This essay is the first in a two-part series.

An irremediable structural flaw lies at the base of our

civilization. I call it Separation, and it has generated all the converging

crises — economic, health, ecological, and political — of our day. It

manifests as separation from each other in the dissolution of community,

separation from nature in the destruction of the environment, separation within

our selves in the deterioration of health. Science is its deep ideology,

technology is its accomplice, and money is its agent.

Money as we know it today is intimately related to our

identity as discrete and separate selves, as well as to the destruction that

our separation has wrought. A saying goes, "Money is the root of all

evil." But why should it be? After all, the purpose of money is, at its

most basic, simply to facilitate exchange; in other words, to connect human

gifts with human needs. What power, what monstrous perversion, has turned money

into the opposite: an agent of scarcity?

For indeed, we live in a world of fundamental abundance, a

world 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. In

the Third World and our own ghettos, people lack food,

shelter, and other basic necessities, but cannot afford to buy them. Other

people would love to supply these necessities and do other meaningful work, but

cannot because there is no money in it.

Money utterly fails to connect gifts

and needs. We pour vast resources into wars, plastic junk, and innumerable

other products that do not serve human needs or human happiness. Why? It is not

difficult to trace it back to greed, to the love of money. Ultimately though,

greed is a red herring, itself a symptom and not a cause of a deeper problem.

To blame greed and to fight it by intensifying the program of self-control is

to intensify the war against the self, which is just another expression of the

war against nature and the war against the other that lies at the base of our

civilization.

Amidst superabundance, even we in rich countries live in an

omnipresent anxiety, craving "financial security" as we try to keep

scarcity at bay. We make choices (even those having nothing to do with money)

according to what we can "afford," and we commonly associate freedom

with wealth. But when we pursue it, we find that the paradise of financial

freedom is a mirage, receding as we approach it, and that the chase itself

enslaves. The anxiety is always there, the scarcity always just one disaster

away. Greed is simply a response to the perception of scarcity. Money, which

has turned abundance into scarcity, precedes greed. But not money per se, only

the kind of money we use today, the kind of money that is evaporating as we

speak, money with a very special characteristic that ensures its eventual

demise.

This characteristic appears, in different forms, in the

other substructures of our civilization as well. By understanding it, we can

clarify the "irremediable structural flaw" of our civilization

itself; more importantly, we can design new systems of money to supplant the

old and that bear the opposite characteristic. The results will be the opposite

as well: abundance, not scarcity; generosity, not greed; and sustainability,

not ruin.

The defining characteristic of money today is usury, better

known as interest. It is usury that both generates today's endemic anxiety and

drives the world-devouring engine of perpetual growth. To explain how, I will

quote Bernard Leitaer's now-famous parable The Eleventh Round, from his book The

Future of Money.

Once upon a time, in a small village in the Outback,

people used barter for all their transactions. On every market day, people

walked around with chickens, eggs, hams, and breads, and engaged in prolonged

negotiations among themselves to exchange what they needed. At key periods of

the year, like harvests or whenever someone's barn needed big repairs after a

storm, people recalled the tradition of helping each other out that they had

brought from the old country. They knew that if they had a problem someday,

others would aid them in return.

One market day, a stranger with shiny black shoes and an

elegant white hat came by and observed the whole process with a sardonic smile.

When he saw one farmer running around to corral the six chickens he wanted to

exchange for a big ham, he could not refrain from laughing. "Poor

people," he said, "so primitive." The farmer's wife overheard him and

challenged the stranger, "Do you think you can do a better job handling

chickens?" "Chickens, no," responded the stranger, "But

there is a much better way to eliminate all that hassle." "Oh yes, how

so?" asked the woman. "See that tree there?" the stranger

replied. " Well, I will go wait there for one of you to bring me one large

cowhide. Then have every family visit me. I'll explain the better way."

And so it happened. He took the cowhide, and cut perfect

leather rounds in it, and put an elaborate and graceful little stamp on each

round. Then he gave to each family 10 rounds, and explained that each

represented the value of one chicken. "Now you can trade and bargain with

the rounds instead of the unwieldy chickens," he explained.

It made sense. Everybody was impressed with the man with

the shiny shoes and inspiring hat.

"Oh, by the way," he added after every family

had received their 10 rounds, "in a year's time, I will come back and sit

under that same tree. I want you to each bring me back 11 rounds. That 11th

round is a token of appreciation for the technological improvement I just made

possible in your lives." "But where will the 11th round come

from?" asked the farmer with the six chickens. "You'll see,"

said the man with a reassuring smile.

Assuming that the population and its annual production

remain exactly the same during that next year, what do you think had to happen?

Remember, that 11th round was never created. Therefore, bottom line, one of

each 11 families will have to lose all its rounds, even if everybody managed

their affairs well, in order to provide the 11th round to 10 others.

