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

January 12, 2012 by Charles Eisenstein

January 2012
This essay has been translated into French.


Transcribed Talk from January 13, 2012 at “The Hive” in Vancouver, BC.

 

Thank you for such a warm welcome. I’m quite amazed actually. I don’t think I’ve ever spoken to this large a crowd that was just here for me. I’ve spoken to more people at conferences, but that wasn’t just for me. Part of me doesn’t even believe it. Especially because last year I gave a talk by the exact same title in New York City and 6 people came.

That makes me realize how much of this is really a gift. I’m not really doing anything differently. I didn’t make this happen. I didn’t try harder or exert more effort and that’s why there’s 200 people instead of six. But it happened through some mysterious means. In a way it’s not that mysterious; I could say that it’s because of Natasha – but how did she find out about it? I’m very aware that I can’t create anything by myself, that everything I create is only because of the gifts that I have received and that I can pass on.

So, thank you. And it just so happens that gratitude is the foundation of sacred economics.

It’s a very ancient idea that the universe runs by the principles of the gift. That human life runs by the principles of the gift. And that in fact the purpose for our existence, the reason why we’re here, is to give. And that everybody has a gift that is important and meaningful, and maybe even unique and essential. It’s certainly true in an ecosystem where every species has an important function, and without that function, without that gift that it gives to the ecosystem everybody would be a little bit poorer. The system as a whole would be a little bit weaker.

And this is a new understanding that may be only 40 or 50 years old, in the west at least. A hundred years ago, or even 50 years ago, scientists thought that you could eliminate one species, eliminate in fact all the bad species, and make nature better. But we’re understanding now that every being has its gift to give. And this shift of perception hasn’t been integrated yet into our institutions.

So my book, Sacred Economics, is about how to make an economy reflect the basic nature of the universe, which is of the gift. And it’s about how we can live – not just in this theoretical future, but also starting right now – according to the principles of the gift.

I just kind of made this claim that you are here to give and that you have a unique gift to give. Maybe some of you have had the experience of being in a job where the pay is fine, secure, but for some reason you’re just not that happy there. You don’t feel fulfilled. It’s because your gifts aren’t being expressed. And you might have had the feeling, “I wasn’t put here on earth to do this.” And it’s not just menial labor that gives you that feeling. I’ve met people with 6- and 7-figure incomes that have that feeling, “I wasn’t put here on earth to maximize a number.” That’s what a lot of jobs are. Wall Street jobs are like that – trying to make a number go up in a computer. Or marketing executives try to make market share go up, or in business you try to make profit go up. “Was I really put on earth to do that?”

Not only do you have to be expressing your gift, but also it has to be going toward a purpose that you care about, that is beautiful to you. And no matter how much money you’re paid, you won’t be happy if you’re not doing that.

Mainstream economics doesn’t really understand this. It says that human beings don’t really want to work. There’s a phrase in economics, “the disutility of work.” Human beings don’t want work, so we have to make people work with these incentives, this money that overcomes your natural disinclination to create, to be productive, and to give something to other people. You have to get something in return, otherwise you won’t want to do it. And it’s considered good that we have a system based on scarcity, that creates anxiety, that kind of forces you to work.

I was just at a meeting of some “Occupy” folks, and one person told a story about one thing they loved about it. It was that any time that they left off some project and had to go somewhere somebody would take it on. They had just started a library, and when they got back 2 days later somebody else had taken it up. Everybody was doing stuff just because they wanted to. And there was no money involved. But it was an expression of human nature. And if you go to Burning Man or something like that, too, there’s this feeling that this is how human beings are supposed to live. If you’re a stranger in a city and you’re walking around and you ask directions, people are happy to give you directions. They’ll even go out of their way. Why is that? One reason is that in our current society, we have so few opportunities to give. And we’re just wanting to do it. (The book isn’t all about gifts, but somehow I’m starting about this now.)

One thing that gifts do is that they create ties among people – which is different from a financial transaction. If I buy something from you, I give you the money and you give me the thing, and we have no more relationship after that. I don’t owe you anything, you don’t owe me anything. The transaction is finished. But if you give me something, that’s different because now I kind of feel like I owe you one. It could be a feeling of obligation, or you could say it’s a feeling of gratitude. What’s gratitude? Gratitude is the recognition that you’ve received, and the desire to give in turn. And that’s why we are driven to give. Because everything we’ve received is a gift. Our life is a gift. Having air to breathe – we didn’t earn that. We didn’t earn being born. We didn’t earn having food. We didn’t earn seeds being able to grow. Everything that we have is a gift. Every breath that we have – we didn’t earn having algae that can make air. Therefore our natural state, our default state is gratitude. And therefore, our default state is a desire to give, a desire to be generous. And you can feel that desire coming up, but then there’s something that stops you from being as generous as you could be.

There’s a little voice that constrains us from giving in a lot of situations, which is, “Can I afford to do that?” “I’d like to spend much more time volunteering at the animal shelter, but can I afford to spend that time? Can I afford to quit a job that isn’t allowing me to express my gifts?” Money stops us. In many cases, not all, but many times what we really want to give to the world isn’t where the money is. Why should that be? Why is it that the beautiful things that people want to do… Where is there more money? Say you want to devote yourself to saving old growth forests from being chopped down, like is about happen on some of the islands on the coast here. Is there a lot of money in that? And the people who are dedicating themselves to stopping that from happening, they’re just doing it to get rich, aren’t they. They’re in it for the money, right? Obviously not. But the people who are cutting down the forests, or the lobbyists in Parliament who are trying to facilitate this happening, is that because they have a passion for cutting down forests, and they would be doing this even if they were no money in it? Obviously not. Well, maybe a few twisted souls… But why is that? Why should money be a force toward cutting down the forests, and not toward preserving them? Why do we consider one option to be valuable and the other one not valuable?

Money is just an agreement. Money only has value because people believe it has value. It is something that we create through our agreements. You can say that money is a story. It’s the symbols that we interpret in a certain way, and that means that they’re valuable. So why have we agreed to create a system of value that is the enemy of all of the beautiful things we want to do? I’m generalizing here a little bit, but generally speaking, those things are not where the money is. And you look into any phenomenon on earth that disturbs you, and you dig down a couple levels, “Why is this happening?” and soon you get to money. Why should that be? Why should the money power push us toward the destruction of all that is good and beautiful?

We’re so used to it being that way that it’s hard even to imagine a world that’s any different.

And so we think money is this bad thing, and that a good person or spiritual person therefore shouldn’t be motivated by money, and maybe shouldn’t have anything to do with money. And maybe we think this world of commerce, this world of the flesh, this world of matter is something that is bad, lowly, and degraded. And maybe we think that virtue and spirituality involve stepping back from that world and not having anything to do with that world. But that’s only because of the way money is today.

