The Moneyless Man (3 page)

Governments may be able to bail out banks during times such as the 2008 credit crunch; unfortunately, we are also approaching what George Monbiot calls the ‘Nature Crunch’. As he correctly points out, nature doesn’t do bail-outs. Pavan Sukhdev, a Deutsche Bank economist who led a study of ecosystems, reported that we are ‘losing natural capital worth somewhere between $2 trillion and $5 trillion every year as a result of deforestation alone’. The credit crunch losses incurred by the financial sector amount to between $1 trillion and $1.5 trillion; these pale in comparison to the total amount we lose in natural capital every year. As we lurch towards environmental disaster and the economy contracts, will money continue to be seen as security? Or will living in a closely-knit community that has re-learned its ability to work together and share for the common good take its place?

This became apparent to me when I went back to Ireland, to visit my parents, in 2008. In the six years I’d been away from my homeland, working in the UK, the country had changed beyond recognition. The growth that Irish people experienced during the ‘Celtic Tiger’ economic period had radically affected their culture. Twenty years earlier, when I was growing up at the end of the eighties, it had seemed very different. My memories were symbolized by the street where my parents still live. When I lived there, everyone knew each other; it could take fifteen minutes to get to the bottom of the road on your way to town. Then, out of the eighty houses, only one had a phone. When you wanted to make a phone call, you went to that house (which, like every other house, always had an open door), stuck a couple of small coins on the table and made what was usually a pretty important call. I can remember no more than five cars on the street; if you saw a Mercedes, you knew someone had relatives visiting from abroad.

Now, most people are only interested in getting on their individual property and career ladders. It doesn’t really matter what wall the ladder is propped up against, just so long as they are climbing. The street I remember is no longer there; its once-open doors are all shut.

Money allows us to store our wealth very easily and for a long time. If this easy storage were taken away, would we still have an incentive to exploit the planet and all the species that inhabit it? With no way of easily ‘storing’ the long-term profit that results from taking more than we need, we would be much more likely only to consume resources as we needed them. A person would no longer be able to turn trees in a rainforest into numbers in a bank account, so would have no real reason to cut down a hectare
of rainforest every single second. It would make more sense to keep the trees in the earth until we needed them.

Consider the planet as a retail business, whose store managers are our world leaders. These managers of Earth Ltd are on short, four-year contracts, so they elect to make as much profit as quickly as they can, to give them a better chance of their contracts being renewed. They decide to sell some of the cash registers and shelving, to add a bit extra to the year’s bottom line and make the profit and loss account look healthier. It works: the shareholders – us – don’t bother to look at the balance sheet and the managers get their contracts extended. The following year, their ability to make money is diminished due to their reduction of important fixtures and fittings and so they have to do the same again, until they have used up every asset they have. In the mean-time, the shareholders have voted to re-invest very little of the profit, choosing instead to buy goods with a very short life and of little practical use.

For our planet, it is exactly the same. At the moment, we are liquidizing our assets and spending the profits on products with built-in obsolescence. This is a long-term business strategy no responsible businessperson would recommend. In 2009, Kalle Lasn, founder of the influential magazine
Adbusters
, said:

… we got rich by violating one of the central tenets of economics: thou shall not sell off your capital and call it income. And yet over the past 40 years we have clear-cut the forests, fished rivers and oceans to the brink of extinction and siphoned oil from the Earth as if it possessed an infinite supply. We’ve sold off our planet’s natural capital and called it income. And now the Earth, like the economy, is stripped.

I don’t see myself as a hugely spiritual person in the traditional sense. I try to practice what I call ‘applied spirituality’, in which I apply my beliefs in the physical world, rather than them being something abstract I talk about but rarely practice. The less discrepancy there is between the head, the heart, and the hands, the closer you are, I believe, to living honestly. To me, the spiritual and physical are two sides of the same coin.

