Charles Eisenstein's blog

Economic growth is sacrosanct because there is no alternative that preserves the wealth of those who have wealth. This is why, at the conference and in the World Happiness Report that accompanied it, there was no mention of addressing debt or the financial system that depends on it. This was the obvious but unmentionable pile in the ballroom.

Now that I have entered the realm of speculation, I would like to describe a few more aspects of sacred economy that I believe will unfold over the next two centuries. This book has described developments that we can create in the next twenty years, and in some cases the next five. What about the next two hundred years?

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Despite being able to pay for everything we need, we do not feel like all our needs have actually been met. We feel empty, hungry. Perhaps the things we need the most are absent from the products of mass production, cannot be quantified or commoditized, and are therefore inherently outside the money realm. 

The occupations have served an important purpose, but the time has come to direct the energy they have awakened toward tangible goals. For too long, the left has mortgaged its soul to a dispirited, defeated version of the practical. Society and the planet are in such a strait that the old practical isn't enough. We need to think big -- and then be practical.

As you step into a gift mentality, the first steps will be small ones. Perhaps if you run a business, you will convert a small part of it to a gift model. Whatever steps you take, know that you are preparing for the economy of the future.

Etymologically speaking, to invest means to clothe, as in to take naked money and put it into new vestments, something material, something real in the physical or social realm. Money is naked human potential -- creative energy that has not yet been "clothed" with material or social constructions. Right investment is to array money in sacred vestments.

It is true that accumulation adds at least some measure to our security, but not for long. The mentality of accumulation is coincident with the ascent of separation, and it is ending in tandem with the Age of Separation as well. Accumulation makes no sense for the expanded self of the gift economy.

If there ever was an Illuminati orchestrating world events, it has lost control. Today, the atmosphere among the financial elite fluctuates between panic and resignation. They cannot be bothered to suppress all the information freely available on the Internet that is accelerating the shift of consciousness away from separation and scarcity.

My new book, Sacred Economics, has been released in print. I'll be touring for the next several months, giving readings and telling the story of the book.

The transition to sacred economy is part of a larger shift in our ways of thinking, relating, and being. Economic logic alone is not enough to sustain it. As we heal the spirit-matter rupture, we discover that economics and spirituality are inseparable. On the personal level, economics is about how to give our gifts and meet our needs.

The transition I map out is evolutionary. It does not involve confiscation of property or the wholesale destruction of present institutions, but their transformation. As the following summaries describe, this transformation is under way already, or incipient in existing institutions.

The new exchange systems we are exploring blur the boundary between the monetary and nonmonetary realms and therefore the standard definition of the "economy." How would we measure it in the absence of a common unit of account? Ultimately, underneath money, is the totality of what human beings do for each other.

Local currency is often proposed as a way to revitalize local economies, insulate them from global market forces, and re-create community. There are at present thousands of them around the world. So what's the catch?

Sacred Economics envisions a world where people do things for love, not money. What would you do, freed from slavery to money? What does your own life, your true life, look like? Underneath the substitute lives we are paid to live, there is a real life, your life.

I have long been impatient with “sustainability,” as if that were an end in itself. Isn’t it more important to think about what we want to sustain, and therefore what we want to create?

Occupy Wall Street has been criticized for its lack of clear demands, but how do we issue demands, when what we really want is nothing less than the more beautiful world our hearts tell us is possible?  We don't want to merely fix the growth machine. We want to fundamentally change the course of civilization.

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The metamorphosis of human economy that is underway 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.

Most critiques of conspiracy theories dispute the author's evidence, logic, and sources, and impugn his sanity, intelligence, or integrity. While such critiques often have merit, they tend to go after the low-hanging fruit. Giving the best of the genre a fair reading, however, the impartial reader realizes that something strange is going on.

The personal and planetary mirror each other. The connection is more than mere analogy: the kind of work that we force ourselves to do is precisely the kind of work that despoils the planet. We don't really want to do it to our bodies; we don't really want to do it to the world.

As our sojourn of separation comes to an end and we reunite with nature, our attitude of human exceptionalism from the laws of nature is ending as well. A new economic system is emerging that embodies the new human identity of the connected self living in cocreative partnership with Earth.

Sometimes it is necessary to live a lie to its fullest before we can step into the truth. The lie of separation in the age of usury is now complete. We have explored its farthest extremes, and have seen the deserts and the prisons, the concentration camps and the wars, the wastage of the good, the true, and the beautiful. Now, the capacities we have developed through our long journey will serve us well in the imminent Age of Reunion.

The impasse in our ability to convert nature into commodities and relationships into services is not temporary. There is no more room for the conversion of life into money. Postponing the collapse will only make it worse. We need to shift our perspective toward what we can give. What can we each contribute to a more beautiful world? That is our only responsibility and our only security.

The imperative of perpetual growth implicit in interest-based money drives the relentless conversion of life, world, and spirit into money. The more of life we convert into money, the more we need money to live. Usury, not money, is the proverbial root of all evil.