121
" If the material world is fundamentally an abundant world, all the more abundant is the spiritual world: the creations of the human mind — songs, stories, filmes, ideas, and everything else that goes by the name of intellectual property. Because in the digital age we can replicate and spread them at virtually no cost, artificial scarcity must be imposed upon them in order to keep them in the monetized realm. Industry and the government enforce scarcity through copyrights, patents, and encryption standards, allowing the holders of such property to profit from owning it.
Scarcity, then, is mostly an illusion, a cultural creation. But because we live, almost wholly, in a culturally constructed world, our experience of this scarcity is quite real — real enough that nearly a billion people today are malnourished, and some 5,000 children die each day from hunger-related causes. So our responses to this scarcity — anxiety and greed — are perfectly understandable. When something is abundant, no one hesitates to share it. We live in an abundant world, made otherwise through our perceptions, our culture, and our deep invisible stories. Our perception of scarcity is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Money is central to the construction of the self-reifying illusion of scarcity. "
― Charles Eisenstein , Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition
125
" Unlike other objects, money retains no trace of its origins and no trace of those through whom it has passed. Whereas a gift seems to partake of its giver, everyone's money is the same. If I have $2,000 in the bank, half from my friend and half from my enemy, I cannot choose to spend me enemy's $1,000 first and save my friend's. Each dollar is identical.
Wisely, perhaps, many people refuse on principle to mix business with friendship, wary of the essential conflict between money and personal relationship. Money depersonalizes a relationship, turning two people into mere "parties to an exchange" driven by the universal goal of maximizing self-interest. If I seek to maximize self-interest, perhaps at your expense, how can we be friends? And when in our highly monetized society we meet nearly all our needs with money, what personal gifts remain from which to build friendship? "
― Charles Eisenstein , Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition
130
" Nonetheless, I (like many others) felt a wrongness in the world, a wrongness that seeped through the cracks of my privileged, insulated childhood. I never fully accepted what I had been offered as normal. Life, I knew, was supposed to be more joyful than this, more real, more meaningful, and the world was supposed to be more beautiful. We were not supposed to hate Mondays and live for the weekends and holidays. We were not supposed to have to raise our hands to be allowed to pee. We were not supposed to be kept indoors on a beautiful day, day after day. "
― Charles Eisenstein , The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible
132
" In any event, today it is still money that gives birth to the ten thousand things. Whatever you want to build in this world, you start with an investment, with money. And then, when you have finished your project, it is time to sell it. All things come from money; all things return to money. Money is therefore not only a universal aim; it is a universal means as well, and indeed it is largely because it is a universal means that it is also a universal end, of which one can never have too much. Or at least, that is how we perceive it.
Many times I've been witness to discussions about creating an intentional community or launching some other project, only for it to end with a disheartening admission that it will never happen because, "Where are we going to get the money?" Money is quite understandably seen as the crucial factor in determining what we can create: after all, it can buy virtually any good, can induce people to perform virtually any service. "Everything has its price."
Money can even, it seems, purchase intangibles such as social status, political power, and divine goodwill (or if not that, at least the favor of religious authorities, which is the next best thing). We are quite accustomed to seeing money as the key to the fulfillment of all our desires. How many dreams do you have that you assume you could fulfill if only (and only if) you had the money? Thus we mortgage our dreams to money, turning it from means to end. "
― Charles Eisenstein , Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition
136
" Today's usury-money is part of a story of separation, in which 'more for me is less for you.' That is the essence of interest: I will only "share" money with you if end up with even more of it in return. On the systemic level as well, interest on money creates competition, anxiety and the polarization of wealth. Meanwhile, the phrase
'more for me is less for you' is also the motto of the ego, and a truism given the discrete and separate self of modern economics, biology, and philosophy. "
― Charles Eisenstein , Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition
137
" Today we associate money with the profane, and for good reason. If anything is sacred in this world, it is surely not money. Money seems to be the enemy of our better instincts, as is clear every time the thought "I can't afford to" blocks an impulse toward kindness or generosity. Money seems to be the enemy of beauty, as the disparaging term "a sellout" demonstrates. Money seems to be the enemy of every worthy social and political reform, as corporate power steers legislation toward the aggrandizement of its own profits. Money seems to be destroying the earth, as we pillage the oceans, the forets, the soil, and every species to feed a greed that knows no end. "
― Charles Eisenstein , Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition
138
" It is ironic that money, originally a means of connecting gifts with needs, originally an outgrowth of a sacred gift economy, is now precisely what blocks the blossoming of our desire to give, keeping us in deadening jobs out of economic necessity, and forestalling our most generous impulses with the words, "I can't afford to do that." We live in an omnipresent anxiety, borne of the scarcity of the money which we depend on for life — witness the phrase "the cost of living." Our purpose for being, the development and full expression of our gifts, is mortgaged to the demands of money, to making a living, to surviving.
Yet no one, no matter how wealthy, secure, or comfortable, can ever feel fulfilled in a life where those gifts remain latent. Even the best-paid job, if it does not engage our gifts, soon feels deadening, and we think, "I was not put here on earth to do this." Even when a job does engage our gifts, if the purpose is something we don't believe in, the same deadening feeling of futility arises again, the feeling that we are not living our own lives, but only the lives we are paid to live. "Challenging" and "interesting" are not good enough, because our gifts are sacred, and therefore meant for a sacred purpose. "
― Charles Eisenstein , Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition
139
" For indeed we live in a world of fundamental abundance, a world where vast quantities of food, energy, and materials go to waste. Half the world starves while the other half wastes enough to feed the first half. In the Third World and our own ghettos, people lack food, shelter, and other basic necessities and cannot afford to buy them. Meanwhile, we pour vast resources into wars, plastic junk, and innumerable other products that do not serve human happiness. Obviously, poverty is not due to a lack of productive capacity. Nor is it due to a lack of willingness to help: many people would love to feed the poor, to restore nature, and do other meaningful work but cannot because there is no money in it. Money utterly fails to connect gifts and needs. "
― Charles Eisenstein , Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition
