Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition (50 page)

I am not advocating an age of altruism in which we forgo personal benefit for the common good. I foresee, rather, a fusion of personal benefit and common good. For example, when I give money to people in my community, I create feelings of gratitude that might motivate a return gift to me or an onward gift to someone else. Either way, I have strengthened the community that sustains me. When we are embedded in gift community, we naturally direct our gratitude not only toward the proximate giver but toward the community as a whole, and we take care of its neediest members (gifts seek needs). Our desire to give may very well express itself as a gift to someone in the community who has given us nothing herself. Therefore, we can see any gift, even one without expectation of direct return, as a form of “investment.” We are still taking naked money and, if it is a good investment, clothing it in something fine. A poor investment clothes it in something ugly. It is just that simple.

The negative-interest currency of the future will align the spirit of the gift with economic self-interest, and zero-interest loans will no longer feel like a sacrifice. After all, holding on to the money brings a return of
less
than zero. In the time remaining to us before such a system takes over, it apparently goes against rational self-interest to lend money at no interest, or to give it away. That, however, is a very shortsighted self-interest because while the present money system may easily disintegrate in the next few years, the ties of gratitude that gifts create will persist through any social tumult. If you are someone who is concerned about Peak Oil or one of the other collapse scenarios, the best security you can have is to ensconce yourself in a gift network. Start being a giver now. Ten million dollars might be just so many slips of paper in a few years.
This is another way that what you give in “this world” might be your treasure in the next.

If you want to create a world of abundance, a world of gratitude, a world of the gift, you can start by using today’s money, while it still exists, to create more gratitude in the world. If we have a large enough reservoir of gratitude, then our society can withstand practically anything. Again, we live in a world of fundamental abundance that we have, through our beliefs and habits, rendered artificially poor. So badly have we damaged planet and spirit that it will require a full outpouring of all our gifts to heal it. The outpouring of gifts comes from gratitude. Therefore, the best investment you can make with your money is to generate gratitude. It doesn’t matter if the gratitude recognizes you as the giver. Ultimately, the proper object of gratitude is the Giver of all our own gifts, of our world, of our lives.

To get ready for that economy, and to live today in its spirit, instead of investing money with the purpose of making more of it, we shift the focus of investment toward using accumulated money as the gift that it is: a gift from the old world to the new, a gift from the ancestors to the future. It is analogous to the gifts of life, of mother’s milk, of food and sensory stimulation and all the things that build us into adults, which we receive in order that we may enter adulthood and give onward of these gifts. The question, then, is how to use money in the consciousness of a gift. If you are not an investor, then the question becomes one of right livelihood.

The question “What are wealthy individuals to do with their pile of money?” suggests a broader one: What are we as a society to do with
the accumulated wealth of thousands of years? What is this wealth, anyway, if not actually or no longer “deferred consumption”?

Let us also revisit the essence of money. What exactly is it that accumulates in these vast accumulations of money? Money consists of ritual talismans by which we coordinate human intention and activity. Those who possess an accumulation of money have, at their disposal, the means to focus and organize society’s labor. The increase of money can come only at the cost of the nonmonetized realm, but the expenditure of money can restore that realm as long as that expenditure is not an investment that seeks the further commodification of the social or natural commons. Money can be used to buy logging equipment to clear-cut a forest; equally it can be used to preserve and guard that forest. The first use is money creation; the second is money destruction (because it generates no further goods and services). Either way, accumulated money bestows the ability to coordinate human activity on a large scale.

The image of sitting atop the accumulated wealth of centuries of exploitation is of particular relevance to the baby boom generation, the last to have come of age during the zenith of our civilization. They have a foot in both worlds, the old and the new. They have access (many of them) to the pile of wealth from the old world, but they are young enough that their consciousness has shifted into alignment with the new. My generation, once called Generation X, is different. Many of us, even from educated backgrounds, never had a foot in the old world. By the time we came of age, it was so obviously bankrupt that we couldn’t bring ourselves to make our fortunes there. For someone entering adulthood in the 1960s or 1970s, it was still possible to believe in the project of ascent; it was still possible to fully participate in the Story of the People: conquering space, conquering the atom, mastering the
universe, onward and upward. I imagine that if I’d been born in 1957 rather than 1967 (or if my father hadn’t given me
Silent Spring, 1984
, and
A People’s History of the United States
to read as a teenager) I would have followed the Program and would be a math professor at a university somewhere today. But it was not to be. By the time I came of age in the eighties, our story of the people was no longer compelling. I, and millions like me, basically dropped out. Of course I am vastly overgeneralizing, but I think there is truth in saying that whereas the children of the fifties and sixties became millionaire programmers for Microsoft, the children of the seventies and eighties are playing with Linux. This is not to impute any moral failing onto the Microsoft millionaires! In their day, it was still possible for a dynamic, visionary twenty-something to be excited about what was going on in the commercial software industry. The same goes for the central institutions of politics, academia, the arts, science, medicine, and so on. Of course, even then the inevitable denouement of the story of Ascent was apparent to those with eyes to see, as it had been apparent to mystics for thousands of years. For most, though, the crises were too far off, and the ideology of human dominion too deeply ingrained, to divert them from full participation in the project of ascent.

The social dynamics of which I speak are in part an America-centric phenomenon, but I think they generalize to a world that is on the cusp of a new age. Like the American baby boomers, the world sits on top of a huge pile of wealth, the end product of ten thousand years of culture and technology. We have a mighty industrial infrastructure; we have roads and airplanes; we have a vast apparatus already in existence that, for centuries, has been devoted toward the expansion of the human realm and the conquest of the natural. The time has come to turn the tools of separation, dominance,
and control toward the purpose of reunion, the healing of the world. Just as the wealthy baby boomer or heir of fortunes past can turn her wealth toward a beautiful purpose, and not worry that the wealth is somehow tainted by its origins, so also do we have the opportunity and the responsibility to use the accumulated fruits of our domination of the earth in a beautiful way. This is true even of the most heinous, exploitative technologies—such as genetic engineering and nuclear fission—that have taken the program of control to its pinnacle of hubris. In the age of interest, that is the age of growth, the primary motivating force behind any new technology was to open up new realms for the conversion of natural or social wealth into money. Genetic engineering enabled the genome to become an exploitable natural resource, just as the steam engine enabled the mining of deep-seam coal and the iron plow the breaking of heavy sod. What will technology look like when devoted to the opposite purpose—the restoration of the planet’s health?

When humanity as a whole goes through the same shift of consciousness that so many individuals have gone through in the last few decades that expelled them from the Matrix, who knows to what purposes we will turn the technologies of profit? When humanity is no longer under compulsion to grow its realm, we will turn our collective ingenuity and the amassed knowledge, information, and technology of the ages toward purposes aligned with the consciousness of ecology, connectedness, and healing. This is not to say that technology won’t change. Technologies that are dominant today will retreat to marginal applications, while marginal technologies, including those dismissed or ridiculed today, will come to the fore.

Whether it is the application of accumulated technology or accumulated money, we want to be sure that we are not using it in the old mode: as a tool to achieve more separation from nature or
more financial wealth. That is why I suggest the concept of
using money to destroy money
. By this I mean to use money to restore and protect the natural, social, cultural, and spiritual commons from which it was originally created. This has the effect of hastening the collapse and mitigating its severity. Usury-money is subject to a grow-or-die imperative. Any item of social or natural capital that we make off-limits to commoditization hastens the demise of usury-money; it “starves the beast.” The realm within which (monetized) goods and services can expand shrinks. Every forest we prevent from being turned into board feet, every piece of land we remove from development, every person we teach to heal herself and others, every indigenous culture we insulate from cultural imperialism is one less place for money to colonize. The efforts of liberals and reformers, though impotent to halt the onward progress of the Machine, have not been in vain. Pollution limits, for instance, have kept at least a portion of the skies from being converted into money. Labor standards have prevented at least a part of workers’ well-being from being converted into money. The antiwar movement makes the war business less profitable. Right-wing criticisms of pro-environment, pro-labor, antiwar policies are correct—they
do
hurt economic growth. If I go to an indigenous culture, convince its people that subsistence farming is degrading and primitive, and induce them instead to work in a factory and join the market economy, then GDP rises (and I’ve created an “investment opportunity”). If, on the other hand, I inspire people to abandon their high-paying jobs and “go back to the land,” then GDP falls. If I create a community where we no longer pay for child care but instead care for each others’ children cooperatively, then GDP falls. And if we succeed in protecting the Alaskan Wildlife Refuge from oil drilling, that’s tens of billions of dollars
that will never materialize. That is why I say we are using money to destroy money. Sometimes, the master’s tools
can
dismantle the master’s house.

Another way to look at it is that these efforts to protect a portion of the commonwealth raise the “bottom” to which we must fall before a transformation to a new world can crystallize. My use of the language of addiction recovery is deliberate. The dynamics of usury-money are addiction dynamics, requiring an ever-greater dose (of the commons) to maintain normality, converting more and more of the basis of well-being into money for a fix. If you have an addict friend, it won’t do any good to give her “help” of the usual kind, such as money, a car to replace the one she crashed, or a job to replace the one she lost. All of those resources will just go down the black hole of addiction. So too it is with our politicians’ efforts to prolong the age of growth.

Thanks to the efforts of generations of do-gooders, we will still have a portion of our divine bequest. There is still goodness in the soil; there are still healthy forests here and there; there are still fish in some parts of the ocean; there are still people and cultures that haven’t completely sold off their health and creativity. This remaining natural, social, and spiritual capital is what will carry us through the transition and form the basis to heal the world.

If you are an investor, it is time to shift your focus entirely to the creation of connections, the generation of gratitude, and the reclamation and protection of the commonwealth. The time for the mind-set of wealth preservation is over. Wealth preservation brings to mind a swarm of rats, each clambering over the others to reach the top mast of a sinking ship. Instead, they could cooperate to gather the pieces to build a raft that is seaworthy. We have a long voyage ahead of us.

The same principles that apply to right investing apply also to right livelihood; indeed, right livelihood and right investment are two sides of the same coin. If right investing uses money as gift to support the creation of a more beautiful world, then right livelihood accepts that gift as it does that work.

Traditional employment receives money for helping expand the monetized realm. We find that in order to earn money, we must participate in the conversion of the good, the true, and the beautiful into money. That is because of the money system—credit ultimately goes to those who can most effectively create new goods and services (or take it from those who create them). An interest-based money system exerts a systemic pressure to convert the commonwealth into money, and the highest remuneration goes to those who do that most effectively. You want to get rich? Invent a way to chop down trees more efficiently. Create an advertising campaign that persuades other nations to drink Coke instead of indigenous beverages. Seeing the workings of the global economy, many idealistic young people decide they want no part of it. I get letters from them all the time. “I want no part of this. I want to do what I love in a way that hurts no one. But there is no money in that. How do I survive?” How do you survive, not to mention access the large amounts of money to do great things, in a world that rewards the destruction of the very things you want to create?