Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition (48 page)

I usually do not advocate heroic, abrupt transitions. If you are wealthy, perhaps a good way to gently adopt nonaccumulation is to apply demurrage to your own accumulated wealth right now, shrinking it by about 5 percent per year. It is going to happen anyway in a sacred economy—why not start living it now?

Poor people, of course, have always lived in nonaccumulation. The economy is now forcing it upon the middle class as well, as most people buy things on credit instead of saving up for them. While interest-bearing debts will no longer dominate economic life in the future, the obsolescence of savings, already well underway for the vast majority of Americans, is a forerunner of a nonaccumulative economy.

There is still a role for large aggregations of capital, and there are people who have a gift for using money as a medium of sacred creativity, as a ritual talisman for the coordination of human activity and the focusing of human intention. It is money that decides whether, tomorrow, five thousand people will build a skyscraper, clean up a toxic waste dump, or create a high-tech film. Of course, there are other rituals through which we coordinate human activity, some of which invoke stories and powers prior even to money, but it is a potent tool nonetheless. This is the essence of “sacred investing,” the subject of the next chapter. To the holders of wealth, I invite you to think in terms of what you will create through collective human agency. Or, how can you use money in the most beautiful way?

Each organism in nature, each cell in the body, can handle only a certain volume of energy throughput. We are the same. Too much flow through a channel can burst the channel. Too big an accumulation is a tumor. Frivolous purchases such as a castle you never go to, or a fifteenth Rolls-Royce, are symptoms of excessive income. The organism is desperately trying to dissipate the energy flow, letting go and holding on at the same time. What the profligate rich man really wants to do is to give it away so as to balance giving and receiving, yet instead he just buys stuff and keeps it. What is the fear that impels him to hold on even as he lets go? It is the fear that rules the separate self, alone in the universe. Accumulation is a way
to enlarge the tiny separate self. Yet ultimately this enlargement is a blatant lie. We leave this world as we entered it: naked.

Most of the baubles of the rich are substitutions for what they truly need—sports cars substituting for freedom, mansions compensating for the lost connections of a shrunken self, status symbols in place of genuine respect from self and others. A sad game it is, the charade of wealth. Even the security it supposedly brings is a deceit, as life’s travails have a way of infiltrating the fortress of wealth, afflicting its inhabitants with distorted forms of the same social ills that affect everyone else. Of course, you can imagine various medical emergencies and such in which wealth can be a lifesaver, but so what? 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.

Lest you think I am doing some noble thing in practicing nonaccumulation, let me assure you that when I began to live in this way, I had no sense of self-sacrifice, but rather of lightness and freedom. I am a person of quite average generosity, and far from saintly. This is not a noble idea I am offering you; it is a practical one. First, because it keeps my heart light and free. Second, because I know that as I give, so shall I receive. Third, because I will live in an ongoing wealth of connectedness, the expansion of the circle of self that happens through the Gift. Fourth, because I believe that I will live beautifully even in material terms. For example, I love the sea, and for years I dreamed of one day living in a house by the shore. It is a dream so vivid I can hear the gulls and smell the salty air. I once thought that to have it, I would have to make an awful lot of money. Now I believe
that though I may never “own” a house by the sea, I will be invited to stay in one “any time,” and when the owner says, “Make yourself at home,” he will mean it from the bottom of his heart.

If the world receives my work enthusiastically, then I expect to receive a great many gifts, far more than I can use for myself. What a waste it would be to accumulate great assets, stocks and bonds, investments and portfolios, basements and attics full of possessions! Why accumulate when there is so much excess in this world to share? Whether or not a decaying currency and gift economy appear in this lifetime, we can live in it right now. We can, to use Gesell’s phrase, reduce money to the rank of umbrellas, freely lending it or giving it to friends who are in need. There is, of course, no guarantee that I will always receive the money or other gifts I need when I need them. I expect sometimes to have no money at all, but for this to be a matter of little anxiety. On the other hand, I might starve and regret not having accumulated and protected a nest egg. But I doubt it, and for me the freedom from worry and anxiety—the open, flowing, light experience of letting it go—far outweighs the risk. If you want guarantees, then go ahead and accumulate, until you discover that the promised security is a mirage, that life’s vicissitudes have a way of invading the fortress of wealth.