So when a storm threatened the crop of one of the

families, people became less generous with their time to help bring it in

before disaster struck. While it was much more convenient to exchange the

rounds instead of the chickens on market days, the new game also had the

unintended side effect of actively discouraging the spontaneous cooperation

that was traditional in the village. Instead, the new money game was generating

a systemic undertow of competition among all the participants.

There are really only three ways this story can end:

inflation, bankruptcy, or growth. The same choices face any economy based on

usury. The villagers could procure another cowhide and make more currency; or

one of each 11 families could go bankrupt, as Lietaer observes; or they could

increase the number of chickens so that new "rounds" would have the

same value as before. In a real economy, all three pressures operate

simultaneously. The bankruptcy pressure drives a built-in insecurity, which in

turn drives people and institutions to "make" more money through

inflationary or productive means. Of these two choices, inflation is only a

temporary solution (as we are discovering today). It can only push the

grow-or-die imperative slightly into the future.

In other words, because of the money system,

competition, insecurity, and greed are an inseparable part of our economy. They

can never be eliminated as long as the necessities of life are denominated in

usury-money. But this is only one reason why money destroys community. The

other is related to the third pressure: perpetual growth.

As Lietaer's parable explains, because of interest, at any

given time the amount of money owed is greater than the amount of money already

existing. To make non-inflationary new money to keep the whole system going, we

have to breed more chickens — in other words, we have to create more

"goods and services." The principal way of doing so is to begin

selling something that was once free. It is to convert forests into timber,

music into product, ideas into intellectual property, social reciprocity into

paid services.

Would you like to get rich? Here is a business idea that, in

one form or another, has worked spectacularly for thousands of years. Very simply,

find anything that people do for themselves or each other for free. Then take

it away from them: make it illegal, inconvenient, or otherwise unavailable.

Then sell back to them what you have taken. Granted, usually no one does this

consciously, but that has been the net effect of culture and technology over

the last several thousand years.

Your 13th-century peasant

ancestors rarely paid money for food, shelter, clothing, or entertainment (much

less in a hunter-gatherer tribe). People were self-sufficient in all these

things or, more likely, depended on elaborate gift networks, sharing, and

reciprocity. Of these things is community built. Today, we pay strangers to

meet most of our physical and cultural needs. You probably don't know the

person who grew your food, wove your shirt, built your house, or sang the songs

on your iPod. Abetted by technology, the commodification of formerly

non-monetary goods and services has accelerated over the last few centuries, to

the point today where very little is left outside the money realm. The vast

commons, whether of land or of culture, has been cordoned off and sold — all

to keep pace with the exponential growth of money. This is the deep reason why

we convert forests to timber, songs to intellectual property, and so on. It is

why two-thirds of all American meals are now prepared outside the home. It is

why herbal folk remedies have given way to pharmaceutical medicines, why child

care has become a paid service, why

drinking water is now the number one beverage sales growth category.

The imperative of perpetual growth

implicit in interest is what drives the relentless conversion of life, world,

and spirit into money. Completing the vicious circle, 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. Inducing competition and replacing personal

relationships with paid services, it rends the fabric of community.

Community is closely linked to

gift-giving; when anthropologists seek to understand a culture, they trace the

flow of gifts. Unlike money transactions, in which no obligations linger after

the transaction is completed, the giving

of a gift creates a tie (which is the literal meaning of "obligation").

When gifts circulate, the community bonds. Lending money at interest is utterly

contrary to the spirit of the gift. For one thing, a cardinal feature of an

authentic gift is that we give it unconditionally. We may expect to be gifted

in return, whether by the recipient or another member of the community, but we

do not impose conditions on a true gift, or it is not really a gift.

More importantly, a universal

characteristic of a gift is that it naturally increases as it circulates within

a community, and that this increase must not be kept for oneself, but allowed

to circulate with the gift. Interest amounts to keeping the increase on the

gift for oneself, thereby withholding it from circulation in the community,

weakening community for the benefit of the individual. It is no accident that many

societies prohibited usury among themselves but allowed it in transactions with

outsiders, who could not be trusted to recirculate a true gift back into the

community. Hence the prohibition in Deuteronomy 23:20: "Unto a stranger

you may lend upon usury, but unto thy brother thou shalt not lend upon

usury."

The ramifications of this

injunction when combined with Jesus' teaching that all men are brothers are

obvious: interest is forbidden entirely. This was the position of the Catholic

Church throughout the Middle Ages, and is still the rule in Islam today.

