Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition

Life has become a private affair. We are uncomfortable with intimacy and connection, which are among the greatest of our unmet needs today. To be truly seen and heard, to be truly known, is a deep human need. Our hunger for it is so omnipresent, so much a part of our experience of life, that we no more know what it is we are missing than a fish kno

We in the richest societies have too many calories even as we starve for beautiful, fresh food; we have overlarge houses but lack spaces that truly embody our individuality and connectedness; media surround us everywhere while we starve for authentic communication. We are offered entertainment every second of the day but lack the chance to play. In

It is only when high income translates into accumulation, frivolous consumption, or socially destructive consumption that it makes sense to restrict it. In other words, the problem is not with high income; it is with the results of the income getting stuck at some point in its circulation, accumulating and stagnating.

To give and to receive, to owe and be owed, to depend on others and be depended on—this is being fully alive. To neither give nor receive, but to pay for everything; to never depend on anyone, but to be financially independent; to not be bound to a community or place, but to be mobile … such is the illusory paradise of the discrete and separate sel

Much of what goes by the name of modesty or humility is actually a refusal of ties, a distancing from others, a refusal to receive. We are as afraid to receive as we are to give; indeed, we are incapable of doing one without the other.

This vision involves a fundamental reorganization of society: bottom-up, peer-to-peer, autopoietic, self-organizing.

Ultimately, what economics attempts to measure, underneath money, is the totality of all that human beings make and do for each other.

Local currencies only work if there is a local system of locally circulating production for which it can mediate exchange.

The nonmonetary realm properly includes all that cannot be quantified. Today we live in an overabundance of the quantifiable and a paucity of the unquantifiable: huge but ugly buildings, copious but empty calories, ubiquitous but trashy entertainment. Do you not agree that a shrinking of the money realm would be a refreshing change?