Keynes (1931)

MONEY: STORY AND MAGICAs the economic meltdown proceeds toits next phase, we begin to see the un-reality of much we thought real. Theverities of two generations become

uncertain, and despite a lingering hopethat a return to normalcy is just aroundthe corner—“by the middle of 2012” or“more slowly than expected”—the real-ization is dawning that normal isn’tcoming back.

When faced with an abrupt shift inpersonal reality, whether the death of aloved one, or the Gestapo coming intotown, human beings usually react firstwith denial. My first response whentragedy hits is usually, “I can’t believethis is happening!” I was not surprised,then, that our political and corporateleaders spent a long time denying that acrisis was underway. Consider somequotes from 2007: “The country’s eco-nomic fundamentals are sound,” saidGeorge W. Bush. “I don’t see subprimemortgage market troubles imposing aserious problem. I think it’s going to belargely contained,” said Secretary of the

372/1108

Treasury Henry Paulson. “A recession isunlikely.” “We are experiencing a cor-rection in the housing sector.” “Amer-ica is not in recession.” “It is likely thathousing prices won’t recover until early2009.” Today, as well, the authoritiesare “predicting” (but really, trying tospeak into existence) economic growthof over 5 percent over the period2010–2015.1

Of course, many of these pronounce-ments were insincere efforts at percep-tion management. The authoritieshoped that by controlling the publicperception of reality, they could controlreality itself—that by the manipulationof symbols they could manipulate thereality they represent. This, in essence,is what anthropologists call “magico-re-ligious thinking.” It is not without reas-on that our financial elites have beencalled a priesthood. Donning

373/1108

ceremonial garb, speaking an arcanelanguage, wielding mysterious inscrip-tions, they can with a mere word, or amere stroke of a pen, cause fortunesand nations to rise and fall.

You see, magico-religious thinkingnormally works. Whether it is a sham-anic rite, the signing of an appropri-ations bill, or the posting of an accountbalance, when a ritual is embedded in astory that people believe, they act ac-cordingly, playing out the roles thestory assigns to them, and respondingto the reality the story establishes. Informer times, when a shamanic rite wasseen to have failed, everyone knew thiswas a momentous event, signaling theEnd of the World, a shift in what wasreal and what was not, the end of theold Story of the People and the begin-ning, perhaps, of a new. What, fromthis perspective, is the significance of

374/1108

the accelerating failure of the rites offinance?

Some would scoff at primitive cave-dwellers who imagined that their rep-resentations of animals on cave wallscould magically affect the hunt. Yettoday we produce our own talismans,our own systems of magic symbology,and indeed affect physical realitythrough them. A few numbers changehere and there, and thousands of work-ers erect a skyscraper. Some other num-bers change, and a venerable businessshuts its doors. The foreign debt of aThird World country, again mere num-bers in a computer, consigns its peopleto endless enslavement producing com-modity goods that are shipped abroad.College students, ridden with anxiety,deny their dreams and hurry into theworkforce to pay off their studentloans, their very will subject to a piece

375/1108

of paper with magical symbols (“Ac-count Statement”) sent to them onceevery moon, like some magical chit in avoodoo cult.2 These slips of paper thatwe call money, these electronic blips,bear a potent magic indeed!

How does magic work? Rituals andtalismans affirm and perpetuate theconsensus stories we all participate in,stories that form our reality, coordinateour labor, and organize our lives. Onlyin exceptional times do they stop work-ing: the times of a breakdown in thestory of the people. We are enteringsuch times today. The economic meas-ures enacted to contain the crisis thatbegan in 2008 have worked only tem-porarily. They don’t go deep enough.The only reform that can possibly be ef-fective will be one that embodies, af-firms, and perpetuates a new story ofthe people. To see what that story

376/1108

might be, let us dig down through thelayers of failing realities and their rela-tionship to money.