One of things I do in the book is that I identify exactly what it is about money that makes it this way. Now some of you might be thinking, “Well, I’m making lots of money and I’m a good person.” And that can happen. The way to decide whether you are expressing your gifts isn’t by calculating what the ecological footprint is and “What’s this going to cause, and what’s that going to cause?” It’s really a feeling of trust. It’s a feeling when you wake up – it’s that feeling of being excited about your day and that feeling of, “Yes, this is what I was put here on earth to do.” And wherever that feeling guides you, that’s where to go. And that’s actually a deeper kind of revolution than the idea that “I’m going to have to overcome something bad inside of myself.

The idea of “conquering evil” has been around for about 3000 years, and the results haven’t been too good. It takes on all different kinds of forms. That’s part of one of the deep stories that carries the story of money. It’s not just a coincidence that money is the way it is. It grows out of the invisible myths, the invisible stories that create our civilization. I’ll tell you what those are in a minute; I want to point out one more thing.

I mentioned that monetary transactions don’t create a bond, but gift transactions do. And that’s one reason why gifts are sacred, and we understand that a little bit. We make a ritual sometimes out of gift giving. It’s a special act, we understand. Primitive societies were all gift economies, if you go back far enough. (No barter – barter was not how primitive economies worked.) In a gift society, to refuse a gift that was considered a hostile act because it was saying, “I don’t want to be tied to you. I don’t want to have a relationship with you. I don’t want to owe you one. I don’t want to be part of your circle.”

Gifts create circles. A basic principle of ecology is “waste is food.” Everything that any being produces is useful for some other being, and eventually it comes back to you. A gift economy is like that, too. Because if you have more than you need, you share it with somebody, you give it to somebody who needs it. And that person will feel gratitude, maybe toward you, maybe toward the community. When that person has more than they need, they’ll pass it on to somebody else, and eventually it comes back to you. And you see that happening, so you understand that somebody else’s good fortune is your good fortune as well. And you’re not in competition. And it’s not because you’re self-sacrificing. It’s simply the way things work.

So if you want wealth in that society, if you want security, if you want social status, the only way to do it is to give a lot. It’s the generous person who is the wealthiest in those societies. If money is the opposite of the gift, if it creates the opposite effect, then no wonder that in our society wealth is not a matter of how much you’ve given. And security is not a matter of how much you’ve given. It’s a matter of how much you control, how much you’ve accumulated.

So what is it about money that makes it into the opposite of a gift? Why should it be evil?

At its foundation money is a beautiful thing: It says “I want to give you something and you don’t have anything I need right now, so instead you’ll give me a useless thing. It’s pretty, but it’s just a shiny piece of metal. It’s a useless thing, but it facilitates and it shows your gratitude.” So how has it turned into a society where there’s so much that people want to give and so many people who need those gifts? Look at all these homeless people here in Vancouver. There are all these homeless people and there are many vacant properties at the same time. Why is money not connecting these gifts and these needs?

I’m going to give you a very quick explanation of why money is the way it is. It’s a partial explanation but it covers a lot of territory. And it’s very fundamental to what money is. It has to do with the way money is created, and the way that money circulates. Five years ago, almost nobody understood it, but today a lot of people understand that money is created as interest-bearing debt. Either the central bank buys some kind of security on the open market creating the money basically out of thin air when it does so, or a bank lends money to a borrower and that’s new money that’s created.

When a bank lends you a million dollars, it creates that money by writing it into a ledger or typing it into a computer. It creates a million dollars. And at the same time, it creates more than a million dollars of debt. Maybe over 10 years you have to pay back two million dollars. How are you going to do that? You’re going to have to make more money from someone else. You’re going to have to take somebody else’s money. Maybe in a very good way. Maybe you’re going to make some great invention and sell it to them. But you’re going to have to get more than that original million dollars. That should be no problem, except that everybody’s in the same boat. Everybody needs to get money from outside of themselves. So the system is set up to force us into competition. To force us into scarcity. No matter how we program our minds to be in a state of abundance and say “Money is just neutral, and it’s our attitudes about that count.” No matter what new age stuff we do, the mathematical fact remains that there’s never enough money. There’s always more money being owed than there is money in existence. The only way that debts can be paid is if you create even more money next year, or the year after. But that creates even more debt. So not only does interest create competition, scarcity, and anxiety, but it also creates a need for endless growth.

Anyone see a problem with that?

What happens when there’s no more room for growth? What happens when growth is killing the planet? What happens if there’s no more room to create new goods and services? Well then the debts can’t be paid from new growth anymore. And at first that’s not too big a problem, because say you owe me a million dollars and you’ve been making the payments out of your income, but now you’re falling behind. Well, fine, you can give me your house, give me your car, pledge your future income in perpetuity. In ancient times, people would also have to pledge their children, their wives, their land, and themselves, and they became debt slaves, debt peons. Most human beings who have lived on earth in the last 5000 years have been debt peons. I’ll get to the good news later. It’s a problem.

Basically it causes a rapid polarization of wealth and then the system collapses and can fall apart. In the mean time, there’s endless pressure to grow the money economy, which means to convert more and more of nature into product, and more and more of human relationships into services.

I used to live in Taiwan, and I moved back to America with this kind of idea of what suburbia was going to be like: Kids running around in groups playing, neighbors chatting with each other over the fence, helping each other out – these things that were left over from my childhood. I got to this suburban development and the first thing I noticed is that there were no kids outside. There was a big playground in the middle of the neighborhood, and it was empty. When I was a kid that place would have been packed. There would have been kickball games, and baseball games, and football games, and kids on bikes everywhere. And it was gone. And it wasn’t because there weren’t any kids – they were all indoors. Why is that happening? Why don’t the neighbors know each other?

We tried to create community. We tried to invite people to our house and have mixers, but people weren’t really that interested in coming, and when they came, no strong relationships were created. What happened to that? What happened to community?

Everywhere I go, people tell me that community is what’s missing most from their lives. What happened to it is that community got converted into money. I mentioned how gifts create ties, they create a bond. If you live a highly monetized life, there are no gifts, there are no bonds. You don’t need anybody. So we had our neighborhood mixer and everybody knew, “I don’t need you.” Unlike an Amish community where you need people – if your house burns down you need them to help you rebuild your house. Now we pay for that kind of community support. It’s called insurance.

When I was a kid, no one really paid for childcare. Everybody watched everybody else’s kids. But now that’s something that you pay for, and as that becomes a paid service, the economy grows. It creates opportunities to lend money, for money to circulate.

So that is part of the explanation that all of the good things you want to do – there’s no money in those. And the places where there is money is something you really don’t want to do. I’m generalizing a little but I think you all understand this dynamic. In our system, money goes to those who will create more of it, to those who will create new goods and services.

I’m a bank. I’ve got a million dollars to lend. You come to me and you say, “Charles, I’d like to borrow that money and I’m going to spend it all on stopping that pipeline from the Alberta tar sands. That’s my business plan.” Even if I want to, I’m not going to lend you that money because how are you going to pay me back? Or maybe you’re going to say, “There’s some land that’s going to be developed. I’m going to save that land. I’m going to buy that land so that it’s not developed.” And I’ll say, “How are you going to make money to pay me back?” “Well, if you want me to pay you back I can sell the land again.” “But what about my interest?” You have to create even more money. But if you come to me and say “I’d like to buy that land and build a strip malls there.” Oh, then you’re going to be making new goods and services.

