Introduction. The following is the first installment from Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition, available from EVOLVER EDITIONS/North Atlantic Books.
Visit the Sacred Economics Homepage here. Introduction The purpose of this book is to make money and human economy as sacred as everything else in the universe. Today we associate money with the profane, and for good reason. If anything is sacred in this world, it is surely not money. From at least the time that Jesus threw the money changers from the temple, we have sensed that there is something unholy about money. At the same time, no one can deny that money has a mysterious, magical quality as well, the power to alter human behavior and coordinate human activity. Obviously, if we are to make money into something sacred, nothing less than a wholesale revolution in money will suffice, a transformation of its essential nature.
What we call recession, an earlier culture might have called "God abandoning the world. " Chapter 1, "The Gift World" (Pt. 2) The following is the second installment from Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition, available from EVOLVER EDITIONS/North Atlantic Books.
You can read the Introduction here, and visit the Sacred Economics homepage here. The converging crises of our time all arise from a common root that we might call Separation. Taking many formsthe human/nature split, the disintegration of community, the division of reality into material and spiritual realmsSeparation is woven into every aspect of our civilization. It is also unsustainable: it generates great and growing crises that are propelling us into a new era, an Age of Reunion. Separation is not an ultimate reality, but a human projection, an ideology, a story. Money is a system of social agreements, meanings, and symbols that develops over time.
Part I of Sacred Economics illuminates the economic system that has arisen on the foundation of the story of Separation. Chapter 1. Chapter 2, "The Illusion of Scarcity" (Pt. 3) The following is the third installment from Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition, available from EVOLVER EDITIONS/North Atlantic Books.
You can read the Introduction here, and visit the Sacred Economics homepage here. Chapter 2 The Illusion of Scarcity With unabated bounty the land of England blooms and grows; waving with yellow harvests; thick-studded with workshops, industrial implements, with fifteen millions of workers, understood to be the strongest, the cunningest and the willingest our Earth ever had; these men are here; the work they have done, the fruit they have realized is here, abundant, exuberant on every hand of us: and behold, some baleful fiat as of Enchantment has gone forth, saying, Touch it not, ye workers, ye master-workers, ye master-idlers; none of you can touch it, no man of you shall be the better for it; this is enchanted fruit!
Chapter 3, "Money and the Mind" (Pt. 4) The following is the fourth installment from Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition, available from EVOLVER EDITIONS/North Atlantic Books.
You can read the Introduction here, and visit the Sacred Economics homepage here. Chapter 3 Money and the Mind When all are isolated by egoism, there is nothing but dust, and at the advent of a storm, nothing but mire. Benjamin Constant The power to induce a collective hallucination of scarcity is only one of the ways money affects our perceptions. Here we are on Chapter 3, and I have not even defined money yet! Economists folklore holds that coins were invented in order to provide a guarantee of weight and purity for the underlying commodity metal.
Chapter 4, "The Trouble with Property" (Pt. 5) The following is the fifth installment from Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition, available from EVOLVER EDITIONS/North Atlantic Books.
You can read the Introduction here, and visit the Sacred Economics homepage here. What would be the result in heaven itself if those who get there first instituted private property in the surface of heaven, and parceled it out in absolute ownership among themselves, as we parcel out the surface of the earth? --Henry George Man did not make the earth, and, though he had a natural right to occupy it, he had no right to locate as his property in perpetuity any part of it; neither did the Creator of the earth open a land-office, from whence the first title-deeds should issue. --Thomas Paine. Chapter 5, "The Corpse of the Commons" (Pt. 6) The following is the sixth installment from Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition, available from EVOLVER EDITIONS/North Atlantic Books.
You can read the Introduction here, and visit the Sacred Economics homepage here. We cry shame on the feudal baron who forbade the peasant to turn a clod of earth unless he surrendered to his lord a fourth of his crop. We call those the barbarous times. But if the forms have changed, the relations have remained the same, and the worker is forced, under the name of free contract, to accept feudal obligations. For, turn where he will, he can find no better conditions. At the foundation of every great fortune lies a great crime. Despite land's obvious independence of human effort for its existence, land is not so different from any other kind of property. Cultural and Spiritual Capital Natural capital is one of four broad categories of the commonwealth that also comprises social, cultural, and spiritual capital.
Chapter 6, "The Economics of Usury" (Pt. 7) The following is the seventh installment from Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition, available from EVOLVER EDITIONS/North Atlantic Books.