When the government’s first responseto the 2008 crisis—denial—proved fu-tile, the Federal Reserve and TreasuryDepartment tried another sort of per-ception management. Deploying theirarsenal of mystical incantations, theysignaled that the government would notallow major financial institutions suchas Fannie Mae to fail. They hoped thattheir assurances would be enough tomaintain confidence in the assets thatdepended on these firms’ continuedsolvency and prosperity. It would haveworked if the story these symbolicmeasures invoked were not alreadybroken. But it was. Specifically, whatwas broken was the story assigningvalue to mortgage-backed securitiesand other derivatives based on

377/1108

unrepayable loans. Unlike camels orbushels of grain, but like all moderncurrencies, these have value only be-cause people believe they have value.Moreover, this is not an isolated belief,but is inextricably linked with millionsof other beliefs, conventions, habits,agreements, and rituals.

The next step was to begin injectingmassive amounts of cash into failingfinancial institutions, either in ex-change for equity (effectively national-izing them, as in the case of FannieMae, Freddie Mac, and AIG) or in ex-change for essentially nothing whatso-ever, as in the TARP program. In thelatter, the Treasury Department guaran-teed or bought banks’ toxic assets inhopes of improving their balance sheetsso that they would start lending again,thus keeping the credit bubble expand-ing. It didn’t work. The banks just kept

378/1108

the money (except what they paid totheir own executives as bonuses) as ahedge against their exposure to untoldquantities of additional bad assets, orthey used it to acquire smaller, healthi-er banks. They weren’t about to lendmore to consumers who were alreadymaxed out, nor to overleveraged busi-nesses in the teeth of a recession. Prop-erty values continued to fall, credit de-fault rates continued to rise, and thewhole edifice of derivative assets builtupon them continued to crumble. Con-sumption and business activityplummeted, unemployment skyrock-eted, and people in Europe began riot-ing in the streets. And why? Just be-cause some numbers changed in somecomputers. It is truly amazing. It onlymakes sense when you see these num-bers as talismans embodying agree-ments. A supplier digs minerals out of

379/1108

the ground and sends them to a factory,in exchange for what? For a few slips ofpaper, or more likely, in exchange forsome bits flipping in a computer, whichcan only happen with the permission ofa bank (that “provides credit”).

Before we become too alarmed aboutthe giveaways of trillions upon trillionsof dollars to the wealthy, let us touchback again on the reality of money.What actually happens when thismoney is given away? Almost nothinghappens. What happens is that bitschange in computers, and the fewpeople who understand the interpreta-tions of those bits declare that moneyhas been transferred. Those bits are thesymbolic representation of an agree-ment about a story. This story includeswho is rich and who is poor, who ownsand who owes. It is said that our chil-dren and grandchildren will be paying

380/1108

these bailout and stimulus debts, butthey could also simply be declared intononexistence. They are only as real asthe story we agree on that containsthem. Our grandchildren will pay themonly if the story, the system of mean-ings, that defines those debts still exists.But I think more and more people sensethat the federal debt, the U.S. foreigndebt, and a lot of our private mortgageand credit card debts will never berepaid.

We think that those Wall Street ty-coons absconded with billions, butwhat are these billions? They too arenumbers in computers, and could theor-etically be erased by fiat. The samewith the money that America owes Ch-ina or that Third World nations owe thebanks. It could be gone with a simpledeclaration. We can thus understandthe massive giveaways of money in the

381/1108

various financial rescue programs asyet another exercise in perception man-agement, though this time it is an un-conscious exercise. These giveaways areritual acts that attempt to perpetuate astory, a matrix of agreements, and thehuman activities that surround it. Theyare an attempt to uphold the magicalpower of the voodoo chits that keep thecollege grad on a career path and themiddle-aged man enslaved to his mort-gage—that give the power to a few tomove literal mountains while keepingthe many in chains.

Speaking of China, it is instructive tolook at the physical reality underlyingthe trade imbalance. Basically what ishappening is that China is shipping usvast quantities of stuff—clothes, toys,electronics, nearly everything in Wal-Mart—and in return we rearrange somebits in some computers. Meanwhile,

382/1108

Chinese laborers work just as hard aswe do, yet their day’s wages buy muchless. In the old days of explicit empires,China would have been called a “vassalstate” and the stuff it sends us wouldhave been called “tribute.”3 Yet Chinatoo will do everything it can to sustainthe present Story of Money, for essen-tially the same reason we do: its elitesbenefit from it. It is just as in AncientRome. The elites of the imperial capitaland the provinces prosper at the ex-pense of the misery of the people,which increases over time. To mollifythem and keep them docile and stupid,the masses are provided with bread andcircuses: cheap food, cheap thrills,celebrity news, and the Super Bowl.