If you say “I’m going to spend that money setting up a lobbying organization so I can help get that pipeline built. Here’s my rolodex of contacts. These firms will pay me lots of money to do this. All I need is some capital.” Now there’s a business plan, because you’re participating in the conversion of the Albertan tundra into money. If you participate in that, you get money.

Well, we don’t want to participate in that anymore, do we. No. But I think it’s important to remember that we did once want to participate in that. A hundred years ago we had no problem with the conquest of nature. And if you invented a way to get that oil out faster and to cut down those trees more efficiently, then you were a hero. You felt good about yourself. But not anymore. Something has changed. What has changed?

Whatever’s changed, money hasn’t changed along with it – yet. Money still keeps us doing things that we don’t want to do. But I think that we can sense that whatever has changed is something that goes very deep, and therefore that the economic crisis is also a spiritual crisis. It’s something that goes all the way to the bottom.

One thing that I’ve noticed about the Occupy movement is this kind of reunion between activism and spirituality – whereas, 10 years ago they wouldn’t have had anything to do with each other. The activists were saying, “Here you are sitting on your meditation cushion while the world burns. Get off your cushion and do something real.”And the meditators were saying, “How do you know what to do? How do you know that you’re not just battling the projections of your own shadow?” But today these two branches that were sundered in the 1960s are reuniting.

The reason I brought that up is to speak to that sense we have that something really big is changing. Something that goes all the way to the bottom. That we’re at a tipping point of some sort, that everything is going to change. One the one hand, there’s a lot of fear in that. It’s the feeling, “The world is falling apart. I don’t know what’s real anymore.” And so many things that seemed so solid and so real are being revealed as nothing but these vapors, these illusions. Like your investments, your pension, things like that. They can disappear – like that. A generation ago we didn’t have that sense so much. Those were solid a generation ago. Someone my age would be planning for my retirement already. “I’ve got to get some annuities set up.” That’s so far from my mind and from so many of my generation. We don’t really believe in that anymore. Its reality is wearing thin.

So, I’ll say a little bit then, about what is changing… Although there’s some juicy stuff about what happened to community, too:

Let’s just say that it’s not just childcare that has been converted into money, but everything that people once did for each other as a gift economy. Technology has allowed almost every bit of it to be converted into a service. For example, my father said that when he was a kid in suburbia every Sunday afternoon the whole neighborhood would get together with guitars and they would sing folk songs. Can you imagine that happening in suburbia today? Not in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where I live. Because we pay for our entertainment now. We don’t create it together. We pay for cooking – in the United States mostly, and maybe here too. When I was a kid Mom cooked, but now Mom goes to the supermarket deli and buys things cooked by other people. Medicine didn’t used to be something that we paid for. A hundred years ago it was one of the village grandmothers who knew a lot about herbs. And you didn’t pay for that. People didn’t used to pay for clothing or housing either. Everyone knew how to build a house.

Maybe some of you would like to get rich, so let me tell you a business plan that’s worked for thousands of years. What you do is you find something that people do for themselves, and you take it away from them. Or you find something that people get from nature, and you take it away from them. And then, you sell it back. So for example, you can pollute the water and then sell bottled water. Or you can scare people into not drinking the water, or you can add chlorine to it, and sell them filters. This isn’t something that people consciously are doing, but you can create a climate in which people are afraid to send their children outdoors and value safety above all else. And then, children can’t have adventures anymore. Like I had when I was a kid. Maybe many of you remember this, too. You finish breakfast, “Bye, Mom,” and then you go out and play. We used to go to the quarry and stand at the edge of a cliff and throw rocks down. Then we’d go swimming unsupervised in a local swimming hole, and do all kinds of dangerous stuff that if you let your kids do today you’d be arrested. I’m not kidding, you’d literally be arrested.

I had this happen. I didn’t get arrested, but my kid was 5 years old at the time and he was playing outside. A neighbor knocks on my door and says, “Do you know that your child is playing outside, unsupervised? I’m not comfortable with that.” Which was kind of a threat. “I’m not comfortable with that. I’m going to report you to child services.” So OK, fun and adventure now become something that you buy. That’s what World of Warcraft is. And the Pokemon game on the DS. My teenage son jokingly says, “Gee, Dad, I wish the real world were 3D, like the movies. Like the 3DS.” So now through these games kids have these adventures, these encounters, and they create this online world, when they once did that in real life. So take it away, and sell it back. Deskill people. Make it illegal to build your own house. Convince everybody that only an expert can do medicine.

I went through a period of a lot of despair when I realized the extent of what we’ve lost and the depth of our poverty. We’ve lost community. We’ve lost our connection to nature. So when I offer optimism, it’s not because I don’t understand how bad things are. It’s not that I don’t understand that in the United States there are thousands of undocumented radioactive waste sites – that have almost started to leak but not quite yet. Some of them are so secret that even the government doesn’t know where they are anymore. They’ve just been forgotten. That’s just one tiny, tiny piece of the environmental crisis. And there are other pieces that are worse – because the environment is something that you convert into money, too. The ability of the atmosphere to absorb our wastes – we convert that into money, too. This is all driven by our money system.

This money system isn’t just some arbitrary mistake, it rests on a deeper foundation. There’s two parts of it. One is the story of the people, and the other is the story of the self. And these are the myths of our culture. They answer the deep questions. For example: What is it to be human? Who am I? What is the purpose of life? Where did we come from? Where are we going? What’s valuable? What’s important? Every culture has different answers to these questions. I’ll tell you how I see our culture’s story of the people and story of the self. I go into this territory because unless this foundation changes, money can’t change either, because money embodies these stories. I’ll start with the story of the self.

What are you? The story of the self says that you are this separate being, this robot made of flesh, that’s a container for a soul or mind (it depends on if you’re religious or not) walking around in a subjective universe. Every field has its own version of this. Biology says that you are a flesh, bio-physical contraption, programmed by your genes to maximize reproductive self-interest. Economics says pretty much the same thing, that you’re fundamentally driven to maximize your economic self-interest. Physics says that you are again this kind of contraption, operating in an external universe subject to deterministic forces. This is obsolete physics, but it still defines the way that we think. It’s obsolete biology too, by the way. Spirituality, religion says that we’re these skin-encapsulated souls separate from other skin-encapsulated souls. Philosophy says that you’re like this bubble of psychology walking around, floating around – this mote of consciousness peering out into the world. That’s what you are. You’re separate.

So, from that arises pretty much every institution of our culture. For example, there are all of these competitors out there, so to be safe and to be healthy you have to control them, conquer them, and defeat them. And from that we get our dominant paradigms of medicine. There are these germs out there that are fundamentally not our friends because they are programmed by their genes to maximize their self-interest. Our economic system is like that, too. That’s why the political discourse is all about competitiveness. From this point of view, if you have any stroke of good fortune it’s not like those gift economies I was talking about. Because now you’re getting more of that limited amount of money and you’re better able to compete. So envy is built into this. Someone else’s good fortune and someone else’s excellent abilities – that harms my interest. And in fact, if you have a stroke of ill fortune and become less able to compete, that’s good for me, according to this paradigm.