I do see a non-physical benefit to living without money. When we work for people, beyond what we do for family and friends, it’s almost always an exchange: we do something because we get something in return. I believe that prostitution is to sex what buying and selling is to giving and receiving: the spirit in which the act is done is significantly different. When you give freely, for no other reason than the fact that you can make someone’s life more enjoyable, it builds bonds, friendships and, eventually, resilient communities. When something is done merely to get something in return, that bond isn’t created.

Another major motivation is much simpler and more emotional – I’m tired. I’m tired of witnessing the environmental destruction that takes place every day and playing a part, however small, in it. I’m tired of giving my money to a bank, which, however ethical it claims to be, nonetheless pursues infinite economic growth on a finite planet. I’m tired of seeing families and lands destroyed in the Middle East so that we in the West can fuel our lives on cheap energy. And I want to do something about it. I want community, not conflict; I want friendship, not fighting. I want to see people make peace with the planet, and with ourselves and all the other species that inhabit it.

It’s one thing to intellectualize the reasons why we should give up money, but it’s quite a challenge to try and do it. In 2007, I decided to give it a shot. I sold my beloved houseboat, moored in Bristol Harbour, and used the cash to set up a project called the ‘Freeconomy Community’. Some might, understandably, call me a hypocrite for using money in an attempt to accelerate its demise. However, I see money in the same way as I see oil: we should be using what we have to build sustainable infrastructures for the future.

I had experience of local trading schemes, such as LETS and Timebanks, in which people exchanged skills and time rather than money. Although I thought these schemes were a really positive alternative to the global monetary system, they still focused on exchange, rather than unconditional giving. My theory was that if you were part of a big enough community, with a diverse enough range of skills, you could help somebody without worrying about what that person could do for you in return. Security would lie in the fact that the community would be there to help any member whenever they needed it. The person whom you help may never help you, and a different person may help you though you have never helped them. The difference between this and the normal monetary system is that one uses figures on a computer screen to calculate our level of security, while the other sees security as the bonds we inevitably build with people when we do something just for the love of it. One system builds stronger communities, the other builds higher fences.

I used the profits from the sale of the boat to pay a web developer to work with me on building an online infrastructure through which people could help each other, not for profit but simply for the love of it. The over-riding aim was for the website
to act as a facilitator in enabling people to help each other for free, but how best to do this was up for some debate. In the end, I decided that sharing was at its heart; not only did sharing mean that fewer of the world’s resources would be used but it would also be a very devious way of bringing people together. Have you ever liked anyone
less
for sharing something with you? Exactly. Sharing builds bonds, reduces fear, and makes people feel better about the world they live in. Peace will only come when all the little interactions that occur around the world every day become more harmonious. The whole is made up of the detail.

The Freeconomy Community became a skill, tool, and space-sharing website, designed to bring people together and allow them to teach each other new skills, pool resources, and eventually be enabled to live a life in which money wasn’t the primary factor in everything they did. I called the site ‘justfortheloveofit.org’, which I felt summed up the spirit of the project. The early success of the website astounded me. The concept behind it was as old as the hills, but I suppose its presence on the internet gave it another dimension. Within a year, journalists were using the term ‘Freeconomy’ to describe the entire moneyless movement.

By early 2008, I felt I was getting closer to understanding what change I actually wanted to be. Having set up a project that successfully enabled people to start making the transition to sharing rather than selling their skills, I decided that if I wanted the world to place less emphasis on money, a decent way to start would be for me to try to live without it, to see whether it were even possible.

In June 2008, I decided that I was going to give up money for at least a year and resolved to start at the end of November, on
International ‘Buy Nothing’ Day. When I told my friends, they thought I’d gone crazy. Why, they asked, was I doing something so extreme (a word that often gets used about my way of living)? But what is ‘extreme’? To me, buying a plasma screen television for a couple of thousand pounds seems extreme. And given that some of the problems we will face in the future, such as climate change and ‘peak oil’, are, according to many leading scientists, likely to be extreme, how can we possibly expect the solutions to be moderate?

