Intro
Check Step 46 for a history of how money developed from sacred origins into “a force for evil.”
Part 1: Separation and Oneness
This illusion is a prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for only the few people nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living beings and all of nature.” ~ Charles Eisenstein
He goes as far as to say to bring forth generosity and love and all dimensions of life, “we must dismantle the systems of domination that perpetuate the illusion of separation. Most notably the neoliberal system of Economics but also religion and politics.”
The difficulty is, we are perpetually bombarded and distracted by the reinforced narrative of individual sovereignty and freedom (liberty) with no discourse on social morality or what we owe each other.
Eisenstein says we must disengage from this system, not oppose it. To do this, we need a new story. Not the age of separation, but the story of Ascent.
Part 2
Systemically we need policy in place that align wealth with the sacred. Eisenstein brings up negative interest. This is when money circulates and investment continues, but the original capital loses value. These would lead us to “value” the capital less than the products or services. With positive interest, there is an incentive to hoard money (pull it out of circulation) and be rewarded through stockpiling, which encourages stagnation, otherwise known as a recession.
In 1906 Silvio Gesell proposed “ the natural economic order” where a stamp of a small percentage was periodically pasted onto paper currency, this maintenance was a fee on the currency.
If wealth is instead measured through happiness and well-being, it will be linked with intimate connections and communities, mutual benefit and attentiveness, which also provides emotional stability, and can generate it’s own economies.
Part 3
But what about land use, property, and ownership?
The consumer citizen has increasingly been distanced from the means of production, and nature, to remain focused on the separated individual self. We become “rational actors” or “rational optimizers.”
The tragedy of the Commons is an economic parable about how “rational actors” optimize individual wellbeing at the cost of the entire community, destroying the equilibrium to thrive for self-interest. Our current model exacerbates or encourages extraction, or commodifying the commons into private wealth, which leads to increase wealth consolidation and extractive damage.
As the myth of perpetual growth become obvious, we need a support system, which is why Eisenstein recommends a social dividend: call it UBI or welfare.
You may ask: where will the money come from, because with negative interest the money supply would continue to shrink?
We will develop a “Commons backed currency” to generate new money and align it with preserving nature. If the land was in a public trust, a social shared resource that could be lent (leased) to corporations for a limited amount of time, the lease would be our social dividend, capital, and currency.
This is a three-pronged attack to
- realign money with natural decay,
- alter the way land is used, letting it become the currency backing or capital as a communally shared resource, and
- letting pre-pollution taxing redirect innovation (and community) towards enriching a sustainable commons.