In our hearts, we know that is not true. We know that on some level the suffering of any being is somehow our own suffering, too. But our scientific logic contradicts that. So one of the effects of this story of the self is a disconnect between heart and mind. Our heart says one thing. Our mind says something else.

You can see that our money system embodies and perpetuates the story of the separate self. It throws us into competition. It makes it true even if it were not fundamentally true. It enacts the story.

The story of the people: Where did we come from, where are we going, and what’s our purpose on Earth? It says that once upon a time we were animals, helpless and ignorant. But thank goodness for our big brains that allowed us to develop technology and become the masters of nature. Our control isn’t complete yet, but we’re getting there. Someday we will transcend nature completely. We will conquer the atom. We will conquer outer space. We will conquer death, even. Just like we overcame the sound barrier, and split the atom, there’s no limit to our ascent. I call this myth “Ascent” – The Ascent of Humanity.

Fifty years ago, people totally believed in this. They thought that someday we will eliminate all insects and have a garden Earth. We’ll eliminate all the bad species, all the harmful species, all the pests. We’ll spray DDT everywhere, and pollination will be done by machines. We’ll have hydroponics or we’ll synthesize our food. We won’t even need nature anymore. Everybody believed it. Almost. But we don’t believe it anymore because our stories are changing. One reason they’re changing is that they’re not working anymore. Not very many people still think that all disease will be conquered by the year 2000. That was what top medical researchers were saying in the 1950s. It was obvious – cholera, small pox, plague, diphtheria, tetanus, and polio – they had all succumbed to the arsenal of modern medicine. So of course cancer is next. Heart disease. But it hasn’t happened. In fact, instead all these new diseases are appearing that our methods of conquest and control are helpless against.

Another example is the social paradise that we were supposed to have when the methods of science were applied to society. The social sciences, political science, social engineering. We were supposed to have an age of leisure by now, too. Because after all, a machine can do the work of a thousand men. People were saying this in 1790. “Very soon every person will only have to work a thousandth as hard.” Alvin Toffler was saying that in the 1980s, too: “By the year 2000 the greatest problem facing society will be what to do with all our leisure time.” But that hasn’t happened either. We’re working even harder.

We’re working harder than hunter-gatherers worked. An anthropologist, Richard Lee, did a study in the Kalahari desert where there’s an annual rainfall of about 5 inches per year – one of the harshest climates on Earth. You’d think that it was a struggle for survival there, if anywhere. But he notices “These guys aren’t working very hard. They seem to enjoy lots of leisure, no anxiety. How much are they working?” So he followed them around with a notebook and complied how much time they actually spent working. It was about 20 hours per week. And a lot of that work is what we would consider recreation. Going out hunting counts – people do that for recreation now. Or going out gathering, with the kids running around and chatting with your friends. That was what those 20 hours of work per week were.

After two hundred years of technological development, can’t we do any better than that? That’s what I’ve been asking myself for such a long time. I read about children in Haiti eating dirt because they’re so hungry. Can’t we do better than that? Or just looking at all the ugly buildings in the town where I live. Shouldn’t we have a world full of beautiful buildings?

I think that everybody carries in their hearts the knowledge that a more beautiful world is possible. Children feel it. Teenagers especially feel it very strongly, and we call it idealism. But many forces conspire to tell us: “That’s just youthful idealism and you’ll grow out of it.” And the world that’s presented to us as normal is the only possibility. And there’s really nothing wrong with it. If there was something really wrong with it… Come on guys, I just told you about this radioactive waste, and you know about global warming, coral reefs dying – that can’t be true. And one in seven children in North America going to bed hungry – that can’t be true. Someone must be lying to you because if that were true, people would be in an uproar about it. If we were really destroying the basis of civilization on Earth people would be in an uproar about it, right? But they’re not. They’re reading about Kim Kardashian and interested in hockey. There’s nothing wrong with hockey… But just the fact that society is obsessed with celebrities and sports, basically it says to you: Things couldn’t be that bad.

A lot of us have been very lonely for many years in this suspicion that there’s something really wrong with the world. Maybe it’s not even a conscious knowledge. If it’s a conscious knowledge, maybe we rebel consciously and develop a political consciousness. If it’s an unconscious knowledge, we rebel unconsciously – by cultivating habits of procrastination and laziness, by becoming depressed, by getting addicted to something. This is basically a mutiny of the soul that says, “I’m not going to participate in this. I would rather stay in bed than live the wrong life.” And then we’re told, “Well, there’s a problem with you. If you are depressed, if you can’t get out of bed, if you procrastinate, if you can’t motivate yourself to be a success, to do the things that you need to do, to develop good work habits – there’s a problem with you.” But maybe the problem isn’t with you, maybe you’re actually healthy. Maybe we don’t have to fight ourselves to be virtuous and to be productive.

School, for example, is all about training us to do things that we don’t care about for the sake of an external reward. And that’s considered a good thing. It’s considered normal for life to suck. It’s considered normal to hate Monday. Can’t we create a better world than that? Where we hate life? Where we hate Monday? Where we want the week to be over? Where we look forward to retirement?

When I taught at university, 21-year-olds were looking forward to retirement, “Because then I get to do what I want to do. I get to live my life then.” And not wanting to participate in the conversion of all that is good and beautiful into money.

So like I said, these stories of the separate self and the ascent of humanity are becoming obsolete. They’re not working anymore. They’re falling apart, and giving birth to new stories. You could even say that all of the crises that we face today – the financial crisis, the soil crisis, (some of them people don’t know as much about), the water crisis, the biodiversity crisis, the energy crisis, the political crisis, health-care crisis, the educational crisis, the list goes on and on – we can look at them as a birth crisis. People don’t change individually until the world falls apart, at least I never change until the world falls apart. (Even then, I still try to make it work for a while.) Maybe societies are the same way. Maybe this is how change happens. Maybe this is how transition happens. And what these crises are propelling us toward – it’s kind of like being born. We don’t really know what it’s going to be like, this new world, but we see a light ahead of us. The cervix has opened.

The stage of birth that precedes that is the stage where the cervix hasn’t opened yet but the uterus is already starting to contract. And it’s kind of a hell stage where there’s no exit. Stanislav Groff writes about this. There’s no exit, there’s no hope, and you’re in despair. And then eventually the cervix opens and you can see a glimpse of something. Culturally I think we caught a glimpse of this during the age of the hippies. They caught a glimpse of our destination. And it seemed so obvious to them that in 5 years war would be obsolete and all of these other institutions would be obsolete because of the shift in consciousness. I think they were seeing something true. When you experience these things, it doesn’t feel like an excursion from reality, or a fantasy. It feels like a glimpse of the way things really could be.