You can read the Introduction here, and visit the Sacred Economics homepage here. In spite of the holy promises of people to banish war once and for all, in spite of the cry of millions "never again war" in spite of all the hopes for a better future I have this to say: If the present monetary system based on interest and compound interest remains in operation, I dare to predict today that it will take less than twenty-five years until we have a new and even worse war. Chapter 7, "The Crisis of Civilization" (Pt. 8) The following is the eighth installment from Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition, available from EVOLVER EDITIONS/North Atlantic Books.
You can read the Introduction here, and visit the Sacred Economics homepage here. We have bigger houses but smaller families; 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. Chapter 8, "The Turning of the Age" (Pt. 9) The following is the ninth installment from Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition, available from EVOLVER EDITIONS/North Atlantic Books.
You can read the Introduction here, and visit the Sacred Economics homepage here. For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to everyone that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still. --John Maynard Keynes (1931) Chapter 9, "The Story of Value" (Pt. 10) The following is the tenth installment from Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition, available from EVOLVER EDITIONS/North Atlantic Books.
You can read the Introduction here, and visit the Sacred Economics homepage here. 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. "
Chapter 10, The Law of Return (Pt. 11) The following is the eleventh installment from Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition, available from EVOLVER EDITIONS/North Atlantic Books. You can read the Introduction here, and visit the Sacred Economics homepage here. Socialism failed because it couldn't tell the economic truth; capitalism may fail because it couldn't tell the ecological truth. --Lester Brown Here is a certainty: the linear conversion of resources into waste is unsustainable on a finite planet. Chapter 11, Currencies of the Commons (Pt. 12) The following is the twelfth installment from Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition, available from EVOLVER EDITIONS/North Atlantic Books.
You can read the Introduction here, and visit the Sacred Economics homepage here. All money is a matter of belief. Adam Smith We live on a naturally abundant planet, the source of life-sustaining gifts for us all. As observed in Chapter 4, the planets richessoil, water, air, minerals, the genomewere created by no man and should therefore be the property of none, but held in common stewardship for all beings. But what to do with this realization? The metamorphosis of human economy that is underway in our time will go more deeply than the Marxist revolution because the Story of the People that it weaves wont be just a new fiction of ownership, but a recognition of its fictive, conventional nature.
Today, access to money, via credit, goes to those who are likely to expand the realm of goods and services. Chapter 12, Negative-Interest Economics (Pt. 13) The following is the thirteenth installment from Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition, available from EVOLVER EDITIONS/North Atlantic Books. You can read the Introduction here, and visit the Sacred Economics homepage here. Debt can endure forever; wealth cannot, because its physical dimension is subject to the destructive force of entropy. Chapter 13, Steady-State and Degrowth Economics (Pt. 14) The following is the fourteenth installment from Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition, available from EVOLVER EDITIONS/North Atlantic Books.
You can read the Introduction here, and visit the Sacred Economics homepage here. Infinite growth of material consumption in a finite world is an impossibility. --E. F. Schumacher Sustainability Reconsidered The last two chapters have outlined an economy that is sustainable: it incorporates the ecological limits of the planet, and it thrives without a structural need for endless growth in consumption. I have long been impatient with sustainability, as if that were an end in itself.
A core concept of sacred economics is that it is an extension of ecology rather than an exception to it. The view of nature as a vast competitive arena, a Darwinian struggle for survival among discrete competing organisms, reverberates throughout economic theory. Chapter 14, The Social Dividend (Pt. 15) The following is the fifteenth installment from Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition, available from EVOLVER EDITIONS/North Atlantic Books.
You can read the Introduction here, and visit the Sacred Economics homepage here. Most men would feel insulted if it were proposed to employ them in throwing stones over a wall, and then in throwing them back, merely that they might earn their wages. But many are no more worthily employed now. --Henry David Thoreau Clearly the most unfortunate people are those who must do the same thing over and over again, every minute, or perhaps twenty to the minute.
Chapter 15, Local and Complementary Currency (Pt. 16) Chapter 16, Transition to Gift Economy (Pt.17) Chapter 22, Community and the Unquantifiable (pt. 23) Chapter 20, Right Livelihood and Sacred Investing (Part 21) Chapter 17, Summary and Roadmap (Pt.18) Chapter 18, Relearning Gift Culture (Pt. 19) Chapter 19, Nonaccumulation (Pt. 20) Chapter 21, Working in the Gift (Part 22) Chapter 23, A New Materialism (Pt. 24) Money, Gift and Society in the Age of Transition. Chapter 24, Conclusion: The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Tell Us Is Possible (Pt. 25)