The distant origins of our things, the anonymity of our relationships, and the lack of visible consequences in the production and disposal of our commodities all deny relatedness.

Our linear/exponential growth economy manifestly violates nature’s law of return, the cycling of resources.

The metamorphosis of human economy that is under way in our time will go more deeply than the Marxist revolution because the Story of the People that it weaves won’t be just a new fiction of ownership, but a recognition of its fictive, conventional nature.

But how can we build community when its building blocks—the things we do for each other—have all been converted into money? Community is woven from gifts.

Land ownership (and indeed all forms of ownership) says more about our perception of the world than about the nature of the thing owned. The transition from the early days, when ownership of land was as unthinkable as ownership of the sky, sun, and moon, to the present day, when nearly every square foot of the earth is subject to ownership of one

Stories bear tremendous creative power. Through them we coordinate human activity, focus attention and intention, define roles, and identify what is important and even what is real. Stories give meaning and purpose to life and therefore motivate action. Money is a key element of the story of Separation that defines our civilization.

You can see now why I call money “the corpse of the commons.” The conversion of natural, cultural, social, and spiritual capital into money is the fulfillment of its power, described by Richard Seaford, to homogenize all that it touches. “In reducing individuality to homogeneous impersonality,” he writes, “the power of money resembles the power of

As we shall see, our money system, system of ownership, and general economic system reflect the same fundamental sense of self that has, built into it, the perception of scarcity. It is the “discrete and separate self,” the Cartesian self: a bubble of psychology marooned in an indifferent universe, seeking to own, to control, to arrogate as much

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.