The new story that we’re being born into, the new story of the self – everybody knows what it is. It’s the connected self. It says you’re not this discrete separate consciousness. But your being partakes in the being of everybody and of all things. To be is to relate. To exist is to relate. You are your relationships, so it’s even deeper than interdependence. Interdependency would be “I’m still separate but I have relationships.” But relationships aren’t something we have, relationships are something that we are. Therefore, when a species goes extinct, something is lost in us – forever. And it hurts. When a forest is bulldozed, when an old-growth forest is destroyed, something in us is lost and we can feel the pain of that. In the logic of separation, that’s ridiculous. Why should that hurt? Who cares about that forest? Maybe I’m even benefitting from cutting it down. Who cares about the seals being clubbed in Newfoundland? Who cares about that? That’s not me being clubbed. Who cares if people are getting sick, as long as I’m keeping my distance from them? Who cares if there are riots in the ghettos? I can live in a gated community. I can separate myself. What I do to the world doesn’t necessarily have to affect me if I can exert enough power, if I can exert enough control, if I can master more forces.

More force. That’s the logic of separation. But it’s phony logic because we can feel – in our hearts. It hurts right here. We can feel that what happens to any other being is happening to us, too. Which is actually much more visibly true in a gift economy. If you start alienating people then you’re going to suffer. If someone breaks their leg, that’s less gifts that are going to come to you. But it’s not true in a money economy like ours where it’s not as obviously true.

So that’s the new story of the self – the connected self.

The new story of the people – I’m going to elaborate on that one a little bit. Part of this despair that many of us go through is that we look at human behavior, we look at what civilization has done on earth and we think that maybe humans are just bad. We’re nature’s mistake. We forgot something important and we’re destroying the earth because of it. Some radical writers say that. Derek Jensen, John Zerzan. They say agriculture was a big mistake. Or even symbolic culture – language was a big mistake. It began to separate us and we became more and more separate from nature and now we have almost destroyed it. “We should go back to being hunter-gatherers.” And no other being in nature thinks that it can grow forever. “Exponential growth – that doesn’t happen in nature.” But actually it does happen in nature. If you introduce bacteria into a medium where there are no bacteria yet but there’s food, they will grow exponentially for a while, until the population levels off. It might peak and then dip and then level off. But there is a growth phase. Same with an immature ecosystem. Same with an immature person.

There’s a phase where you grow and you are entitled. You feel entitled to receive from your parent. That’s what your love relationship is. It’s one of receiving, and you grow. And that’s humanity’s relationship with Earth up until now – where we’ve pretty much taken nature’s gifts for granted. But then at some point, growth ends. The ecosystem reaches maturity, the child reaches adulthood, and as growth ends two things happen. First, there’s some kind of ordeal that marks this transition. Ancient cultures understood this, so they created coming-of-age ordeals for the children to mark the passage into adulthood. Coincidently enough, these rituals involved your world falling apart – either through psychedelic plants or physical pain or isolation. Everything that you thought was so solid and secure and permanent – your child’s world fell apart. You didn’t know who you were anymore. Your identity fell apart. And then you gained a larger identity, an understanding of your place in the tribe. Therefore, you were an adult, and you joined the tribe for real. That’s what is happening now to humanity. We’re going through a coming of age ordeal that feels like the world is falling apart that is changing our identity in relationship to nature. No longer separate from nature. And then we’re joining the tribe of all life on earth.

The other thing that happens at this stage of life is that you fall in love. And this love relationship is different from the relationship of a child to a parent. Because you no longer just want to receive. You also want to give. Even as a teenager, you want to give something to your sweetie. And then you want to co-create. And that’s what humanity now is moving into. It started again in the 60s when the environmental movement was born into mass consciousness and people wanted to protect Earth, and give back to Earth. And it happened when the astronauts beamed down those photographs of the planet, which was the first time that most people saw Earth without borders drawn on it. People had never seen that before. Today it’s almost a cliché image – planet Earth. But even today it arouses some kind of wonder and reverence. When it first came down it was a revelation to people. The astronauts felt it. They all fell in love, too. “I was up there and I didn’t see any borders on Earth and I felt an overwhelming desire to protect this planet. And I felt love for every person on the planet. I could cover the Earth with my thumb, and I realized that everything precious to me was on that little dot. All of literature, all of music, everybody I love, all of history, all of human striving is on this little, fragile, dot.”

And so we fell in love with Earth. And today, everybody on some level wants to devote their gifts in service of other beings, and in service of the earth. For the connected self, it’s not true that we’re in competition, and that more for you is necessarily less for me. More for you is more for me, too. And those are the things that we’re attracted to now. We are no longer attracted to the conquest of nature. Unfortunately, our institutions haven’t caught up with the shift. Especially the institution of money. It still embodies separation and ascent, too. It compels both.

What I write about in my book is: What would money have to look like to embody the new story of the people and the new story of the self? What would money have to look like to make wealth be a matter of how much you give, not how much you keep? What would money have to look like to obey the law of ecology – that there’s no waste, that everything you create needs to be food for something else. How can we create an economic system that embodies those truths? It’s not a rhetorical question. That’s what I write about in the book.

Basically the book is how we got here, why money is the way it is, what would it look like to be something that we would call sacred, and then how do we align ourselves on a personal level with this shift. I kind of get sick of stuff about what “we” should do. What about me. What can I do now that doesn’t depend on lots of other people doing the same thing? That’s another source of despair. “I can ride my bike, recycle. Then there’s all those greedy people in those SUVs and what difference does it make, what I do?” I act from my heart and I rescue a puppy. How is that going to make a difference? The logic of separation says: It couldn’t make a difference because you’re just a separate little being and change is governed by the laws of physics, the laws of force. How could it make a difference – anything that you do? Especially if it is taking care of a puppy, or taking care of a sick person. How’s that going to change the world? But, again, that’s the mind and the logic that we’ve received, but our hearts know that those are all significant acts. That somehow that makes a difference. The connected self, the story of the connected self, understands that: Of course it makes a difference. Of course. Because anything that you do affects all beings. So logic and heart don’t have to be in contradiction anymore. That’s the significance of this transition in stories. We no longer have to enact this war against ourselves.

I’ll say just a couple things about what money will look like. I also write about how the transition can happen.

We have Michael Linton in the audience. He’s one of the pioneers of a different kind of money system, where money is not scarce because it is created by the transaction itself. Where it’s kind of like an ancient gift economy, where you do something for somebody and the community witnesses it. They don’t necessarily keep track of exactly how valuable it was, but there’s a general sense of who’s been giving a lot, who’s been receiving a lot, who’s been generous. For someone to be generous in that setting, they don’t have to have a lot of wealth. But that wealth is created through the giving. So why not have money like that, too? Why not say, “OK, I’m going to mow your grass, and we’ll make my credit go up by $10, and yours go down by $10. We create our own money, we create our own credit. We don’t have to go to a bank to get the money to create transactions. This system is known by the acronym, LETS: Local Exchange Trading System. So that’s one thing that I write about.

