This week we take a break from

the serialization of Sacred Economics: Money, Gift and Society in the Age of

Transition to present an article inspired by the protests across the country connected to #occupywallstreet. We will

resume with Chapter 13 of Sacred Economics next Thursday.

Looking out upon the withered American Dream, many of us

feel a deep sense of betrayal. Unemployment, financial insecurity, and lifelong

enslavement to debt are just the tip of the iceberg. We don't want to merely

fix the growth machine and bring profit and product to every corner of the

earth. We want to fundamentally change the course of civilization. For the

American Dream betrayed even those who achieved it, lonely in their overtime

careers and their McMansions, narcotized to the ongoing ruination of nature and

culture but aching because of it, endlessly consuming and accumulating to quell

the insistent voice, "I wasn't put here on earth to sell product."

"I wasn't put here on earth to increase market share." "I wasn't

put here on earth to make numbers grow."

We protest not only at our exclusion from the American

Dream; we protest at its bleakness. If it cannot include everyone on earth,

every ecosystem and bioregion, every people and culture in its richness; if the

wealth of one must be the debt of another; if it entails sweatshops and

underclasses and fracking and all the rest of the ugliness our system has

created, then we want none of it.

No one deserves to live in a world built upon the

degradation of human beings, forests, waters, and the rest of our living

planet. Speaking to our brethren on Wall Street, no one deserves to spend their

lives playing with numbers while the world burns. Ultimately, we are protesting

not only on behalf of the 99% left behind, but on behalf of the 1% as well. We

have no enemies. We want everyone to wake up to the beauty of what we can

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? No demand is big

enough. We could make lists of demands for new public policies: tax the

wealthy, raise the minimum wage, protect the environment, end the wars,

regulate the banks. While we know these are positive steps, they aren't quite

what motivated people to occupy Wall Street. What needs attention is something

deeper: the power structures, ideologies, and institutions that prevented these

steps from being taken years ago; indeed, that made these steps even necessary.

Our leaders are beholden to impersonal forces, such as that of money, that

compel them to do what no sane human being would choose. Disconnected from the

actual effects of their policies, they live in a world of insincerity and

pretense. It is time to bring a countervailing force to bear, and not just a

force but a call. Our message is, "Stop pretending. You know what to do.

Start doing it." Occupy Wall Street is about exposing the truth. We can

trust its power. When a policeman pepper sprays helpless women, we don't beat

him up and scare him into not doing it again; we show the world. Much worse

than pepper spray is being perpetrated on our planet in service of money. Let

us allow nothing happening on earth to be hidden.

If politicians are disconnected from the real world of human

suffering and ecosystem collapse, all the more disconnected are the financial

wizards of Wall Street. Behind their computer screens, they occupy a world of

pure symbol, manipulating numbers and computer bits. Occupy Wall Street

punctures their bubble of pretense as well, reconnects them with the human

consequences of the god they serve, and perhaps with their own consciences and

humanity too. Only in a hallucination could someone imagine that the

unsustainable can last forever; in puncturing their bubble, we remind them that

the money game is nearing its end. It can be perpetuated for a while longer,

perhaps, but only at great and growing cost. We, the 99%, are paying that cost

right now, and as the environment and the social fabric decay, the 1% will soon

feel it too. We want those who operate and serve the financial system to wake

up and see before it is too late.

We can also point out to them that they sooner or later they

will have no choice. The god they serve, the financial system, is a dying god.

Reading various insider financial websites, I perceive that the authorities are

flailing, panicking, desperately implementing solutions they themselves know

are temporary just to kick the problem down the road a few years or a few

months. The strategy of lending even more money to a debtor who cannot pay his

debts is doomed, its eventual failure a mathematical certainty. Like all our

institutions of exponential growth, it is unsustainable. Once you have stripped

the debtor of all assets – home equity, savings, pension – and turned every

last dollar of his or her disposable income toward debt service, once you have

forced the debtor into austerity and laid claim even to his future income (or

in the case of nations, tax revenues), then there is nothing left to take. We

are nearing that point, the point of peak debt. The money machine, ever hungry,

seeks to liquidate whatever scraps remain of the natural commons and social

equity to reignite economic growth. If GDP rises, so does our ability to

service debt. But is growth really what we want? Can we really cheer an

increase in housing starts, when there are 19 million vacant housing units on

the market already? Can we really applaud a new oil field, when the atmosphere

is past the limit of how much waste it can absorb? Is more stuff really

what the world needs right now? Or can we envision a world instead with more

play and less work, more sharing and less buying, more public space and less

indoors, more nature and less product?

So far, government policy has been to try somehow to keep

the debts on the books, but every debt bubble in history ultimately collapses;

ours is no different. The question is, how much misery will we endure, and how

much will we inflict, before we succumb to the inevitable? And secondly, how

can we make a gentle, non-violent transition to a steady-state or degrowth

world? Too many revolutions before us have succeeded only to institute a

different but more horrible version of the very thing they overthrew. We look

to a different kind of revolution. At risk of revealing the stars in my eyes,

let me call it a revolution of love.

What else but love would motivate any person to abandon the

quest to maximize rational self-interest? Love, the felt experience of

connection to other beings, contradicts the laws of economics as we know them.

