By definition, negative economic growth means a decline in goods and services that are exchanged for money. If they are provided through some other, nonmonetary, mechanism, then the statistical “economy” can shrink even as the real economy—what people make and do for each other—grows richer.

We are emerging now from childhood, and the crises we have created offer the first opportunity to apply our gifts to their true purpose. In a subtle way, to reject our gifts wholesale is just as much a mindset of Separation as to exalt them above the rest of nature.

The obscene overconsumption and waste of our society arise from our poverty: the deficit of being that afflicts the discrete and separate self, the scarcity of money in an interest-based system, the poverty of relationship that comes from the severance of our ties to community and to nature, the relentless pressure to do anything, anything at all,

Gifts cement the mystical realization of participation in something greater than oneself, which is yet not separate from oneself. The axioms of rational self-interest change because the self has expanded to include something of the other.” Can we imbue money with the same property as the gift?

The tension between the wealth of the individual and the wealth of society reflects the atomistic conception of the self that has risen to dominance in our time. A money system that resolves this tension therefore promises profound consequences for human consciousness.

Money as universal end becomes a substitute for many other things, including those very things that the money economy has destroyed: community, connection to place, connection to nature, leisure, and more.

This mentality pervades our culture. You must delay gratification. You must restrain your desires with the thought of future rewards. Pain now is gain later. Do your homework for the grade. Go to work for the salary. Do the workout to be healthy. Go on a diet to be thin. Devote your life to something that pays well, even if it isn’t your passion,

Historically, economic contraction or stagnant growth has meant human misery: economic polarization, a sharpening of the divide between the haves and the have-nots. Negative-interest money prevents this from happening by providing a way for money to circulate without needing to be driven by growth-dependent lending. It allows prosperity without

Holders of wealth are its caretakers, its stewards, and if they do not put it to socially beneficial use, then eventually that wealth should flow away to others who will.