Another thing is what money would look like if instead of bearing interest, it had the negative of interest. If it decayed, just like everything else in the universe decays. Right now, money seems to be an exception. If wealth is in the form of grain or potatoes or iron or anything that you have to keep – the grain decays over time. How are you going to stay rich? You can’t be rich by just having a lot. But money’s not the same. Money doesn’t decay. So if I have a thousand loaves of bread right now, how am I going to be rich? If I keep them, they’re going to be stale in 3 days. The only way that I can be rich is to give everybody in this room a couple loaves of bread. It could just be a gift, but maybe we’re in a money economy, maybe I’ll say, “I’ll lend you these at zero interest, and you give me two loaves whenever you have more than you need. Or, whenever I need it, I’ll ask you for those two loaves of bread.” If I’ve given out a thousand loaves of bread, I’m really rich because for the rest of my life I’ll be able to get bread.

But that’s not the way we use money. If I have this bread and I say, “OK, I’m going to lend it to you, but only if you give me 3 loaves of bread back in a year,” I don’t have the leverage to do that. Everybody knows that if I keep them, they’re going to go bad. Money could work that way too, if money decays. This feature of money isn’t a half-baked idea, actually, it’s been developed by economists. John Maynard Keynes spoke very highly of it. It turns everything on its head.

So for example, (this story is based on something that actually happened): Let’s consider a company that owns an island with old-growth forest. They have a decision. “Either we can log this island sustainably and make a million dollars per year forever, or we can clear-cut the forest and destroy it, and make 100 million dollars this year. What should we do?” What would you do? Well, if you are rational you would clear-cut it and get that 100 million dollars, invest it in treasury bonds at 3 percent interest, and make 3 million dollars per year, not just 1 million. Well, maybe you are an environmentalist and you don’t want to do that. So you say, “Sorry, I’m the CEO. I’m not going to do that.” Fine. But now a corporate raider comes and says, “Your company is poorly managed. You could be having a cash flow of 3 million dollars from this asset. But you’re only getting a cash flow of 1 million dollars from this asset. Your stock price is based on lower corporate income than you could be having. Therefore, your stock is undervalued. So, I’m going to go to an investment bank, borrow enough money to buy your company, buy the company, cut down the forest, pay back the bank, and get rich.

This actually happens. As CEO, the only way you can stop this hostile takeover is by raising your stock price. And the way you do that is you cut down the forest. So that’s market discipline for you. It hardens a soft heart.

Now suppose you are the CEO of Earth and you are absolute dictator. Extraterrestrials come and they say, “We’d like to buy Earth, and we’re going to make it worth your while. Gross world product right now is 60 trillion dollars per year. How would you like 10 quadrillion dollars? Right now. Why, the interest on that alone is way more than 60 trillion dollars per year. You’ll be rich! We’re going to buy the planet from you. We’re going to destroy the atmosphere. We’re going to pollute the oceans. We’re going to destroy the planet. We’re going to mine it and build a big amusement park in another galaxy with the raw materials.” So do you want to say yes to this deal? Obviously not. But we are saying yes to this deal – collectively. And it’s driven by the money system. But if money has negative interest, then you’d rather have a million dollars per year in perpetuity rather than 100 million dollars right now.

Those are just two little examples of how to align money with what has become sacred to us.
– See more at: https://charleseisenstein.org/essays/transcript-of-a-speech-on-sacred-economics-and-beyond/#sthash.yuJGVLjq.dpuf



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Filed Under: Money, Gift, & Economics Tagged With: Essay, gift, gift economy, interbeing, money, new story, purpose, Sacred Economics, transition

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Compartmentalization: UFOs and Social Paralysis

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Reinventing Progress

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Love-gift to the Future

The Paradox of Busy

On the Great Green Wall, And Being Useful

Reunion

Division, Reunion, and some other stuff

Volatility

Into the Space Between

Wanna Join Me in a News Fast?

And the Music Played the Band

Comet of Deliverance

Divide, Conquer; Unite, Heal

A Path Will Rise to Meet Us

A Gathering of the Tribe

The True Story of the Sith

The Human Family

Elements of Refusal

The America that Almost Was and Yet May Be

Sanity

Time to Push

Some Stuff I’m Reading

The Rehearsal is Over

Beyond Industrial Medicine

A Temple of this Earth

The Sacrificial King

How It Is Going to Be

Charles Eisenstein, Antisemite

Mob Morality and the Unvaxxed

Fascism and the Antifestival

The Death of the Festival

Source Temple and the Great Reset

To Reason with a Madman

From QAnon’s Dark Mirror, Hope

World on Fire

We Can Do Better Than This

The Banquet of Whiteness

The Cure of the Earth

Numb

The Conspiracy Myth

The Coronation

Extinction and the Revolution of Love

The Amazon: How do we heal a burning heart?

Building a Peace Narrative

Xylella: Supervillain or Symptom

Making the Universe Great Again

Every Act a Ceremony

The Polarization Trap

I, Orc

Living in the Gift

A Little Heartbreak

Initiation into a Living Planet

Why I am Afraid of Global Cooling

Olive Trees and the Cry of the Land

Our New, Happy Life? The Ideology of Development

Opposition to GMOs is Neither Unscientific nor Immoral

The Age of We Need Each Other

Institutes for Technologies of Reunion

Brushes with the Mainstream

Standing Rock: A Change of Heart

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The Election: Of Hate, Grief, and a New Story

This Is How War Begins

The Lid is Off

Of Horseshoe Crabs and Empathy

Scaling Down

The Fertile Ground of Bewilderment

By Their Fruits Ye Shall Know Them

Psychedelics and Systems Change

Mutiny of the Soul Revisited

Why I Don’t Do Internet Marketing

Zika and the Mentality of Control

In a Rhino, Everything

Grief and Carbon Reductionism

The Revolution is Love

Kind is the New Cool

What We Do to Nature, We Do to Ourselves

From Nonviolence to Service

An Experiment in Gift Economics

Misogyny and the Healing of the Masculine

Sustainable Development: Something New or More of the Same?

The Need for Venture Science

The EcoSexual Awakening

“Don’t Owe. Won’t Pay.”

Harder to Hide

Reflections on Damanhur

On Immigration

The Humbler Realms, Part 2

The Humbler Realms

A Shift in Values Everywhere

Letter to my Younger Self

Aluna: A Message to Little Brother

Raising My Children in Trust

Qualitative Dimensions of Collective Intelligence: Subjectivity, Consciousness, and Soul

The Woman Who Chose to Plant Corn

The Oceans are Not Worth $24 trillion

The Baby in the Playpen

What Are We Greedy For?

We Need Regenerative Farming, Not Geoengineering

The Cynic and the Boatbuilder, Revisited

Activism in the New Story

What is Action?

