A look at how Charles Eisenstein’s Sacred Economics is changing the way we view our relationship to money in our day-to-day lives.
We distance ourselves daily from the financial transactions that we make simply through substituting our credit cards for cash. This morning, I handed over my debit card to the cashier in the cafe down the street without much thought. I’ve long stopped using cash to pay for many of my purchases and now rely on that small piece of plastic for nearly all of my expenditures.
Eisenstein’s Sacred Economics: Money, Gift & Society in the Age of Transition has been transforming my perspective on my everyday interaction with money. In Sacred Economics, Eisenstein advocates change for a completely new economy based upon value. In changing money itself, Eisenstein affirms, we can change the very nature of humanity’s role on the planet in our social relationships and much more.
But what exactly does Eisenstein mean when he calls for a new “sacred” economy? In the past, the sacred referred to something increasingly separate from nature, the world, and the flesh. However, Eisenstein encourages us to find the sacred in the everyday rather than the otherworldly. He urges us to redefine what animates this world—money—and cleanse it of its deeply negative and profane connotation:
“Money, it seems, animates people as well as machines. Without it we are dispirited. We do not realize that our concept of the divine has attracted to it a god that fits that concept, and given it sovereignty over the earth. By divorcing soul from flesh, spirit from matter, and God from nature, we have installed a ruling power that is soulless, alienating, ungodly, and unnatural. So when I speak of making money sacred, I am not invoking a supernatural agency to infuse sacredness into the inert, mundane objects of nature. I am rather reaching back to an earlier time, a time before the divorce of matter and spirit, when sacredness was endemic to all things.”
With negative-interest currencies, gift and resource-based economies, Eisenstein pushes us to look into the possibility of a completely new economy that would invoke interrelatedness and uniqueness rather than the damaging disconnect that underlies our economy today.
In an environment with increasingly limited resources, how have your consumer habits changed lately? Have you considered more sustainable avenues for exchanging value?