I come from a very sporting family and before I decided to give up money, I longed to be a mega-rich professional soccer player. Soccer didn’t teach me a lot that is relevant for moneyless living but it did show me that every game needs clear rules. Before I did anything else, I resolved to create a set of rules that I could easily explain and which I would follow for the duration of my moneyless year.

Those who inquire about the rules of this experiment mostly fall into two groups. On the one hand are those who are surprised that I would even be thinking of rules. Their logic says that it’s my game and I have no opponents, so why not just do as I feel fit at any given moment? On the other hand are those who want to know the answer to every conceivable scenario I could possibly get myself into.

The logic of the first group is somewhat flawed; I do have a couple of opponents. The scarier of the two is my inner demon,
which inevitably is weak when exposed to temptations like a ride into town on a wet winter’s evening, a shot of whiskey with my friends in front of the fire and, of course, chocolate. Without rules, I know I would sometimes have given in, and once I had succumbed, the floodgates would be opened. Knowing your weaknesses will always be one of your greatest strengths. I was less worried by my other opponent: potential critics. When you do something like I was doing, so publicly, you leave yourself open to all sorts of criticism if it fails. I’ve built up a really good relationship with almost all the journalists I have worked with; the ones I’ve been fortunate enough to meet have shown a lot of integrity and we have had mutually very beneficial partnerships. However, journalists are paid to get great stories and some publications prefer it juicy. I would be pretty naïve if I thought every producer and editor on the planet was out to promote the message of Freeconomy. One newspaper, whose name I will omit, held a meeting in which the editor asked his team whether or not they should send out an undercover journalist to see if they could catch me spending or accepting money. On this occasion, I happened to know the roommate of one of the editors in the meeting. How prepared they were to create a story one way or another, I’m not sure.

So what were these rules that were going to dictate the parameters of my existence for twelve months?

For one whole year I would not be able to receive or spend money. No checks, no credit cards, and no exceptions. Everything I needed or wanted in those twelve months would have to be achieved without either cash or its proxies. I closed my bank account, even though I knew it would be difficult to open a new one with no financial activity for a whole moneyless year.

Normality is not a word often used in the context of my experiment. The law of normality, however, was my most crucial rule as it provided the intellectual framework for making decisions in the myriad scenarios I’d find myself in during the year. Without this law, I wouldn’t be able to undertake my experiment and live a relatively normal life.

If somebody asked if something was within the rules of the experiment, I would ask myself ‘what would I normally do?’ Take one of the most common questions: ‘If a friend wants to cook you dinner one night, would you accept or would you have to barter for it?’ This type of question eventually drives you a bit crazy. Of course I’m not going to barter with a friend who offers me dinner. In my pre-moneyless days, I would never have offered to pay my friend for the food on my plate; to do so would have gone against every societal norm I was brought up to believe in.

There are some important points to clarify. First, if I offered the same friend dinner a couple of weeks later, or any other friend for that matter, they couldn’t refuse on the basis that they were worried I wouldn’t have enough food to survive for the week. That would not be a normal excuse. On top of that, if I ever felt people were inviting me to dinner more often than normal, out of concern for my wellbeing rather than just wanting to spend time together, then I would say ‘no’. Second, I intended to live off-grid for the year. Living ‘off-grid’ meant producing all my own energy for lighting, heating, cooking and communicating, and dealing with all my waste. However, that didn’t mean that if I were with a friend and they turned on a light or some music, I had to leave the room; that would be ridiculous. I had acquired a laptop computer and cell phone (for incoming calls only) from people who no longer wanted them; if I visited people far away from home and I needed to charge them, I would use their
electricity, if there were no other option, as that is what I would have done in the past. Similarly, if someone came and stayed with me, then I’d offer them any solar energy I had produced. Third, I started the year with a normal amount of food and clothing. To throw everything out on Buy Nothing Eve and start again would go against everything my year was about.