Wasting Time

The Space Between Stories

Breakdown, Chaos, and Emergence

At This Moment, I Feel Held

A Roundabout Endorsement

Imagine a 3-D World

Presentation to Uplift Festival, 12.14.2014

Shadow, Ritual, and Relationship in the Gift

A Neat Inversion

The Waters of Heterodoxy

Employment in Gift Culture

Localization Beyond Economics

Discipline on the Bus

We Don’t Know: Reflections on the New Story Summit

A Miracle in Scientific American

More Talk?

Why Another Conference?

A Truncated Interview on Racism

A Beautiful World of Abundance

How to Bore the Children

Post-Capitalism

The Malware

The End of War

The Birds are Sad

A Slice of Humble Pie

Bending Reality: But who is the Bender?

The Mysterious Paths by Which Intentions Bear Fruit

The Little Things that Get Under My Skin

A Restorative Response to MH17

Climate Change: The Bigger Picture

Development in the Ecological Age

The campaign against Drax aims to reveal the perverse effects of biofuels

Gateway drug, to what?

Concern about Overpopulation is a Red Herring; Consumption’s the Problem

Imperialism and Ceremony in Bali

Let’s be Honest: Real Sustainability may not make Business Sense

Vivienne Westwood is Right: We Need a Law against Ecocide

2013: Hope or Despair?

2013: A Year that Pierced Me

Synchronicity, Myth, and the New World Order

Fear of a Living Planet

Pyramid Schemes and the Monetization of Everything

The Next Step for Digital Currency

The Cycle of Terror

TED: A Choice Point

The Cynic and the Boatbuilder

Latent Healing

2013: The Space between Stories

We Are Unlimited Potential: A Talk with Joseph Chilton Pearce

Why Occupy’s plan to cancel consumer debts is money well spent

Genetically Modifying and Patenting Seeds isn’t the Answer

The Lovely Lady from Nestle

An Alien at the Tech Conference

We Can’t Grow Ourselves out of Debt

Money and the Divine Masculine

Naivete, and the Light in their Eyes

The Healing of Congo

Why Rio +20 Failed

Permaculture and the Myth of Scarcity

For Facebook, A Modest Proposal

A Coal Pile in the Ballroom

A Review of Graeber’s Debt: The First 5000 Years

Gift Economics Resurgent

The Way up is Down

Design and Strategy Principles for Local Currency

The Lost Marble

To Bear Witness and to Speak the Truth

Thrive: The Story is Wrong but the Spirit is Right

Occupy Wall Street: No Demand is Big Enough

Elephants: Please Don’t Go

Why the Age of the Guru is Over

Gift Economics and Reunion in the Digital Age

A Circle of Gifts

The Three Seeds

Truth and Magic in the Third Dimension

Rituals for Lover Earth

Money and the Turning of the Age

A Gathering of the Tribe

The Sojourn of Science

Wood, Metal, and the Story of the World

A World-Creating Matrix of Truth

Waiting on the Big One

In the Miracle

Money and the Crisis of Civilization

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Invisible Paths

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Mutiny of the Soul

The Age of Water

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Money: A New Beginning (Part 1)

The Original Religion

Pain: A Call for Attention

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The Miracle of Self-Creation

The Deschooling Convivium

The Testicular Age

Who Will Collect the Garbage?

The Ubiquitous Matrix of Lies

You’re Bad!

A 28-year Lie: The Wrong Lesson

The Ascent of Humanity

The Stars are Shining for Her

All Hallows’ Eve

Confessions of a Hypocrite

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From Opinion to Belief to Knowing

Soul Families

For Whom was that Bird Singing?

The Multicellular Metahuman

Grades: A Gun to Your Head

Human Nature Denied

The Great Robbery

Humanity Grows Up

Don’t Should on US

A State of Belief is a State of Being

Ascension

Security and Fate

Old-Fashioned, Healthy, Lacto-Fermented Soft Drinks: The Real “Real Thing”

The Ethics of Eating Meat

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The Coronation

For years, normality has been stretched nearly to its breaking point, a rope pulled tighter and tighter, waiting for a nip of the black swan’s beak to snap it in two. Now that the rope has snapped, do we tie its ends back together, or shall we undo its dangling braids still further, to see what we might weave from them?

Covid-19 is showing us that when humanity is united in common cause, phenomenally rapid change is possible. None of the world’s problems are technically difficult to solve; they originate in human disagreement. In coherency, humanity’s creative powers are boundless. A few months ago, a proposal to halt commercial air travel would have seemed preposterous. Likewise for the radical changes we are making in our social behavior, economy, and the role of government in our lives. Covid demonstrates the power of our collective will when we agree on what is important. What else might we achieve, in coherency? What do we want to achieve, and what world shall we create? That is always the next question when anyone awakens to their power.

Covid-19 is like a rehab intervention that breaks the addictive hold of normality. To interrupt a habit is to make it visible; it is to turn it from a compulsion to a choice. When the crisis subsides, we might have occasion to ask whether we want to return to normal, or whether there might be something we’ve seen during this break in the routines that we want to bring into the future. We might ask, after so many have lost their jobs, whether all of them are the jobs the world most needs, and whether our labor and creativity would be better applied elsewhere. We might ask, having done without it for a while, whether we really need so much air travel, Disneyworld vacations, or trade shows. What parts of the economy will we want to restore, and what parts might we choose to let go of? And on a darker note, what among the things that are being taken away right now – civil liberties, freedom of assembly, sovereignty over our bodies, in-person gatherings, hugs, handshakes, and public life – might we need to exert intentional political and personal will to restore?

For most of my life, I have had the feeling that humanity was nearing a crossroads. Always, the crisis, the collapse, the break was imminent, just around the bend, but it didn’t come and it didn’t come. Imagine walking a road, and up ahead you see it, you see the crossroads. It’s just over the hill, around the bend, past the woods. Cresting the hill, you see you were mistaken, it was a mirage, it was farther away than you thought. You keep walking. Sometimes it comes into view, sometimes it disappears from sight and it seems like this road goes on forever. Maybe there isn’t a crossroads. No, there it is again! Always it is almost here. Never is it here.

Now, all of a sudden, we go around a bend and here it is. We stop, hardly able to believe that now it is happening, hardly able to believe, after years of confinement to the road of our predecessors, that now we finally have a choice. We are right to stop, stunned at the newness of our situation. Because of the hundred paths that radiate out in front of us, some lead in the same direction we’ve already been headed. Some lead to hell on earth. And some lead to a world more healed and more beautiful than we ever dared believe to be possible.

I write these words with the aim of standing here with you – bewildered, scared maybe, yet also with a sense of new possibility – at this point of diverging paths. Let us gaze down some of them and see where they lead.

* * *

I heard this story last week from a friend. She was in a grocery store and saw a woman sobbing in the aisle. Flouting social distancing rules, she went to the woman and gave her a hug. “Thank you,” the woman said, “that is the first time anyone has hugged me for ten days.”

Going without hugs for a few weeks seems a small price to pay if it will stem an epidemic that could take millions of lives. There is a strong argument for social distancing in the near term: to prevent a sudden surge of Covid cases from overwhelming the medical system. I would like to put that argument in a larger context, especially as we look to the long term. Lest we institutionalize distancing and reengineer society around it, let us be aware of what choice we are making and why.