However, starting with the merger of Church and state and accelerating with the

rise of mercantilism in the late Middle Ages, pressure mounted to resolve the

fundamental tension between Christian teaching and the requirements of

commerce. The solution provided by Martin Luther and John Calvin was to

separate moral and civil law, maintaining that the ways of Christ are not the

ways of the world. Thus spirit became further separated from matter, and religion

retreated another step toward worldly irrelevancy.

Abandoning the prohibition on

interest was a key step in religion's complicity in the desacralizing of the

world. After all, it is interest that drives the conversion of all that is

sacred about the world — its beauty, uniqueness, and living relationships —

into something profane. Why do we intuitively know money is profane? Because it

is the one great exception to the irreducible uniqueness of all beings.

In my

last Reality Sandwich essay, I described how each drop of water, even each

electron, is unique and sacred. But not so each dollar. Money is by design

standard, generic. Your dollar is the same as my dollar. Money today lacks even

a unique serial number: It is bits in a computer, an abstraction of an

abstraction of an abstraction. A forest is unique and sacred; not so the money

from its clearcutting. Convert two distinct forests into money and they become

the same. Applied to cultures, the same principle is fast creating a global

monoculture where every service is a paid service.

When money mediates all our

relationships, we too lose our uniqueness to become a standardized consumer of

standardized goods and services, and a standardized functionary performing

other services. No personal economic relationships are important, because we

can always pay someone else to do it. No wonder, strive as we might, we find it

so hard to create community. No wonder we feel so insecure, so replaceable. It

is all because of the conversion, driven by usury, of the unique and sacred

into the monetized and generic.

Because money is identified with

Benthamite "utility" — that is, the good — this entire process is

considered rational in traditional (neoclassical) economic theory. Quite

simply, whenever anything is monetized, the world's "goodness" level

rises. The same assumption appears in the euphemism "goods" to

describe the products of industry. The very definition of a "good" is

anything exchanged for money. In other words, Money = Good. Got that?

By definition, when we buy bottled

water instead of tap water too polluted to drink, that is good. When we pay for

day care instead of caring for our babies at home, that is good. When we buy a

video game instead of playing outdoors, that is good.

In terms of conventional economics, it may actually be in an

individual's rational self-interest to engage in activities that render the

earth uninhabitable. This is potentially true even on the collective level:

given the exponential nature of future cash flow discounting, it may be more in

our "rational self-interest" to liquidate all natural capital right

now — cash in the earth — than to preserve it for future generations. After

all, the net present value of an eternal annual cash flow of one trillion

dollars is only some twenty trillion dollars (at a 5% discount rate).

Economically speaking, it would be more rational to destroy the planet in ten

years while generating income of $100 trillion, than to settle for a

sustainable level of $3 trillion a year forever.

If this seems like an outlandish fantasy, consider that it

is exactly what we are doing today! According to the parameters we have

established, we are making the insane but rational choice to incinerate our

natural, social, cultural, and spiritual capital for financial profit.

Amazingly, this end was foreseen thousands of years ago by the originator of

the story of King Midas, whose touch turned everything to gold. Delighted at

first with his gift, soon he had turned all his food, flowers, even his loved

ones into cold, hard metal. Just like King Midas, we too are converting natural

beauty, human relationships, and the basis of our very survival into money.

Yet

despite this ancient warning, we continue to behave as if we could eat our

money: David Korten once spoke of an East Asian minister who said his country's

forests would be more valuable clearcut, with the money put in the bank to earn

interest. Apparently, the effects of destroying the planet are of little

concern to economists. William Nordhaus of Yale proclaims, "Agriculture,

the part of the economy that is sensitive to climate change, accounts for just

three percent of national output. That means there is no way to get a very

large effect on the US

economy." Oxford economist

Wilfred Beckerman echoes him: "Even if net output of agriculture fell by

50 percent by the end of the next century, this is only a 1.5 per cent cut in

GNP."

Must we, like King Midas, find ourselves marooned in a cold,

comfortless, ugly, inhospitable world before we realize we cannot eat our

money?

Because it builds exponentially, interest feeds a linearity

that puts humankind outside of nature, which is bound by cycles. Subtly but

inexorably, it drives the assumption that human beings exist apart from natural

law. As well, interest drives a relentless anxiety by demanding always more,

more, more, propelling the endless conversion of all wealth into financial

capital. Part of this anxiety is encoded in the very word,

"interest," which implies that self-interest too is bound up in

ever-lasting increase.

Interest is a necessary counterpart to the mentality of

externalization. Like interest, externalization involves a denial of nature's

cyclicity by treating it as an infinite reservoir of resources and an infinite

dumping ground for waste. Interest is also akin to fire, the foundation of

modern technology. To keep it going requires the addition of ever more fuel,

until the whole world is consumed, leaving but a pile of dollars or ash.

Money is a most peculiar kind of property, for unlike physical

inventories of goods, "rust doth not corrode nor moths corrupt" it.

