Money

From Charles Eisenstein ‘Sacred Economics‘…

Money is an agreement. It doesn’t have value all by itself has value because people agree that it has value. Economists will tell you what money does – it facilitates exchange, you use it to count things and keep track of things. You write some numbers on a magical piece of paper called a cheque and you can cause all kinds of abundant goods to come to your house. I mean, you can even cause misery for 1000s of people if you are one of the highest initiates of the magic of money.

Scarcity is built into the money system. On a most obvious level it’s because of the way money is created as interest bearing debt. Anytime a bank lends money into existence, or the Federal Reserve creates money, money comes along with a corresponding amount of debt. The debt because there’s interest on it is always greater than the amount of money, so it essentially throws people into competition with each other for never enough money.

Growth is another thing built into our money system. If you’re a bank, you’re going to lend it to the person who’s going to create new goods and services. So they can profit and they can pay back. You’re not gonna lend to somebody who doesn’t create goods and services., so money goes toward those who will create even more of it.

Economic growth means that you have to find something that was once nature and make it into a good, or was once a gift relationship and make it into a service. You jave to find something that people once got for free, or did for themselves or for each other, and then take it away and sell it back to them somehow.

By turning things into commodities, we get cut off from nature, the same ways were cut off from community. We look at nature with eyes of ‘it’s just a bunch of stuff’, and that leaves us very lonely, and leaves us with with many basic human needs that go unmet.
And if you have money, you might try to fill this hunger, by purchasing, buying things or through accumulating money itself. And of course now we’re nearing the end of growth, and the planet can’t sustain much more growth, and that’s why the crisis that we have today won’t go away.