Summary of Charles Eisenstein's Sacred Economics

Everest Media

Description

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#1 We are born helpless infants, and we are given everything we need to survive. We are grateful for this, and it is the truth of our existence. We feel the same reverence and gratitude when we observe the magnificence of nature, the miraculous complexity and order of an ecosystem, an organism, or a cell.
#2 The most important mode of economic exchange in primitive communities was the gift. While gifts can be reciprocal, they are also often exchanged in circles. I give to you, you give to someone else, and eventually someone gives back to me.
#3 The kula system is a gift network that extends to all sorts of utilitarian items, food, boats, labor, and so forth. Gifts flow continuously, only stopping in their circulation when they meet a real, present need.
#4 The conventional explanation of how money developed is that it evolved from barter. However, this is not supported by anthropology. The only instances of barter were for petty, infrequent, or emergency transactions, just like today.

Sujets

• Business
• Economics
• Theory

Informations

• Publié par: Everest Media LLC
• Date de parution: 12 juin 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9798822512542
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Insights on Charles Eisenstein's Sacred Economics
Contents Insights from Chapter 1 Insights from Chapter 2 Insights from Chapter 3
Insights from Chapter 1

#1

We are born helpless infants, and we are given everything we need to survive. We are grateful for this, and it is the truth of our existence. We feel the same reverence and gratitude when we observe the magnificence of nature, the miraculous complexity and order of an ecosystem, an organism, or a cell.

#2

The most important mode of economic exchange in primitive communities was the gift. While gifts can be reciprocal, they are also often exchanged in circles. I give to you, you give to someone else, and eventually someone gives back to me.

#3

The kula system is a gift network that extends to all sorts of utilitarian items, food, boats, labor, and so forth. Gifts flow continuously, only stopping in their circulation when they meet a real, present need.

#4

The conventional explanation of how money developed is that it evolved from barter. However, this is not supported by anthropology. The only instances of barter were for petty, infrequent, or emergency transactions, just like today.

#5

Money is a beautiful concept. It was not only ancient economies that were based on gifts. Money arose as a means to facilitate gift giving, sharing, and generosity. But today, our money with its qualities of standardization, abstraction, and anonymity is aligned with many other aspects of the human experience.

#6

Money becomes necessary when the range of our gifts must extend beyond the people we know personally. It appeared in the first agricultural civilizations that developed beyond the Neolithic village: Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, and India.

#7

The money we rely on to survive is actually what blocks the blossoming of our desire to give, keeping us in deadening jobs out of economic necessity. Our purpose for being is tied to the demands of money, which prevents us from ever feeling fulfilled.

#8

The idea that we are here on earth to do something is essentially a religious concept, according to conventional biology. However, we can make a neo-Lamarckian case that the view of biology as consisting of myriad discrete, separate competing selves is more a projection of our own present-day culture than it is an accurate understanding of nature.

#9

The world as a competition among separate selves for limited resources is how we view it, and this belief is reflected in our money system. But is this belief true. Do we live in a world of basic scarcity.

#10

We live in a world of fundamental abundance, where vast quantities of food, energy, and materials go to waste. Half the world starves while the other half wastes enough to feed the first half.

#11

The problem in economic life is supposedly greed, both outside ourselves in the form of all those greedy people and within ourselves in the form of our own greedy tendencies. But what if the assumption of scarcity is false.

#12

The assumption of scarcity is one of the two central axioms of economics. It is false, however, as there is actually enough for everyone if we can just learn to share it. The other axiom, that people naturally seek to maximize their rational self-interest, is also false.

#13

The world is already overburdened with human activity. While it is true that the earth can’t support industrial civilization at present population levels, a large portion of this activity is either superfluous or deleterious to human happiness.

#14

In a sacred economy, waste would be eliminated because there would be no money to waste. Everything would be needed by everyone, and there would be no more unnecessary consumption.