At a deep level, the distinction between accumulation and nonaccumulation is a false distinction that smuggles in assumptions of scarcity and separation. A gift mind-set experiences the abundance of the world as a personal abundance and lives an experience of life that conforms to that mind-set. The mind-set of separation sees gifts, loans, and savings as three very different things, but are they really? If I am in a phase of life where I receive more than I can use, I could give it away, thereby generating gratitude, or I could loan it to others, relying on obligation instead of gratitude, or I could just save
the money, seemingly not relying on other people at all. But these three choices are not as different as they may seem. First, as discussed earlier, a very blurry line divides gratitude and obligation, and in gift cultures each reinforces the other. Whether it is gratitude that moves someone to give to those who have given or the social agreements that, ultimately, are based on the very same principle of gratitude (the rightness of giving to those who give), the result is the same. As for savings and investment, in a credit-based currency system like our own, these are no different from lending. A savings account is a loan-at-call to a bank. Like a loan, monetary savings says, “I have given to others in the past and can call upon others to give to me in the future.” Even in the case of equities or physical commodities, accumulation depends on social conventions of ownership.

In a sense, then, it is impossible for the recipient of gifts
not
to accumulate. As long as I give within a social witnessing, I will build up a source of abundance for the future. (Even if there is no social witnessing, I believe the universe will return to us what we have given, perhaps in some other form, perhaps, indeed, multiplied a hundredfold.) Ultimately, then, the essence of nonaccumulation lies in the intention with which money is given, lent, invested, or saved. In the spirit of the gift, we focus on the purpose and let the return to ourselves be secondary, an afterthought. In the spirit of accumulation, we seek to ensure and maximize the return and let the destination of the gift, loan, or investment serve that end. The former is a state of freedom, abundance, and trust. The latter is a state of anxiety, scarcity, and control. Whoever lives in the former is rich. Whoever lives in the latter is poor, no matter how much wealth he or she possesses.

In the future, when social mechanisms are in place to eliminate economic rents (i.e., profits from merely owning land, money, etc.),
the way of living I have described will accord with economic logic, not just spiritual logic. When money decays anyway, it is better to lend it to others at zero interest than it is to keep more than you need. Moreover, as the mentality of abundance becomes prevalent, the distinction between a loan, a gift, and an investment will blur. We will be secure in knowing that whether or not there is a formal agreement to repay a gift, an obligation has been created, if not with a particular person then with society or even the universe. This realization is a natural consequence of the new Story of Self—the connected self—that underlies the sacred economy we are transitioning into. More for you is more for me. From the spiritual perspective this has always been true, even at the height of the Age of Separation. From the economic perspective, it was true in the gift culture of yore, and it is becoming true again as we establish new economic institutions to recreate gift economics in a modern context.

These new, gift-aligned economic institutions are both a cause
and a result
of a change in general attitudes. When enough people begin to live in nonaccumulation, they will establish a psychic foundation upon which the new economic institutions can stand. Practically speaking, people will recognize the new kinds of money as something that reflects their values and spiritual intuitions. They will “get it”; they will adopt it enthusiastically. This is happening already: despite the huge structural disincentives for using complementary currencies, people still find them exciting and alluring. Even though there is as yet little economic reason to use them, people want to anyway, understanding intuitively that these currencies are in alignment with the new Story of Self they are stepping into. Already, our spiritual intuitions signal in advance the truth of coming times: that possessions are a burden, that true wealth comes from sharing, that as we do unto others, so we do unto ourselves.

Let us be clear: the purpose of nonaccumulation is not to exculpate oneself from the crimes of a money-based civilization. That is merely ego. You don’t get virtue points for poverty; nonaccumulation is not a goal in and of itself. The goal is to enjoy true wealth, the wealth of connection and flow, rather than the counterfeit wealth of having. But what if you have wealth beyond what you can share in the ordinary flow of life?

To the conscientious person, such wealth might seem to be more a burden than a gift. We are bound, and we are pleased, to make right use of what we have been given. Wealth is no exception. Those who are blessed and cursed with a lot of it have no more reason to abdicate its duties than anyone has to spurn the gifts, responsibilities, and opportunities to serve that we are each born with.

Excess wealth, whether inherited from family or from an earlier time in one’s own life, carries with it a desire to use it well. It is a dharma, a call to service. To squander it on baubles, to give it away senselessly, or to devote oneself to its increase are all ways of refusing that call. The challenge of excess wealth is to give of it in a way that is beautiful. This may take years or decades and involve long-term planning and the creation of entire organizations, or it may happen through a single generous act. Either way, this is the kind of investment that is aligned with a future economy in which status comes from giving, not having, and security comes not from accumulation, but from being a nexus of flow. It is an entirely different mentality from the traditional paradigm of investment, which we equate with the increase of wealth.

Originally I thought that we ought to do away with the word and concept of
investment
altogether. Then I considered its etymology: it 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.