We love it, and envy those who have lots of it. We even give up our time – those precious, finite moments that make up the totality of our lives – in return for it, regardless of how much we already have, and how hideous or soul-destroying the task. Everyone, it seems, wants more money. We’re all Spike Milligan, when he quipped “all I ask for is a chance to prove that money can’t make me happy”
This is not a book about the self, it’s about money, but questioning where the boundaries of self lie is a crucial foundation to understanding the call to move beyond monetary economics. People assume that I would agree with the old misquoted adage, money is the root of all evil. I don’t. Instead I propose that it is our deluded sense of self which is the root of many of our current personal, social and ecological crises. Money is instrumental to maintaining and affirming this delusion.
Money is both chicken and egg in relation to this delusional sense of self. Whilst it originated as a mere symptom itself of the illusion of separation between ourselves and all other life, and the consciousness of concepts such as debt and credit which stem from that, it has in turn perpetuated and greatly intensified the extent to which we feel disconnected from the rest of life by increasing the degrees of separation between us and what we consume. This creates an even stronger delusion and more severe symptoms. Therefore it plays a major role in contributing to the destructive acts which each of us undertake when we put the narrow interests of our own skin-encapsulated ego over the interests of the whole, our holistic self.
This behaviour is not incidental; nor, as defenders of the status quo would have us believe, is it human nature. It is simply the mindset born of a culture in which disconnection and separation are built into its infrastructure; a mindset which we absolutely have to move on from if we are to have any hope of surviving, let alone reversing, the ecological meltdown we are faced with. If, as the 19th century naturalist Henry David Thoreau said, “In wilderness is the preservation of the world,” then Wendell Berry’s remark has never been more poignant: “In human culture is the preservation of wilderness.”
The cultivation of fire, language, linear time, and measurement, leading to the development of agriculture, technologies, centralised politics and the mass media, all contributed, over thousands of years, to the gradual separation of human beings from Nature, our communities and, ultimately ourselves, until we end up with what we have today – beings utterly swept up in the illusion of our own independence and separation.(10) Born of this illusion is our modern culture.
How many of you see yourselves as a spirited and wondrous being, a magnificent encapsulation of the entire universe? How many of you feel that you live in a world that forever affirms and celebrates the beauty, care, compassion and spontaneity that we are all capable of? How many of you feel you live in a world in which integrity and creativity are considered more important than clocking hours, or paying bills? Not many, I would think. Yet who would doubt that living in such a world would make us happier, and more fulfilled?
Man … sacrifices his health in order to make money. Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health. And then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present; the result being that he does not live in the present or the future; he lives as if he is never going to die, and then he dies having never really lived.
– Dalai Lama
Anthropological studies have shown time and time again that many tribal people, regardless of how much food they gather or successfully hunt, will never store food. Daniel Everett, a renowned linguist who has spent years amongst the Pirahã – a Brazilian tribe who have no concept of numerical systems, let alone money – writes in Don’t Sleep, There are Snakes(12)that when asked why they didn’t store any food, the Pirahã replied “I store meat in the belly of my brother”. Implicit in this is a deep trust in Nature to provide, and an acknowledgement in the interdependency of the community. The very odd day they go hungry, but mostly they feast. They never worry. From Everett’s accounts they are a much happier and more content people for it too, and understandably so: like an unconcerned child, wouldn’t you be happier assuming that tomorrow you will be provided for?
Contrast that with how we live in civilisation today, always worried about things from the past and planning ahead for the future, never being in the moment. How much of life do we miss out on because our minds are time travelling?
The concept of money plays a grossly underestimated role in our historically unrivalled inability to live in the present moment. It is not just anthropological studies which show a link between the use of money and a decreased sense of living for the day – my own limited experience taught me exactly the same. Counter-intuitively, and to my own surprise, I slowly began to worry less – not more – about everything after three to four months of living without money. Admittedly, in those first few months I worried much more, due in a large part to the fact that money had for so long provided me with a sense of security, and I was concerned that if I was hungry or got into a bit of bother I had zero to fall back on.
As the wheel of time slowly turned I found myself voluntarily surrendering to life and started living for the moment, something I had never done in the days when I was much more conscious of concepts such as credit and debt. Every day seemed to provide for me, and with that repeated experience you slowly stop worrying about the next day. Somewhere in your psyche you realise that it’ll all be fine, and that the worst that can happen to you is that you return to the whole, which is my understanding of what your true self is anyway. Orwell once said that “happiness only exists in acceptance”, and that has been my experience in life, and the experience of people like the Pirahã. Accept what life brings to you every day, regret nothing and don’t worry about the future. And have fun – none of it is that serious.
