Interview with Daniel Pinchbeck from BEA 2011. Pinchbeck is the Evolver Editions executive editor and co-editor of the new anthology What Comes After Money?
Q: [In What Comes After Money?] you go as far as to describe our current economic system as a parasitic virus. What’s the most recent indicator that a new system is necessary?
A: Obviously there’s the 2008 financial collapse. But you also see that the way the stock market is set up, corporations are forced to squeeze profit, to maximize their ability to make profit which leads them to them disregarding environmental safeguards. For instance, you can’t blame British Petroleum for the gulf oil spill. They’re just forced to maximize their profit and therefore undo environmental safeguards. So we see it as a more systemic problem that needs a more systemic solution.
Q: You believe that we need to transform our economic system. [What Comes After Money?] is an anthology of essays about that. And you talk about a sustainable society. What do you mean by a sustainable society?
A: Ultimately, we have to become symbiotic with the biosphere rather than parasitic. In a sense, we almost have to become one collective organism on the planet to exchange energy in a sensible way. In your body, you don’t have one cell hoarding 600 billion units of energy while every other cell is gasping and starving.
Q: Is there one specific thing you believe needs to be changed to start improving our economic system?
A: Yeah, I think we’re going to need other mechanisms and instruments for exchanging value. There’s a movement towards complementary and alternate currencies. Bernard Leitaer is one of the authors from the book and one of the architects of the euro. He argues for negative interest currencies that actually lose value if you try to hoard them. So they would lead to more cooperative and sharing behavior.
Q: Can we sustain society without something called money or something like money? Or do we need something to barter?
A: We need ways to exchange value. Money is a historical concept. There was a time before it and there could very well be a time after it. We wanted our title [What Comes After Money?] to be provocative and make people think. Most people think this stuff’s inevitable, will always be with us, almost like nature itself. Actually it’s a human made creation. There could be some other form of how people get around and exchange value.
Q: Would you say that money is the root of all evil?
A: It’s the root of a lot of evil in our society. Rousseau’s A Discourse on Inequality looked at private property as the root of inequality and evil. I think money and private property go hand in hand… money and the kind of unfairness of the current economic system which allows a hedge fund manager to make billions of dollars a year and then you have an inner city school teacher barely able to pay her rent. But who’s actually contributing to society? There’s something very very off about the way our economic system is functioning right now.
“The next phase of human development should be one of conscious evolution and co-creative collaboration, when we recognize that society is, in itself, an art project. We have the power to use our intelligence and imagination to reinvent society’s operating system so that it fulfills humanity’s highest hopes and age-old aspirations. If we can develop and construct a new economic foundation that strikes a balance between the gift exchanges of the archaic past and our modern system of swift global transactions, we might manifest a magnificent art project, an ever-evolving social sculpture together.” – From the introduction of What Comes After Money?