Whether we declare it to end, orwhether it ends of its own accord, thestory of money will bring down a lotwith it. That is why the United States

383/1108

won’t simply default on its debt. If itdid, then the story under which theMiddle East ships us its oil, Japan itselectronics, India its textiles, and Chinaits plastic would come to an end. Un-fortunately, or rather fortunately, thatstory cannot be saved forever. The fun-damental reason is that it depends onthe maintenance of exponentially grow-ing debt in a finite world.

When money evaporates as it is do-ing in the current cycle of debt defla-tion, little changes right away in thephysical world. Stacks of currency donot go up in flames; factories do notblow up; engines do not grind to a halt;oil wells do not run dry; people’s eco-nomic skills do not disappear. All of thematerials and skills that are exchangedin human economy, upon which werely for food, shelter, transportation,entertainment, and so on, still exist as

384/1108

before. What has disappeared is our ca-pacity to coordinate our activities andfocus our common efforts. We can stillenvision a new airport, but we can nolonger build it. The magic talisman bywhich the pronouncement “An airportshall be built here” crystallizes into ma-terial reality has lost its power. Humanhands, minds, and machinery retain alltheir capacities, yet we can no longerdo what we once could do. The onlything that has changed is ourperceptions.

We can therefore see the bailouts,quantitative easing, and the other fin-ancial measures to save the economy asfurther exercises in perception manage-ment, but on a deeper, less consciouslevel. Because what is money, anyway?Money is merely a social agreement, astory that assigns meaning and roles.The classical definition of money—a

385/1108

medium of exchange, a store of value, aunit of account—describes what moneydoes, but not what it is. Physically, it isnow next to nothing. Socially, it is nextto everything: the primary agent for thecoordination of human activity and thefocusing of collective human intention.

The government’s deployment of tril-lions of dollars in money is little differ-ent from its earlier deployment ofempty words. Both are nothing but themanipulation of various types of sym-bols, and both have failed for anidentical reason: the story they are try-ing to perpetuate has run its course.The normalcy we took as normal wasunsustainable.

It was unsustainable on two levels.The first level of “normal” is the debtpyramid, the exponential growth ofmoney that inevitably outstrips the realeconomy. The solution at this level is

386/1108

what liberal economists (usually identi-fying themselves as Keynesians) pro-pose: wealth redistribution, fiscal stim-ulus, debt write-downs, and so forth.Through these they hope to reigniteeconomic growth—the second “normal”that is coming to an end.

HUMANITY’S COMING-OF-AGEORDEALThe story that is ending in our time,then, goes much deeper than the storyof money. I call this story the Ascent ofHumanity. It is a story of endlessgrowth, and the money system we havetoday is an embodiment of that story,enabling and propelling the conversionof the natural realm into the humanrealm. It began millennia ago, whenhumans first tamed fire and made tools;

387/1108

it accelerated when we applied thesetools to the domestication of animalsand plants and began to conquer thewild, to make the world ours. Itreached its glorious zenith in the age ofthe Machine, when we created a whollyartificial world, harnessing all theforces of nature and imaginingourselves to be its lords and possessors.And now, that story is drawing to aclose as the inexorable realizationdawns that the story is not true. Despiteour pretenses, the world is not reallyours; despite our illusions, we are notin control of it. As the unintended con-sequences of technology proliferate, asour communities, our health, and theecological basis of civilization deterior-ate, as we explore new depths ofmisery, violence, and alienation, weenter the story’s final stages: crisis, cli-max, and denouement. The rituals of

388/1108

our storytellers are to no avail. No storycan persist beyond its ending.

Just as life does not end with adoles-cence, neither does civilization’s evolu-tion stop with the end of growth. Weare in the midst of a transition parallelto an adolescent’s transition into adult-hood. Physical growth ceases, and vitalresources turn inward to foster growthin other realms.

