Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition
Charles Eisenstein
Language: English
Pages: 469
ISBN: 1583943978
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Sacred Economics traces the history of money from ancient gift economies to modern capitalism, revealing how the money system has contributed to alienation, competition, and scarcity, destroyed community, and necessitated endless growth. Today, these trends have reached their extreme—but in the wake of their collapse, we may find great opportunity to transition to a more connected, ecological, and sustainable way of being.
This book is about how the money system will have to change—and is already changing—to embody this transition. A broadly integrated synthesis of theory, policy, and practice, Sacred Economics explores avant-garde concepts of the New Economics, including negative-interest currencies, local currencies, resource-based economics, gift economies, and the restoration of the commons. Author Charles Eisenstein also considers the personal dimensions of this transition, speaking to those concerned with "right livelihood" and how to live according to their ideals in a world seemingly ruled by money. Tapping into a rich lineage of conventional and unconventional economic thought, Sacred Economics presents a vision that is original yet commonsense, radical yet gentle, and increasingly relevant as the crises of our civilization deepen.
Sacred Economics official website: http://sacred-economics.com/
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EVOLVER EDITIONS promotes a new counterculture that recognizes humanity's visionary potential and takes tangible, pragmatic steps to realize it. EVOLVER EDITIONS explores the dynamics of personal, collective, and global change from a wide range of perspectives. EVOLVER EDITIONS is an imprint of North Atlantic Books and is produced in collaboration with Evolver, LLC.
completely and permanently separated from the person who surrendered it.”6 When we pay for everything we receive, we remain independent, disconnected, free from obligation, and free from ties. No one can call in favors; no one has any leverage over us. In a gift economy, if someone asks for help, you can’t really say no: that person and the whole society says, explicitly or not, “Hey, remember all the things we have done for you? Remember when we babysat your children? When we rescued your cow?
commodity realm. The shrinkage of the money realm described in Chapter 14, then, holds the possibility of liberating more and more of our things from the chains of commodity. After all, we have a surfeit of manufactured goods, the result of standardized mass production and efficiencies of scale. Our tremendous overcapacity indicates that we don’t need these efficiencies, nor so much mass production. Trapped by the madness of growth-demanding money, we compulsively produce more and more cheap,
customer, supplier, and competitor knew your true costs! However, monetary transparency fits in naturally to the gift-inspired business models I explored in Chapter 21, which require that you honestly reveal your costs and invite gifts on top of that. No longer would one be able to lie about one’s costs in order to profit from the other party’s lack of knowledge. Many people would find the idea of no financial privacy very threatening. Since money today is so bound up with self, we would feel
because of our perception that all is horribly wrong. PART II THE ECONOMICS OF REUNION As our sojourn of separation comes to an end and we reunite with nature, our attitude of human exceptionalism from the laws of nature is ending as well. For decades, the environmental movement has been telling us, “We are not exempt from nature’s laws.” Increasingly, painfully, we are experiencing the truth of that. A child takes from his mother, blissfully heedless of her sacrifices and her pain; and
sustainable baseline. I believe that we missed our chance for an effortless (Figure 4) transition in the 1960s, which really represented the natural zenith of the Age of Separation. And we caught a glimpse of it, too! We caught a glimpse of a more beautiful world, so close. The hippies saw it and lived it for a few shining moments, but the old stories were too strong. Instead of the hippies pulling us all into a new world, we dragged them back into ours. The longer the Age of Separation