The implications of this stretch further, breaking off sections of what were once community into their own separate markets. Most notably in the realms of art and music our relationships have immeasurably changed, so that in the space of one hundred years the vast majority of us have moved from being participants and creators to being consumers. In Ireland, my native land, in the 1920s, people gathered around each other’s fires every evening and played music. Most people could contribute something – whether a jig on a fiddle or the stamping of their foot – and all involved intrinsically knew and felt the value of creative, communal play.
That was before the advent of the radio, then the television, quickly followed by the tape, the compact disc and the ipod, with a brief appearance by something called a mini-disc if my memory serves me correctly. Each new technological development – itself only made possible through the increasingly larger economies of scale and finer divisions of labour that I talk about later in this chapter – takes away one nugget of creativity and community, until we are left with fifty people in a room absorbed by fifty different pieces of music – none of them creating, and none of them sharing. The same process has infiltrated almost every aspect of our lives, to the point that we are now just consumers of life, and not participants in it.
How is community possible when everyone is as replaceable as interchangeable cogs in The Machine, and how is it possible not to feel isolated, when everyone you deal with is a stranger?
If you grow your own food, you don’t waste it. If you have to take responsibility for your own water supply, you’re probably not going to shit in it. I was speaking with a journalist recently about a report from the Department for Environment Food, and Rural Affairs (DEFRA)(19) which states that bread is now the number one food item that we waste, and he asked me why I thought that was so. I told him it is simply because we no longer have to knead and bake our own bread. If we had to put thirty minutes of love and elbow grease into it, we wouldn’t waste a slice.(20)
Until we understand that our own health, our own lives, are dependent on the health of the whole, we will not adequately resist a culture that seems hell-bent on looting every fish, tree and mineral from the planet, polluting our air and rivers and streams along the way. Derrick Jensen, an American author and environmental activist, points out that “if your experience is that your food comes from the grocery store and your water comes from the tap, then you are going to defend to the death the system that brings those to you because your life depends on them. If your experience, however, is that your food comes from a landbase and that your water comes from a stream, well, then you will defend to the death that landbase and that stream.”(22) Nothing stops us understanding our interdependency with our landbases better than money
If this was the only problem, I wouldn’t be so concerned. At least it would only be harmful to those of us who also perceive ourselves to benefit from it. But when a person spends forty plus hours a week in an office shuffling electronic paper from one inbox to the next, they have almost no connection to the rest of Nature, or to the stuff they consume. Such disconnection leads to voids that are plugged by escapisms such as consumerism.
The difference between optimum and maximum is crucial; efficiency, like everything else, has its optimal level. So while everyone wouldn’t start doing every single thing for themselves again – that would be to go to the other ridiculous extreme – communities would become sufficient as a unit, and life could be much more varied, more connected, more autonomous and free.
When we are connected to what we use, or when getting or making something new isn’t so simple as going to the shop, we appreciate it and we certainly don’t waste it. You understand how much time or energy you or someone you know put into it. Money disconnects us from our goods and services through the massive economies of scale and the highly specialised division of labour it facilitates. This disconnect leads to large levels of waste in our daily lives.
Through the eyes of a people intimately connected to each other and their land, such as the Awá tribe of the Brazilian Amazon, extreme is how we industrialised nations live today. Extreme is a worldview that sees the majesty of life on Earth as an ingredients list of resources that by mining, clear-cutting and bottom-trawling can be efficiently turned into cold, hard cash. Extreme is not knowing our neighbours, let alone feeling comfortable enough to ask them for help. Extreme is many members of a community having spare rooms in their houses while others sleep on the street. Extreme is spending our lives doing jobs we hate, just so that we can repay the bank money that it created out of thin air in the first instance. Extreme is taking what was freely given to us and then charging another part of Nature for it, only sharing that which was gifted to us if we receive something in return. Extreme is walking towards the precipice as we smugly recycle our tetrapaks. Extreme is letting it all unfold before our eyes, as if somehow we were not powerful enough to stop it.