Two key developments mark thetransition from childhood to adulthood,whether on the individual or the spe-cies level. The first is that we fall inlove, and this love relationship is differ-ent from that of the child to the moth-er. In childhood, the primary aspect ofthe love relationship is that of receiv-ing. I am happy to give all I can to mychildren, and I want them to receive itwithout restraint. It is right for a childto do what is necessary to grow, both

389/1108

physically and mentally. A good parentprovides the resources for this growth,as our Mother Earth has done for us.

So far, we humans have been chil-dren in relationship to earth. We beganin the womb of hunter-gatherer exist-ence, in which we made no distinctionbetween human and nature, but wereenwombed within it. An infant does nothave a strong self-other distinction, buttakes time to form an identity and anego and to learn that the world is notan extension of the self. So it has beenfor humanity collectively. Whereas thehunter-gatherer had no concept of aseparate “nature” distinct from“human,” the agriculturist, whose live-lihood depended on the objectificationand manipulation of nature, came tothink of nature as a separate category.In the childhood of agricultural civiliza-tion, humanity developed a separate

390/1108

identity and grew large. We had our ad-olescent growth spurt with industry,and on the mental plane enteredthrough Cartesian science the extremeof separation, the fully developed egoand hyperrationality of the young teen-ager who, like humanity in the Age ofScience, completes the stage of cognit-ive development known as “formal op-erations,” consisting of the manipula-tion of abstractions. But as the extremeof yang contains the birth of yin, sodoes the extreme of separation containthe seed of what comes next: reunion.

In adolescence, we fall in love, andour world of perfect reason and perfectselfishness falls apart as the self ex-pands to include the beloved within itsbounds. A new kind of love relationshipemerges: not just one of receiving, butof giving too, and of cocreating. Fullyindividuated from the Other, we can

391/1108

fall in love with it and experience a re-union greater than the original union,for it contains within it the entire jour-ney of separation.

The first mass awakening of the newlove consciousness happened in the1960s with the birth of the environ-mental movement. At the pinnacle ofour separation, triumphantly surveyingour apparent conquest of nature, webegan to notice how much she had giv-en; we became aware of her hurts, herwounds, and we began to desire notonly to take from earth, but to give toearth too, to protect and cherish her.This desire was not based on a fear ofextinction—that came later—but onlove. We were falling in love with theearth. In that decade, the first photo-graphs of this planet were beameddown from orbiting satellites, and wewere transformed by the planet’s

392/1108

beauty. To view earth from the outsidewas the penultimate step of separationfrom nature; the ultimate step was theascension of the astronauts, physicallyleaving nature behind. And they fell inlove with earth too. Here are the wordsof astronaut Rusty Schweickart:

From the moon, the Earth is sosmall and so fragile, and such aprecious little spot in that Uni-verse, that you can block it outwith your thumb. Then you real-ize that on that spot, that littleblue and white thing, iseverything that means anything toyou—all of history and music andpoetry and art and death andbirth and love, tears, joy, games,all of it right there on that littlespot that you can cover with yourthumb. And you realize from that

393/1108

perspective that you’ve changedforever, that there is somethingnew there, that the relationship isno longer what it was.

The second hallmark of the transitionto adulthood is an ordeal. Ancient tri-bal cultures had various coming-of-ageceremonies and ordeals that purposelyshattered the smaller identity throughisolation, pain, fasting, psychedelicplants, or other means, and then rebuiltand reincorporated it into a larger,transpersonal identity. Though we intu-itively seek them out in the form ofdrinking, drugs, fraternity and militaryhazing, and so on, modern men andwomen usually have only a partial ex-perience of this process, leaving us in akind of perpetual adolescence that endsonly when fate intervenes to tear ourworld apart. Then we can enter a wider

394/1108

self, in which giving comes just as nat-urally as receiving. Having completedthe passage to adulthood, a man or wo-man takes full possession of his or hergifts and seeks to contribute to thegood of all as a full member of thetribe.

Humanity is undergoing an analog-ous ordeal today. The multiple crisesconverging upon us are an ordeal thatchallenges our very identity, an ordealthat we have no assurance of even sur-viving. It calls forth unrealized capacit-ies and compels us to relate to theworld in a new way. The despair thatsensitive people feel in the face of thecrisis is part of the ordeal.4 Like a tribalinitiate, when we as a species emergefrom it, we too will join the communityof all being as a full member of the“tribe” of life. Our unique capacities of

395/1108

technology and culture, we will turn tocontribute to the good of all.

