Sacred Economics 🍇

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she256 Book Club

May 1, 2021

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Part I

Gift Economies

• “Circular” economies, needs are met with gifts
• Traditionally, gift networks tied to kinship networks
• Gifts retain uniqueness, wholeness & interdependency
• Gifts are not purchases
• Money originated as “social currencies” & credit, not bartering
• Birth of money gave rise to the idea of a “discrete and separate self”

Money as a Social Agreement

• “Money” is a social agreement between humans, similar to laws and religion
• a way to coordinate, organize and activate human activity across a larger scale
• Ancient Greeks were the first to think about money abstractly and separate concrete from the abstract
• Led to the rise of the individual and the age of “separation”
• Breakdown of traditional gift economies
• Commoditization of everything
• Logic & reason replace interconnection and community

The School of Athens, Raphael

The Illusion of Property & Scarcity

• Root assumption of biology, economics & philosophy is scarcity
• But we live in a world of abundance, according to Eisenstein
• Scarcity is a perception rooted in money
• The more money invested, the less likely we are to give
• World faces problem of maldistribution, not underproduction
• “Nature” isn’t owned by humans - we commoditized it and buy/sell it as property
• Converting the “commons” into property & money
• The “original robbery”

Conversion of the Commons into Commodities

• Capital of the commons:
• Spiritual
• Cultural
• Social
• Natural
• Commons → commodity
• Everything that was one free has been stripped and sold back to us
• Music
• Art
• Childcare
• Relentless pursuit of growth to meet the same basic needs

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“Strip-mining of the commons”

The Economics of Usury

• Usury: charging interest on money
• The way new money is created in the United States, debt outstanding > money in circulation
• Leads to unsustainable emphasis on economic growth
• Strip-mining the commons to satiate growth and the interest rates of the wealthy
• Will never be able to fully repay debt in the current system
• Leads to ordeals like the dot com bubble or the 2008 financial crisis

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Portrait of Cosimo the Elder, Pontormo

Separation to Reunion

• Humanity is facing a crisis - we’ve exhausted all our commons and can no longer grow to repay our debt
• Finite resources cannot pay infinite debt
• “Peak Everything”
• Maturing from childhood & adolescence of humanity to adulthood
• Age of Reunion with nature, relationships and self
• A transformation of money
• Death of the usury system

“You give according to your abilities and, linked with others of like spirit, you receive according to your needs.”

Part II

Part III

Bringing back gift culture

• Gifts create dependence on others & society for survival
• Today, we don’t need communities to survive
• Independence = a virtue in the modern world
• Refusal to receive someone’s gift denies a connection with that person
• “Gift circle:” connecting needs with gifts in an authentic way

Native American potlatch - “giving feast”

Nonaccumulation of possessions

• Accumulation of “things” started in the agricultural era and became a desirable trait in partners
• Security of accumulation is an illusion (wealth ≠ happiness)
• Income topping - method to prevent accumulation through placing a ceiling on yearly income
• People accumulate to feel less lonely as separate selves in an alien universe
• Nonaccumulation = freedom, free expression of gifts

The Tower of Babel, Pieter Bruegel the Elder

““We are all going to die anyway, and no matter how long you live, the moment will come when you look back upon your years and they seem short, a flash of lightning in the dark of night, and you realize that the purpose of life is not after all to survive in maximum security and comfort, but that we are here to give, to create that which is beautiful to us.” 🪐

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Sacred investing & right livelihood

• Putting your money in zero or negative-return projects
• Not “ethical investing” or “socially conscious investing”
• Giving money strengthens ties with the community → generates gratitude
• Humanity sits on a bed of “usury money” - deploy exploitative wealth to new purposes
• Right livelihood: living off gifts
• Anything that shrinks the money realm

Endangered Hawaiian rainforest

Gift-based models in business

Community & a new materialism

• Community arises from actual meeting of needs with gifts
• Not “artificial dependencies”
• Impersonal money cannot meet unquantifiable needs for love, community and beauty
• We crave the intimate, personal and unique
• Sacred objects: embody the infinite → putting care & beauty into everything we make

“Sacred Economics is part of the healing of the spirit/matter divide, the human/nature divide, and the art/work divide…”

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Still Life with Flowers, Fruit and Birds, Jan van Os