Even if a unification of world ideologies was possible, within this version of a resource-based economy there seems to lie the assumption that ‘advanced’ technologies make us happy. If this were true, why is it that in easily the most technologically advanced period of human history, humankind has never been more depressed? I’ve no doubt proponents of a globalised non-monetary economy would point out that the reasons for our current unhappiness are much more complex than that, and they’d be right, they are. At the same time, it is widely documented that those who live in low technology societies, past and present, express stronger feelings of happiness, contentment and connection to community and place than those of us in the global West, who survive on a collective diet of quick-fix antidepressants, escapism and self-help gurus
Some of our social norms are pervasive and intensely oppressive. In Western civilisation, status is conferred on you by how much you own, where you live, what career you have, how much money you earn, how powerful you are, or the brands you sport. In each of these, the bigger or more expensive the better. If you choose to live moneylessly, or even a life of simplicity, you instantly forsake most culturally accepted indicators of success. Despite many who have swam against the tide reporting that making such bold moves enhanced their sense of confidence and freedom – to the point where they no longer care what people think – it can initially seem a very difficult path to take. They also realise, as Bob Dylan once penned, that “a man is a success if he gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night and in between does what he wants to do”.
One of the main concerns cited to me by people pondering moneylessness – or just simple living – is what their friends, family and community will think of them because of it. After all, having no money is stigmatised with a sense of poverty and being unsuccessful in life, even if your life has never been richer in real terms. Yet the extent to how deeply embedded social acceptance is within us has still surprised me, despite our claims that we dislike the very society we feel compelled to be accepted by. As Jiddu Krishnamurti once said, “it is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society”, yet we often seem to prefer to make such adjustment than risk the exclusion that is perceived to come with living a healthy life
But we’re addicted. Addicted to growth, to more, to bigger, to faster, to status, to the illusion of certainty, to convenience, to mediocrity, to an unhealthy and unbalanced level of comfort, to processed food, to conformity, to non-stop round-the-clock everything. We’re addicted to consuming the planet, and with it all the elemental building blocks that make up our flesh and bone. We’re killing both our egocentric and holistic selves, and we can’t seem to help either.
Tolerance, where someone needs more of a substance (or behaviour) to get the same effect, is clearly visible with consumerism. The level of consumption thought of as ‘normal’ in the industrialised world has been steadily rising for over fifty years. We’ve now reached the point where our collective appetite for resources is generating an ecological catastrophe. While addiction to alcohol, nicotine and other drugs are clearly threats to health, they’re unlikely to destroy our civilisation. Our collective hunger for more and more goods is another matter. That’s why it is worth thinking about the role of addiction here.
A smoker may use cigarettes to calm down, but nicotine dependence makes people more anxious. Someone may turn to alcohol to cheer themselves up, yet drinking heavily makes people more depressed. Addictive behaviour often appears to be a solution to the very problems it makes worse. This creates a vicious cycle, where the more someone relies on something the more they end up feeling they need it. This is true with consumerism too. The more we rely on buying things as the way to meet our needs, the less we develop other paths to a satisfying life.
When I first decided to give up money, I only intended to do so for a year. But after twelve months I had never been healthier, fitter or happier. Yes I did have to give up little things like going to the cinema, chocolate and delightful dealings with Her Majesty’s Revenue Commissioners, but I regained my freedom, my autonomy to only do things my heart agreed with, not to mention a sense of real control over my life again. I found parts of me that I didn’t even know existed, and I loved it. For the first time in my life I felt like I was living with awareness, with connection, with Nature. I didn’t continue because it made me miserable – I continued because I’d never felt so alive. The question has got to be: what do you value most in your life – freedom or stuff?
Life is the most incredible gift we’ll ever be given. It is an adventure, something to explore to its fullest. We would do well not to waste it, and destroy life for everything else in the process, because we were afraid to let go of our habitual behavioural patterns. One of the tragedies of this culture is that we are so afraid to die that we never really live. We live with superficial relationships that lack dependency or depth, we live with money instead of connected relationships with all in our biosphere, and therefore we live in isolation rather than community.
Such manipulative use of language has produced profitable results for those with vested interests: few of us can even imagine a non-monetary or non-wage economy, thinking it to be a utopian fantasy dreamt up by hippies and those with no sense of reality, even though we can readily see this utopia in its most glorious action on any occasion we wander to the woods, where we bear witness to every other species living in a totally localised manner.
The question then becomes – as intelligent, self aware, life-loving creatures – why aren’t we recognising this? Why are we prioritising our own individual lives over the life of everything else on the planet? Why, in other words, can’t we see and understand natural limits?