In humanity’s childhood, a moneysystem that embodied and demandedgrowth, the taking of more and morefrom earth, was perhaps appropriate. Itwas an integral part of the story of As-cent. Today it is rapidly becoming ob-solete. It is incompatible with adultlove, with cocreative partnership, andwith the graduation into the estate of aGiver that comes with adulthood. Thatis the deep reason why no financial oreconomic reform can possibly workthat does not include a new kind ofmoney. The new money must embody anew story, one that treats nature notonly as a mother, but as a lover too. Wewill still have a need for money for along time to come because we need ma-gical symbols to reify our Story of thePeople, to apply it to the physical world

396/1108

as a creative template. The essentialcharacter of money will not change: itwill consist of magical talismans,whether physical or electronic, throughwhich we assign roles, focus intention,and coordinate human activity.

The next part of this book will dis-cuss such a money system, as well asthe economy and psychology that willaccompany it. There is a person-al—some might say spiritual—dimen-sion to the metamorphosis of storiesthat we are entering. Today’s usury-money is part of a story of separation,in which “more for me is less for you.”That is the essence of interest: I willonly “share” money with you if I endup with even more of it in return. Onthe systemic level as well, interest onmoney creates competition, anxiety,and the polarization of wealth. Mean-while, the phrase “more for me is less

397/1108

for you” is also the motto of the ego,and a truism given the discrete and sep-arate self of modern economics, bio-logy, and philosophy.

Only when our sense of self expandsto include others, through love, is thattruism replaced by its opposite: “Morefor you is also more for me.” This is theessential truth embodied in the world’sauthentic spiritual teachings, from Je-sus’s Golden Rule, which has been mis-construed and should read, “As you dounto others, so also you do unto your-self,” to the Buddhist doctrine ofkarma. However, to merely understandand agree with these teachings is notenough; many of us bear a dividebetween what we believe and what welive. An actual transformation in theway we experience being is necessary,and such a transformation usuallycomes about in much the same way as

398/1108

our collective transformation is happen-ing now: through a collapse of the oldStory of Self and Story of the World,and the birth of a new one. For the self,too, is ultimately a story, with a begin-ning and an end. Have you ever gonethrough an experience that leaves you,afterward, hardly knowing who youare?

The mature, connected self, the selfof interbeingness, comes into a balancebetween giving and receiving. In thatstate, whether you are a person or anentire species, you give according toyour abilities and, linked with others oflike spirit, you receive according toyour needs.

Not coincidentally, I have just para-phrased a fundamental tenet of social-ism: “From each according to his abilit-ies, to each according to his needs.”This is a good description of any gift

399/1108

network, whether a human body, anecosystem, or a tribal gift culture. As Iwill describe, it is also a good descrip-tion of a sacred economy. Its currencycontributes to a very different Story ofthe People, of the Self, and of theWorld than usury-money. It is cyclicalrather than exponential, always return-ing to its source; it encourages the pro-tection and enrichment of nature, notits depletion; it redefines wealth as afunction of one’s generosity and notone’s accumulation; it is the manifesta-tion of abundance, not scarcity. It hasthe potential to recreate the gift dy-namics of primitive societies on a glob-al scale, bringing forth human gifts anddirecting them toward planetary needs.

I remember as a teenager readingAyn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, whoseblack-and-white characters, hyperra-tionality, and moral absolutism

400/1108

appealed strongly to my adolescentmind. The book is a manifesto of thediscrete and separate self, the mercen-ary ego, and it appeals to adolescentminds to this day. The book devoted itsmost vitriolic ridicule to the phrase“From each according to his abilities, toeach according to his needs,” painting apicture of people outdoing each otherin their postures of neediness so as tobe allotted a greater share of resources,while producers had no motivation toproduce. This scenario, which was incertain respects played out in the Com-munist block, echoes a primal fear ofthe scarcity-conditioned modernself—what if I give and receive nothingin return? This desire of an assurance ofreturn, a compensation for the risk ofgenerosity, is the fundamental mind-setof interest, an adolescent mind-set to besuperseded by a more expansive adult

401/1108

self that has matured into full member-ship in the community of being. We arehere to express our gifts; it is amongour deepest desires, and we cannot befully alive otherwise.

