Eisenstein asks “Why is money a force for evil in the world?” When did money, once a sacred promise and gift, become a means to separate individuals from each other and nature, to create competition, extraction, and hoarding?
Key takeaways from Eisenstein's book "Sacred Economics"
1: We are ungrateful teenagers: the earth nurtured us into adolescence, but we won't become responsible adults.
2: The parable of the Eleventh Round.
3: Negative interest. Instead of money accruing value… what if it lost it?
We discuss the origin of money, how it developed as a sacred trust and could enrich lives and community, but through Interest (usury) and the parable of the Eleventh round we see how it destroyed community and the environment through unsustainable growth (capitalism) built into it's design.
We also discuss the Tunnel Effect, and how it leads to the problem of solving capitalism's problems with more capitalism. Primarily this is a doubling down into existing systems and ideologies when under stress, which -of course- is manufactured by capitalism.
0:00 Intro (Ryder's 3 takeaways)
8:23 Part 1: Getting stuck
11:47 Part 2: History of money (potlatch into trade)
18:09 Part 3: The Eleventh Round
28: 19 Part 4: Transition from The Hedonic Treadmill
31:36 Part 5: Outro