Tag Archives: sacred economics

Can You Dream a Little?

Posted on by
2

A few weeks ago I read an article in The Guardian, which has given me much cause for thought ever since. The ideas are not new to me and the conclusions don’t quite work for me either, but there is much in it that is worth exploring more about the demise of the nation state:

 

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/apr/05/demise-of-the-nation-state-rana-dasgupta?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

 

Unknown-1Alongside that sits my ongoing rumination about economics and politics and a need for something altogether different. Economics, from the Greek word, ‘Oikos’ literally means ‘household’ or ‘ecology’ and has to do with how we organise our household or our ecology – worth noting here that both the household and the ecology are ‘living systems’ and not ‘mechanistic’ (a word which describes many of our current approaches in how we think about economics generally). I have particularly found Kate Raworth’s book, Doughnut Economics, to be extremely helpful, along with Charles Eisenstein’s, ‘Sacred Economics’, and Tomas Sedlacek’s, ‘The Economics of Good and Evil’, in helping me reframe how I think about economics and to dream about what else might be possible for us together.

 

Unknown

from certianlyher.com

Politics, on the other hand, comes from the Greek, ‘Polis’, meaning ‘the city’ and has to do with how we live together as people. Our current political system is simply not cutting it. I’m actually not out to criticise our politicians. I think many of them are genuinely trying to do a good job. It’s the system that is broken and lacks the ability for true representative democracy to flourish. There is such a weariness with the two-sided braying and mocking, referendums which don’t even come close to talking about the real issues, media control of the arguments and social media manipulation of the mass psyche. Posturing, pedestalling, point-scoring, point-missing and powerful lobbies pulling strings……is this it? Is this the best of us? Is there nothing better that we can imagine? What I’m interested to find is a reimagining of what it means for us to live well together in this global age and hope we can find a way forward together, politically (with a small p) to face up to the major issues of our day.

 

My friend, Steve Lowton, recently did a little vlog series about authenticity and it has made my ears prick up. He stated that there are three things he is listening out for: 1) the sound of people living authentic lives, 2) the sound of the people on the streets (people movements which are emerging) and 3) creative artists/poets/dreamers who can help to open up the imagination of what might be possible. If Rana Dasgupta is right, and the nation state as a concept, is crumbling, we have 100 years ahead of us of some significant turmoil as we try and navigate our way through to a reimagined future. What if, as Bishop Michael preached at imagesHarry and Meghan’s wedding, we reimagined the world based on love?! Is it really that crazy? It is foolishness to those who deem themselves wise and experts in how things need to be run….but there is great wisdom to be found in the ‘self-giving, others-empowering love’ we find in the kenotic source of life itself!

 

Unknown-2More than ever, we need to find ways of having conversations, based on the premise of Albert Einstein, who said that if he had one hour to save the world, he would spend 55 minutes trying to find the right question and then he would only need 5 minutes to solve it. Our temptation is to dive in and fix problems, often based on our own very limited perspective, or piece of the jigsaw, which often leads to finger pointing, blaming and shaming, before we’ve really discovered what the question is that we’re actually needing to ask……The problems before us are complex and the next election isn’t going to fix them! We have an environment which is under significant stress, an economic system which is profoundly dysfunctional, global inequality at every level, major health crises, boundaries and histories which divide us and ongoing conflicts and wars. Pointing fingers and blaming ‘the other’ isn’t going to help us. We must be willing to encounter those totally different from ourselves and find an altogether better way……

 

But if you take the time to listen, there are people of authenticity making a different sound, there are people movements across the globe calling for something new and there are many creative minds, hearts and voices beginning to weave together some dreams of what might be possible……

 

Unknown-4

from animals.howstuffworks.com

Do you think that the caterpillar can ever conceive of becoming a butterfly? And yet….in the cocoon, in the waiting, IMAGINAL cells form – they have the potential to become anything!! It is time for a great metamorphosis, where our imaginations can dream of what seems utterly impossible…..it is time for new creation…..can you see it? Can you perceive it? Can you hear it? Can you feel it? Then be authentic and turn your face into the wind that is blowing…..because together, with love, we can!

Sacred Economics – The Illusion of Scarcity

Posted on by
Reply

“If money, in its simplest form, is about connecting human gifts with human needs, what perversion has turned it into an agent of scarcity?” A great opening question from Charles for this next chapter.

He sets out the following argument: We live in a world of abundance, but we waste and abuse it. Half the world starves, while the other half wastes enough to feed the first half. Vast numbers of people cannot afford food, suitable housing or clothing, yet we pour an unbelievable amount of resources into: war and theimages armaments industry ($2trillion a year), plastic junk we don’t use, McMansions serving no real human need, ridiculously sprawling suburbia requiring more and more cars (worsened by poor public transport), huge farm to retail wastage, bottled water (what’s that about?!), child care (gone are the days when we would watch our kids for each other), various goods we never recycle or fix (like lawnmowers or blenders – just how many do we need per street, exactly?!) – the list goes on!

There is so much poverty, but it is not due to a lack of productive capacity. Nor is imagesit due to a lack of willingness to help. So many people would love to feed the poor, restore nature and do loads of other things, but there is simply no money in it. Yet we are in a situation in which many people have jobs which contribute perhaps to more growth, but not at all to well-being. What if people were not employed to make more and more cars, or lawnmowers or blenders or plastic nonsense, but instead could devote themselves to permaculture, caring for the sick and elderly, restoring ecosystems and other tragically unmet needs?

How are we living like this? Surely the answer is greed?

But Eisenstein argues that blaming greed is an easy ‘get-out clause’, because greed only makes sense in the context of scarcity. The story of our time assumes it – the story of the separate self with competition and therefore greed written into the basic axioms of our biology and economics. But what if this assumption is false? What if greed is only manifest because we perceive that resources are scarce? He quotes some interesting studies which show that people earning less than $25k give 4.2% of their money to charity, but those earning over $100k give 2.7% to charity. But this is crazy. Greed makes no sense in the context of abundance. Perhaps money itself causes the illusion of scarcity?

For something to become an object of commerce, it must become ‘scarce’. As the economy grows, so more and more of human activity enters the realm of money – the realm of goods and services. We pay for things we would never dream of paying for. And most of us have an underlying anxiety that we simply don’t have enough money.

The biggest indication of our slavery to this way of thinking is the monetization of time. He tells the story of a mexican woman who visits her sister in the big city.images “She has all kinds of amazing time-saving devices, yet when I visit, she is always so busy, she barely has time to talk.” When did time become money? How have we become unable to afford the time?

Scarcity, he argues, is actually an illusion created by the way we handle money. Money (that embodies our cultural story) has turned abundance into scarcity and caused greed. No one can deny we’re in a mess – Peak Oil, overpopulation, global warming, the raping of the world’s resources. Real problems, but the solutions currently on the table to tackle them are too little, too late. How did money in it’s current come to afflict our minds so severely?