Most needs have been monetized,while the amount of labor needed tomeet those monetized needs is falling.Therefore, in order for human gifts toreceive their full expression, all this ex-cess human creativity must thereforeturn elsewhere, toward needs or pur-poses that are inimical to the money ofSeparation. For without a doubt the re-gime of money has destroyed, and con-tinues to destroy, much that is beauti-ful—indeed, every public good thatcannot be made private. Here are a fewexamples: a starry night sky free oflight pollution; a countryside free ofroad noise; a vibrant multicultural localurban economy; unpolluted lakes,

402/1108

rivers, and seas; the ecological basis ofhuman civilization. Many of us havegifts that would contribute to all ofthese things, yet no one will pay us togive them. That’s because money as weknow it ultimately rests on convertingthe public into the private. The newmoney will encourage the opposite, andthe conflict between our ideals andpractical financial reality will end.

Usury-money is the money of growth,and it was perfect for humanity’sgrowth stage on earth and for the storyof Ascent, of dominance and mastery.The next stage is one of cocreative part-nership with earth. The Story of thePeople for this new stage is coming to-gether right now. Its weavers are thevisionaries of fields like permaculture,holistic medicine, renewable energy,mycoremediation, local currencies, res-torative justice, attachment parenting,

403/1108

and a million more. To undo the dam-age that the Age of Usury has wroughton nature, culture, health, and spiritwill require all the gifts that make ushuman, and indeed is so impossibly de-manding that it will take those gifts toa new level of development.

This might seem hopelessly naive,vague, and idealistic. I have drawn outsome of the logic in The Ascent of Hu-manity and will flesh it out in greaterdetail in the second half of this book.For now, weigh the competing voices ofyour idealism and your cynicism, andask yourself, “Can I bear to settle foranything less?” Can you bear to accepta world of great and growing ugliness?Can you stand to believe that it is inev-itable? You cannot. Such a belief willslowly but surely kill your soul. Themind likes cynicism, its comfort andsafety, and hesitates to believe anything

404/1108

extraordinary, but the heart urges oth-erwise; it urges us to beauty, and onlyby heeding its call can we dare create anew Story of the People.

We are here to create somethingbeautiful; I call it “the more beautifulworld our hearts tell us is possible.” Asthe truth of that sinks in, deeper anddeeper, and as the convergence ofcrises pushes us out of the old world,inevitably more and more people willlive from that truth: the truth that morefor you is not less for me; the truth thatwhat I do unto you, so I do unto my-self; the truth of living to give what youcan and take what you need. We canstart doing it right now. We are afraid,but when we do it for real, the worldmeets our needs and more. We thenfind that the story of Separation, em-bodied in the money we have known, isnot true and never was. Yet the last ten

405/1108

millennia were not in vain. Sometimesit is necessary to live a lie to its fullestbefore we are ready to take the nextstep into the truth. The lie of separationin the age of usury is now complete.We have explored its fullness, itsfarthest extremes, and seen all it haswrought, the deserts and the prisons,the concentration camps and the wars,the wastage of the good, the true, andthe beautiful. Now, the capacities wehave developed through this long jour-ney of ascent will serve us well in theimminent Age of Reunion.

1. U.S. Department of the Treasury, “AnnualReport on the Public Debt,” June 2010.2. This is not to denigrate voodoo cults or tocite them as an example of primitive mumbojumbo. In fact, I don’t want to denigratemumbo jumbo either. Whether it is the modern

406/1108

financial system or voodoo ritual, symbolic ma-gic works by the same essential principles. Ourmodern system of ritual differs little from theprimitive.3. Sometimes the power shifts to the vassal asthe hegemonic power becomes decadent andreliant on imported wealth to the point that itloses its own ability to create wealth. It lookslike this is happening with China today. Per-haps China is only temporarily playing a vassalrole in pursuit of another end.4. Actually, all is well: the crisis is exercising itsevolutionary function. But don’t let that as-suage your panic. All is well, but only becauseof our perception that all is horribly wrong.

407/1108