Cash does not depreciate in value; on the contrary, in its modern, abstracted

form of bits in a bank's computer, it grows in value as it earns interest. Thus

it appears to violate a fundamental natural law: impermanence. Money does not

require maintenance like a plot of farmland to maintain its productivity. It

does not require constant rotation of stock like a store of grain to keep it

fresh. No accident, then, was money's early and enduring association with gold,

the metal most famously impervious to oxidation. Money perpetuates the

fundamental illusion of independence from nature; financial wealth endures

without constant interaction with the environment. Other forms of wealth are bothersome,

because they require a continuing relationship with other people and the

environment. But not money, which is now wholly abstract from physical

commodities and thus abstract as well from natural laws of decay and change.

Money as we know it is thus an integral component of the discrete and separate

self.

It is a curious fact that most people are extremely

unwilling to share their money. Even among relatives, sharing money is bound by

strong taboos: I know countless poor families whose brothers, cousins, or

uncles' families are very wealthy. And how many friendships have disintegrated,

how many family members have shunned each other for years, over issues of

money? Money, it seems, is inextricably wrapped up in the very essence of

selfishness — a clue to its deep association with self. Hence the intense

sense of violation we feel upon getting "ripped off" (as if a part of

our bodies were being removed) when from another perspective all that has

happened is pieces of paper changing hands or bits turning on and off in a bank

computer.

We do not usually share our money because we see it almost

as part of our selves and the foundation of our biological security. Money is

self. Meanwhile, conditioned by science and the origins of separation

underlying it, we see other people as essentially just that, "other."

Mixing these two realms invites confusion and conflict. The problem is, the

more of life we convert to money, the more territory falls into one of these

dichotomous realms, mine or yours, and the less common ground there is to share

life and develop unguarded relationships. The conversion of life to money

reduces everything to an economic transaction, leaving us the loneliest people

ever to inhabit the planet. The propertization of the whole world means that

everything is either mine, or someone else's. No longer is anything in common.

The violation we feel at being ripped off is much akin to

the violation an indigenous hunter-gatherer must feel at witnessing the

destruction of nature. When "I" is defined not as a discrete

individual but through a web of relationships with people, earth, animals, and

plants, then any harm to them violates ourselves as well. Even we moderns

sometimes feel an echo of this violation when we see the bulldozers knocking down

the trees to build a new shopping center. That is because our separation from

the trees is illusory. The buried connectedness can be resisted through

ideology, narcotized through distractions, or intimidated through the

invocation of survival anxiety, but it can never die because it is germane to

who we really are. The love of life that Edwin Wilson has named biophilia, and

our natural empathy toward other human beings, is ultimately irrepressible

because we are life and life is us.

The regime of separation has deadened us to the

self-violation inherent in the despoliation of the planet and the degradation

of its inhabitants. In an attempt to compensate for our lost sense of

beingness, we transfer it to possessions and particularly to money, setting the

stage for disaster. How? Because money (bearing interest) is an outright lie,

encoding a false promise of imperishability and eternal growth. Identified with

self, money and its associated "assets" suggest that if we stay in

control of it, the self might be maintained forever, impervious to the rest of

the cycle that follows growth: decay, death, and rebirth.

Obviously, there is a problem when something that does not

decay but only grows, forever, exponentially, is linked to commodities which do

not share this property. The only possible result is that these other

commodities — social, cultural, natural, and spiritual capital — will

eventually be exhausted in the frantic, hopeless attempt to redeem the

ultimately fraudulent promise inherent in money with interest.

They are almost exhausted already. What more of community or

of nature can we still commoditize, before the very basis of life and sanity

crumbles? All of today's crises originate in the conversion of natural, social,

cultural, and spiritual capital into money. Yet even usury is not the deepest

root. It is not an accidental feature of our system that, if only someone

had made a wiser choice, could be different. It is implicit in our

Newtonian-Cartesian cosmology in which, by definition, more for me is less for

you. As this cosmology rapidly becomes obsolete, we can glimpse an emerging new

money system embodying a very different conception of self and world. Until we

transition to it, there is no hope that the current conversion of social,

cultural, natural, and spiritual capital into money will ever abate. Under an

interest-based money system, it is inevitable that we will cash in the earth.

In Part 2 of this essay, I will describe what the currency

of Reunion will look like. When it reflects the new

human identity and relationship to nature that is emerging from the present

convergence of crises, money will have the opposite effects it has today. It

will be a force for sharing, not competition; for generosity, not greed; for

community, not division; for conservation, not liquidation. Can you imagine a

world where money is the ally of all our best impulses? That is the promise of

the new money I will describe in Part 2.

Photo by TW Collins courtesy of Creative Commons License