Tagged with Gift Economy

In this interview, I talk with the RS contributor and Sacred Economics author about the ritualistic origins of money, negative interest banking, the spirit of the gift, the morphing future of Occupy, and the strange alchemical art of making economics sacred. (more)

Despite being able to pay for everything we need, we do not feel like all our needs have actually been met. We feel empty, hungry. Perhaps the things we need the most are absent from the products of mass production, cannot be quantified or commoditized, and are therefore inherently outside the money realm.  (more)

As you step into a gift mentality, the first steps will be small ones. Perhaps if you run a business, you will convert a small part of it to a gift model. Whatever steps you take, know that you are preparing for the economy of the future. (more)

Etymologically speaking, to invest means to clothe, as in to take naked money and put it into new vestments, something material, something real in the physical or social realm. Money is naked human potential -- creative energy that has not yet been "clothed" with material or social constructions. Right investment is to array money in sacred vestments. (more)

Accumulation adds some measure to our security, but not for long. The mentality of accumulation is coincident with the ascent of separation, and it is ending in tandem with the Age of Separation. Accumulation makes no sense for the expanded self of the gift economy. (more)

The transition to sacred economy is part of a larger shift in our ways of thinking, relating, and being. Economic logic alone is not enough to sustain it. As we heal the spirit-matter rupture, we discover that economics and spirituality are inseparable. On the personal level, economics is about how to give our gifts and meet our needs. (more)

The new exchange systems we are exploring blur the boundary between the monetary and nonmonetary realms and therefore the standard definition of the "economy." How would we measure it in the absence of a common unit of account? Ultimately, underneath money, is the totality of what human beings do for each other. (more)

Local currency is often proposed as a way to revitalize local economies, insulate them from global market forces, and re-create community. There are at present thousands of them around the world. So what's the catch? (more)

Sacred Economics envisions a world where people do things for love, not money. What would you do, freed from slavery to money? What does your own life, your true life, look like? Underneath the substitute lives we are paid to live, there is a real life, your life. (more)

The personal and planetary mirror each other. The connection is more than mere analogy: the kind of work that we force ourselves to do is precisely the kind of work that despoils the planet. We don't really want to do it to our bodies; we don't really want to do it to the world. (more)

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. A new economic system is emerging that embodies the new human identity of the connected self living in cocreative partnership with Earth. (more)

Burning Man is this wild party on the one hand, and the most public-spirited city in America on the other. The essential cause of this is the giving of gifts. A gift economy is founded on principles that are diametrically opposed to those that dominate our consumer culture. (more)

The lie of separation in the age of usury is now complete. We have explored its farthest extremes, and have seen the deserts and the prisons, the concentration camps and the wars, the wastage of the good, the true, and the beautiful. Now, the capacities we have developed through our long journey will serve us well in the imminent Age of Reunion. (more)

The selling of $1000 Burning Man tickets on eBay has shaken up the ethos of participation and radical inclusion. Despite the rhetoric and philosophy, it is no secret that some burners are more equal than others. What's new is that the most fundamental criterion of participation -- entry -- is now subject to market pressures. (more)

When I ask people what is missing most from their lives, the most common answer is "community." But how can we build community when its building blocks- -- the things we do for each other -- have all been converted into money? (more)

Community is impossible in a highly monetized society since community is woven from gifts. Intimacy comes from co-creation, not co-consumption. We must do more than simply get people together: we need to create together. Creating gift circles can reduce our dependence on the traditional market and help us transition to a co-creative partnership of interdependence. (more)

We are transitioning into a time that realizes the truth of the connected self, in which not only my well-being, but my very existence, my very being-ness, depends on the well-being and indeed the existence of all other beings on the planet. I am describing the economic dimension of the truth of interbeingness. To move fully to a gift model of economy would bring the form of this website into alignment with its content. (more)

Hard work has been relatively recently enshrined as a natural obligation. Perhaps 99% of humans' time on Earth has been as hunter-gatherers who spend much less time producing subsistence than do agricultural and industrial workers. (more)

Is capitalism the only system ever to support large-scale, sophisticated cultures? Hell, no! Gift economies have been doing that splendidly, throughout history. In Native North America, they were the right-hand of our constitutional democracies, and still flourish underground.  (more)