"At the foundation of every great fortune lies a great crime." (Leo Tolstoy)
Eisenstein, C. (2011) Sacred Economics: Money, Gift & Society In The Age Of Transition. Evolver Editions.
In the realm of finance, interest plays the role of royalties and rents, ensuring that the wealth that flows from human creativity and labor flows primarily to those who own money. Money is just as criminal in its origins as are other forms of property - an ongoing robbery that both impels and embodies the expropriation of the commons. (p. 68)
Eisenstein, C. (2011) Sacred Economics: Money, Gift & Society In The Age Of Transition. Evolver Editions.
I met a horse enthusiast who described how, in Ireland, all the gates to private farm lanes and pastures are unlocked. "Trespassing" is not a concept; the land is open to all. (p. 66)
Eisenstein, C. (2011) Sacred Economics: Money, Gift & Society In The Age Of Transition. Evolver Editions.
The situation is different in most of Europe; in Sweden, for instance, the right of Allemansratt allows individuals to walk, pick flowers, camp for a day or two, swim, or ski on private land (but not too near a dwelling)(p. 66)
Eisenstein, C. (2011) Sacred Economics: Money, Gift & Society In The Age Of Transition. Evolver Editions.
There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me.
The sign was painted, it said private property.
But on the back side it didn't say nothing.
That side was made for you and me.
(Woody Guthrie)
Eisenstein, C. (2011) Sacred Economics: Money, Gift & Society In The Age Of Transition. Evolver Editions.
Herein lies a universal principle: the regime of property, the enclosure of the owned, has made us all poorer. The promise of freedom inherent in that broad, verdant landscape was a mirage. (p. 66)
Eisenstein, C. (2011) Sacred Economics: Money, Gift & Society In The Age Of Transition. Evolver Editions.
...most people today who profess to follow Christian teachings have turned everything inside out and associate socialism with atheism and private wealth with God's favor. (p. 62)
Eisenstein, C. (2011) Sacred Economics: Money, Gift & Society In The Age Of Transition. Evolver Editions.
...the church itself acquired considerable property and allied itself with imperial power. The teachings of Jesus became otherworldly ideals that were not seriously recommended to anyone, and the Kingdom of God was transported from earth to Heaven. This was a major step in the conceptual separation of spirit and matter that has contributed to making materiality, and especially money, profane today. (p. 61-62)
Eisenstein, C. (2011) Sacred Economics: Money, Gift & Society In The Age Of Transition. Evolver Editions.
The parallel between ancient Rome and the present day is striking. Now as then, wealth is increasingly concentrated in the hands of the few. Now as then, people must go into lifelong debt that they can never pay off just to have access to the necessities of life. Then it was through access to land; today it is through access to money. The slaves, serfs, and tenants give a lifetime of labor to the enrichment of the landowners; today the proceeds of our labor go to the owners of money.
Marxist systems not only eliminate profit from exclusive control of scarce capital resources; they also eliminate profit from their efficacious use. The result is inefficiency and stagnation.
We need an economic system that disallows profit-by-owning yet rewards the entrepreneur's spirit that says, "I know a way to use it better," and allows that spirit free rein.
I am not advocating the abolition of private property. For one thing, the whole mentality of abolition involves a fervid, abrupt, jarring change imposed forcefully on the unwilling. Secondly, private property is but a symptom of a deeper malady (Separation), and if we address that symptom from the mind-set of Separation, of conquest, of overcoming evil, we will end up with the same iniquities in different forms. Finally, even on the economic level, the problem is not private property per se, but the unfair advantages of owning it.
Originally, land rights were almost always held in common, accruing to the village or tribe, and not the individual. In the great agrarian civilizations such as Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Zhou Dynasty China, there was little concept of private land ownership. All land was the property of the king, and because the king was the representative of the divine on earth, all land was the property of God.
Private property is supposed to give people an incentive to make improvements upon the land.
...before Roman times there was no such thing as a deed. Land was like the air and water; it could not be owned. The first owners therefore could not have acquired it legitimately. They must have taken it.
"Property is robbery," proclaimed Proudhon: tracing back the origin of any piece of property through a succession of "legitimate" transfers, we eventually get to the first owner - the one who simply took it, the one who separated it off from the realm of "ours" or "God's" into the realm of "mine."
Can we instead create an economic system that liberates, celebrates, and rewards the innate urge to give? ...a system that rewards flow and not accumulation, creating and not owning, giving and not having?
The urge to own diminishes as our sense of connectedness and gratitude grows, and we realize that our labor power is not our own, and what I make is not properly mine.
Each institution of our Age of Separation is tied to all the others; alienation from nature, the body, and the sacred feminine echoes the alienation from the world that property implies when it makes things detachable objects of commerce.
The institution of property, therefore, is not the root of our present malady, but a symptom of our disconnection and isolation.
Looking out upon the strop mines and the clear-cuts and the dead zones and the genocides and the debased consumer culture, we ask, What is the origin of this monstrous machine that chews up beauty and money? The discrete and separate self, surveying a universe that is fundamentally Other, naturally treats the natural and human world as a pile of instrumental, accidental stuff. The rest of the world is fundamentally not-self.
Addictions to shopping, to money, and to acquisition arise from the same basic source as do addictions to food: both come from loneliness, from the pain of merely existing cut off from most of what we are.
Trapped in the logic of me and mine, we seek to recover some tiny fraction of our lost wealth by expanding and protecting the separate self and its extension: money and property.
I once heart Martin Prechtel, speaking of his village in Guatemala, explain, "In my village, if you went to the medicine man with a sick child, you would never say, 'I am healthy, but my child is sick.' You would say, 'My family is sick.' Or if it were a neighbor, you might say, 'My village is sick.'" No doubt, in such a society, it would be equally inconceivable to say, "I am healthy, but the forest is sick." To think anyone could be healthy when her family, her village, or indeed the land, the water, or the planet were not, would be as absurd as saying, "I've got a fatal liver disease, but that's just my liver - I am healthy!" Just as my sense of self includes my liver so their included their social and natural community.