Ultimately, we want to create a money system, and an economy, that is the ally

not the enemy of love. We don't want to forever fight the money power to create

good in the world; we want to change the money power so that we don't need to

fight it. I will not in this essay describe my vision – one of many – of a

money system aligned with the good in all of us. I will only say that such a

shift can only happen atop an even deeper shift, a transformation of human

consciousness. Happily, just such a transformation is underway today. We see it

in anyone who had dedicated their lives to serving, healing, and protecting

other beings: people, cultures, whales, children, ecosystems, the waters, the

forests, the planet.

In the ecological age, we are beginning to understand that

we are connected beings, that the welfare of any species or people is aligned

with our own. Our money system is inconsistent with this understanding, which

is dawning among all 100 percent of us, each in a different way. I think the

ultimate purpose of Occupy Wall Street, or the great archetype it taps into, is

the revolution of love. If the 99% defeat the 1%, they will like the Bolsheviks

ultimately create a new 1% in their place. So let us not defeat them; let us

open them and invite them to join us.

If Occupy Wall Street has a demand, it should be this: wake

up! The game is nearly over. Jump ship while there is still time. In my work I

meet many people of wealth who have done that, exiting the money game and

devoting their time to giving away money as beautifully as they can. And I meet

many more people who have the skills and good fortune to earn wealth if they

wanted to, but who likewise refuse to participate in the money game. So if I

sound idealistic, keep in mind that many people have had a change of heart

already.

Some might call these ideas impractical (though I think that

nothing other than a change of heart is practical), and seek to issue concrete

demands. Unfortunately, though no demand is big enough, yet equally any demand

we would care to make is also too big. Everything we want is on the very margin

of mainstream political discourse, or outside it altogether. For example, it might

be within the range of respectable policy options to tighten standards on

industrial-scale confinement meat operations; but how about ending the practice

completely? Congress wrangles about whether or not to reduce troop levels by a

few thousand here and there, but what about ending the garrisoning of the

planet? Any demand that we could make that is within the realm of political

reality is too small. Any demand we could make that reflects what we truly want

is politically unrealistic.

Shall we fight hard for something we don't even want? It is

fine to make demands, but the movement cannot get hung up on them, much less on

practicality, because any remotely achievable demand is far less than what our

planet needs. "Practical" is not an option. We must seek the

extraordinary.

We might come up with a list of demands, something we can

all stand behind, albeit each with a secret reservation in his or her heart

that says, "I wanted more than that." I encourage those in the

movement to recognize such demands as stepping stones, or landmarks, perhaps,

on the road to an economy of love. Let us never mortgage a greater to a lesser.

The means of the movement, more than the ends, will be the genesis of what

comes after the debt pyramid collapses. Occupy Wall Street is practicing new

forms of non-hierarchical collaboration, peer-to-peer organization, and playful

action that someday, maybe, we can build a world on.

We must learn the lessons of Egypt, where a people's

movement started with the amorphous demand to end intolerable conditions, and,

as it discovered its power, soon turned to demand the ouster of the president.

That demand would have been too big at the outset, too impossible; yet at the

end it proved to be too small. The dictator left, the protestors went home

without creating any lasting structures of people power, and, while some things

changed, the basic political and economic infrastructure of Egypt did not.

Occupy Wall Street should not be content with half-measures,

even as it encourages and applauds the tiny hundredth-measures that might come

first. It should not let such concessions sap the strength of the movement or

seduce it into neglecting to foster its organizational network. Occupy Wall

Street is the first manifestation in a long time of "people power" in

America. For too long, democracy has, for most people, meant meaningless

choices in a box. The Wall Street occupation is stepping out of the box.

Our job is to take a stand for a world that is truly

beautiful, fair, and just, a planet and a civilization that is healing. For a

politician or a financier, even a small step in this direction takes courage,

for it goes against the gradient of money and all that is attached to it. I

think that the task of Occupy Wall Street is to provide a context for that

courage, and a call to that courage. With each step taken, the necessity of far

larger steps will become apparent, along with the courage to take them.

To those holding the reins of power, let us say, We will be

your witnesses and your truthtellers. We will not allow you to live in a

bubble. We will not go away. We will show you who you are hurting and how. We

will make it awkward to do business, until your conscience cannot stand it any

longer. We know, in the beginning, many of you will try to escape us; perhaps

you will leave Wall Street for suburban corporate offices on private land where

there is no "street" for us to hit. You might also retreat further

into your ideologies of globalism and growth that deny the obvious. But nothing

will stop us, because our tactics will constantly shift. In one way or another,

we will speak the truth and we will speak it loudly. Where speaking the truth

becomes illegal, we will break the law. We will not wait to be invited. We will

enter, in some way, every physical and ideological fortress.

The truth is dwindling rain forests, spreading deserts, mass

tree die-offs on every continent; looted pensions, groaning burdens of student

debt, people working two or three dead end jobs; children eating dirt in Haiti,

elders choosing between food and medicine… the list is endless, and we will

make it no longer possible to hold it in disconnection from the money system.

That is why we converge on Wall Street, and anywhere that finance holds sway.

You have lulled us into complacency for long enough with illusions and false

hopes. We the people are awakening and we will not go back to sleep.

Image by edenpictures, courtesy of Creative Commons license.