sustainability has been fighting a losing battle against profit.

The time is here, though, for the reverse process to begin in earnest—to remove things from the realm of goods and services and return them to the realm of gifts, reciprocity, self-sufficiency, and community sharing.

social compromise forged in the New Deal: the rich got to stay on top, but they had to give up through taxation an amount offsetting the profits of ownership of capital.

leaves you, afterward, hardly knowing who you are? The mature, connected self, the self of interbeingness, comes into a balance between giving and receiving. In that state, whether you are a person or an entire species, you give according to your abilities and, linked with others of like spirit, you receive according to your needs. Not

we are merely paying for something once provided through self-sufficiency or the gift economy, then the logic of economic growth is faulty.

No longer will greed, scarcity, the quantification and commoditization of all things, the “time preference” for immediate consumption, the discounting of the future for the sake of the present, the fundamental opposition between financial interest and the common good, or the equation of security with accumulation be axiomatic.

For what purpose have our forebears sacrificed, if not to create a beautiful world?

not just “goods now for goods in the future,” but goods now for more goods in the future.

The people who have been left holding the debt bag have no way to pay it off: no one else to take the money from, and nothing to convert into new money. That, as we shall see, is the root of the economic, social, and ecological crisis our civilization faces today.