#15

The expansion of the economic realm is the expansion of scarcity, which is why it has begun to intrude into areas once characterized by abundance. Economic behavior, particularly the exchange of money for goods, extends today into realms that were never before the subject of money exchanges.

#16

When everything is subject to money, then the scarcity of money makes everything scarce, including the basis of human life and happiness. When we experience time as scarce, we experience life as short and poor.

#17

Scarcity, which is an illusion, is mostly caused by the money system. Money is central to the construction of the self-reifying illusion of scarcity. Scarcity engenders greed. But not money itself, only the type of money we use today.

#18

The benefits of organic agriculture are not easily measured, as they require a long-term relationship between farmer and land. It is only after years, decades, or even generations that the true benefits of organic agriculture become fully apparent.

#19

The power to induce a collective hallucination of scarcity is only one of the ways money affects our perceptions. Money is woven into our minds, our perceptions, our identities. It is what we call money that matters, not its functions.

#20

Money is a symbol that possesses no intrinsic power, but derives it from human interpretation. It is the agreement that is money that gives it value. The purpose of this book is to illuminate what new agreements we might embody within these fiduciary talismans, so that money is the ally, not the enemy, of a more beautiful world.

#21

Money is a standard sign that wipes out variations in purity and weight. It promotes a sense of homogeneity among things in general. Things are equal because they can be sold for money, which can be used to buy any other thing.

#22

The pre-Socratic Greek philosophers, who developed their ideas at the same time that money took over their society, believed that the world was governed by an unseen principle. This ideology has infiltrated the DNA of our civilization to the point where the size of the financial sector dwarfs the real economy.

#23

Money homogenizes the things it touches, and it homogenizes and depersonalizes its users. It facilitates the commercial exchange that is detached from all other relationships. When there is no standard of value, different humans want different things.

#24

The profit motive is antithetical to any benevolent personal motive. We are quick to spot financial motives in everything people do, and we are deeply moved when they do something so magnanimous or so naively generous that such motive is obviously absent.

#25

Money is not only a universal aim, but also a universal means. It is largely because it is a universal means that it is also a universal end. It is the key to the fulfillment of all our desires.

#26

The primary function of money is to serve as a medium of exchange, and when it takes on the additional function of store-of-value, our desire for it becomes unlimited.

#27

The unlimit of money is what allows us to possess unlimited quantities of it. It is easy for economists to believe in the possibility of endless exponential growth, where a mere number represents the size of the economy. The sum total of all goods and services is a number, and what limit is there on the growth of a number.

#28

We live in a world of abundance, but we are also depleting a limited biosphere. To resolve that paradox, consider that most of our excess production and consumption serve no real need.

#29

The modern self, in contrast, is a discrete and separate subject in a universe that is Other. It underlies the converging crises of our time, which are all variations on the theme of separation – separation from nature, from community, and from lost parts of ourselves.

#30

The origin of property is the desire to separate self from Other, and the modern sense of self is based on that distinction. But as the mystics have taught, the separate self can only be maintained temporarily.

#31

In the past, some socialist philosophers have argued that the state should expropriate individual labor due to the debt we owe society. But we can create a system that rewards flow and not accumulation, giving and not having.

#32

The modern concept of property is rooted in the idea that everything on earth should not exist through anyone’s labor. Anything that existed independent of human effort could not belong to anyone.

#33

The idea that property is sacred is a result of a legal system that protects private property rights. If property is robbery, then a legal system dedicated to the protection of private property rights is a system that perpetuates a crime.

#34

The privatization of land soon brought about a concentration of ownership. In the early days of Roman Rome, land was common property except for a small homestead plot. As Rome expanded through conquest, the new lands did not stay public for long but soon migrated into the hands of the wealthiest families.

#35

The parallel between ancient Rome and the present day is striking. Wealth is increasingly concentrated in the hands of the few. People must go into lifelong debt just to have access to the necessities of life.

#36

The distinction between the right to use and outright ownership echoes the primitive distinction between that which is produced through human effort and that which is there already.