The answer to this can only be understood in terms of the separate self – if we do not sense ourselves as being part of Nature, then we cannot understand the limits it places on us. We see limits as bad – capitalist culture has made unlimited growth the be all and end all, and that is reflected in our understanding of our selves as well. We are economic people, after all. But limits, in fact, are absolutely integral to healthy systems. A child without limits runs out of control and is not happy. Pathogenic bacteria, left unchecked, destroy their host. So ourselves, and so our ecosystems. Without limits we are a disease on the Earth, mindlessly consuming our host, with thought only for our own survival. But after the host dies, what next?
he monetary economy kills our spirit, teaching us to consume instead of play. It has bought up the entire planet – a planet that was once ours to share freely – so that it can then sell it back to us. Because of this, we fools spend all of our time doing work we derive little or no meaning or happiness from, instead of doing all the things that we love to do.
Slavery never ended in the nineteenth century, it was merely rebranded and marketed to us in a different packet. The monetary economy doesn’t serve us, we serve it. It is out-of-date, obsolete, a chain around our necks. So let’s change it, and together co-create stories that serve both us and the land we inhabit well.
When you disconnect from the world of high technology and reconnect with Nature, you stop becoming a consumer of life and finally begin participating in it, like you did as a child. Is listening to an album on your iPod, taking in a movie at the cinema, or going to the pub for a bottle of ice-cold American beer really the fullest expression of the human potential that lies inside us? Imagine a society where we made our ales and ciders together, before drinking them around a campfire whilst singing, dancing and playing music together. A world where we spent our days meeting our needs in ways that integrated pleasure and creativity, where one day we’d be making a table, the next day planting some acorns, and in the evenings telling stories, learning chords, playing chess using pieces we hand-carved ourselves, and generally making merry. After all these years of being told moneyless living must be boring, I would love for someone to finally explain to me how participating in life could be less fun that just consuming it.
There is so much each of us could do in life, so much to experience and wonder at, yet we spend much of our time working around the clock just to pay for things that we don’t really need and which eventually end up owning us. As Epicurus once pointed out, there are two ways of getting rich: increasing your financial wealth, or decreasing your desires. Every bill or expense you can eliminate from your life means that you get to spend more of your precious time here doing the things you really want to do and less of the time doing things that you have to do to pay the bills. Reducing your outgoings means regaining control over your life and it affords you the time to work on whatever projects you want. It buys you the time to get creative, learn something new or volunteer for a project you believe in. The closer you reduce these bills and desires to zero, the closer you are to complete freedom. Let go of your addictions and you will soon regain the freedom to spend your days doing whatever the hell you like.
The monetary economy kills our spirit, teaching us to consume instead of play. It has bought up the entire planet – a planet that was once ours to share freely – so that it can then sell it back to us. Because of this, we fools spend all of our time doing work we derive little or no meaning or happiness from, instead of doing all the things that we love to do.
We are extraordinarily adaptable creatures. We can be any beings we want to be, if we want it badly enough. Out of the flames and smouldering embers of such a remarkable world as ours can rise a thousand phoenixes, a million transformations. Out of monetary economics can rise the gift economy; competitive relationships can transform into symbiotic ones, hoarding into sharing, stress into play, complexity into simplicity, the conditional into the unconditional, boredom into creativity and isolation into connection. We are faced with an incredibly exciting chance to create a new way of living, one that mixes the best of the old with the best of the new and undiscovered.
I want to live in freedom, in a manner that also affords the rest of life the same autonomy over their lives. I want to be intimately connected to the land and the people of my habitat. I want to nurture relationships that are based on sharing and unconditional giving, relationships that uplift and inspire and affirm that people are in fact loving and kind. I want to live as I see fit regardless of whether the melting of the ice caps – and civilisation with it – is inevitable or not. I want to live a life that is present in the moment, not regretting yesterday or worrying about tomorrow. I want to share the fruits of my labour as freely as Nature shares them with me, without a taint of the notions of credit or debt on my mind. I want to delve into the depths of life and experience aspects of both it and myself that I don’t even know exist yet. And when only my body remains, I want my closest friends to make things out of every spare part of my flesh and bones – shoes, belts, tools and drums. I want my beloved to then play a beautiful beat on my tanned skin that will echo across the valley, an eternal beat that every bird, every otter and every human recognises as the heartbeat of the land.
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