The same goes for the other changes happening around the coronavirus epidemic. Some commentators have observed how it plays neatly into an agenda of totalitarian control. A frightened public accepts abridgments of civil liberties that are otherwise hard to justify, such as the tracking of everyone’s movements at all times, forcible medical treatment, involuntary quarantine, restrictions on travel and the freedom of assembly, censorship of what the authorities deem to be disinformation, suspension of habeas corpus, and military policing of civilians. Many of these were underway before Covid-19; since its advent, they have been irresistible. The same goes for the automation of commerce; the transition from participation in sports and entertainment to remote viewing; the migration of life from public to private spaces; the transition away from place-based schools toward online education, the decline of brick-and-mortar stores, and the movement of human work and leisure onto screens. Covid-19 is accelerating preexisting trends, political, economic, and social.

While all the above are, in the short term, justified on the grounds of flattening the curve (the epidemiological growth curve), we are also hearing a lot about a “new normal”; that is to say, the changes may not be temporary at all. Since the threat of infectious disease, like the threat of terrorism, never goes away, control measures can easily become permanent. If we were going in this direction anyway, the current justification must be part of a deeper impulse. I will analyze this impulse in two parts: the reflex of control, and the war on death. Thus understood, an initiatory opportunity emerges, one that we are seeing already in the form of the solidarity, compassion, and care that Covid-19 has inspired.

The Reflex of Control

At the current writing, official statistics say that about 25,000 people have died from Covid-19. By the time it runs its course, the death toll could be ten times or a hundred times bigger, or even, if the most alarming guesses are right, a thousand times bigger. Each one of these people has loved ones, family and friends. Compassion and conscience call us to do what we can to avert unnecessary tragedy. This is personal for me: my own infinitely dear but frail mother is among the most vulnerable to a disease that kills mostly the aged and the infirm.

What will the final numbers be? That question is impossible to answer at the time of this writing. Early reports were alarming; for weeks the official number from Wuhan, circulated endlessly in the media, was a shocking 3.4%. That, coupled with its highly contagious nature, pointed to tens of millions of deaths worldwide, or even as many as 100 million. More recently, estimates have plunged as it has become apparent that most cases are mild or asymptomatic. Since testing has been skewed towards the seriously ill, the death rate has looked artificially high. In South Korea, where hundreds of thousands of people with mild symptoms have been tested, the reported case fatality rate is around 1%. In Germany, whose testing also extends to many with mild symptoms, the fatality rate is 0.4%. A recent paper in the journal Science argues that 86% of infections have been undocumented, which points to a much lower mortality rate than the current case fatality rate would indicate.

The story of the Diamond Princess cruise ship bolsters this view. Of the 3,711 people on board, about 20% have tested positive for the virus; less than half of those had symptoms, and eight have died. A cruise ship is a perfect setting for contagion, and there was plenty of time for the virus to spread on board before anyone did anything about it, yet only a fifth were infected. Furthermore, the cruise ship’s population was heavily skewed (as are most cruise ships) toward the elderly: nearly a third of the passengers were over age 70, and more than half were over age 60. A research team concluded from the large number of asymptomatic cases that the true fatality rate in China is around 0.5%. That is still five times higher than flu. Based on the above (and adjusting for much younger demographics in Africa and South and Southeast Asia) my guess is about 200,000-300,000 deaths in the US – more if the medical system is overwhelmed, less if infections are spread out over time – and 3 million globally. Those are serious numbers. Not since the Hong Kong Flu pandemic of 1968/9 has the world experienced anything like it.

My guesses could easily be off by an order of magnitude. Every day the media reports the total number of Covid-19 cases, but no one has any idea what the true number is, because only a tiny proportion of the population has been tested. If tens of millions have the virus, asymptomatically, we would not know it. Further complicating the matter is the high rate of false positives for existing testing, possibly as high as 80%. (And see here for even more alarming uncertainties about test accuracy.) Let me repeat: no one knows what is really happening, including me. Let us be aware of two contradictory tendencies in human affairs. The first is the tendency for hysteria to feed on itself, to exclude data points that don’t play into the fear, and to create the world in its image. The second is denial, the irrational rejection of information that might disrupt normalcy and comfort. As Daniel Schmactenberger asks, How do you know what you believe is true?

In the face of the uncertainty, I’d like to make a prediction: The crisis will play out so that we never will know. If the final death tally, which will itself be the subject of dispute, is lower than feared, some will say that is because the controls worked. Others will say it is because the disease wasn’t as dangerous as we were told.

To me, the most baffling puzzle is why at the present writing there seem to be no new cases in China. The government didn’t initiate its lockdown until well after the virus was established. It should have spread widely during Chinese New Year, when every plane, train, and bus is packed with people traveling all over the country. What is going on here? Again, I don’t know, and neither do you.

Whether the final global death toll is 50,000 or 500,000 or 5 million, let’s look at some other numbers to get some perspective. My point is NOT that Covid isn’t so bad and we shouldn’t do anything. Bear with me. Last year, according to the FAO, five million children worldwide died of hunger (among 162 million who are stunted and 51 million who are wasted). That is 200 times more people than have died so far from Covid-19, yet no government has declared a state of emergency or asked that we radically alter our way of life to save them. Nor do we see a comparable level of alarm and action around suicide – the mere tip of an iceberg of despair and depression – which kills over a million people a year globally and 50,000 in the USA. Or drug overdoses, which kill 70,000 in the USA, the autoimmunity epidemic, which affects 23.5 million (NIH figure) to 50 million (AARDA), or obesity, which afflicts well over 100 million. Why, for that matter, are we not in a frenzy about averting nuclear armageddon or ecological collapse, but, to the contrary, pursue choices that magnify those very dangers?

Please, the point here is not that we haven’t changed our ways to stop children from starving, so we shouldn’t change them for Covid either. It is the contrary: If we can change so radically for Covid-19, we can do it for these other conditions too. Let us ask why are we able to unify our collective will to stem this virus, but not to address other grave threats to humanity. Why, until now, has society been so frozen in its existing trajectory?

The answer is revealing. Simply, in the face of world hunger, addiction, autoimmunity, suicide, or ecological collapse, we as a society do not know what to do. Our go-to crisis responses, all of which are some version of control, aren’t very effective in addressing these conditions. Now along comes a contagious epidemic, and finally we can spring into action. It is a crisis for which control works: quarantines, lockdowns, isolation, hand-washing; control of movement, control of information, control of our bodies. That makes Covid a convenient receptacle for our inchoate fears, a place to channel our growing sense of helplessness in the face of the changes overtaking the world. Covid-19 is a threat that we know how to meet. Unlike so many of our other fears, Covid-19 offers a plan.

Our civilization’s established institutions are increasingly helpless to meet the challenges of our time. How they welcome a challenge that they finally can meet. How eager they are to embrace it as a paramount crisis. How naturally their systems of information management select for the most alarming portrayals of it. How easily the public joins the panic, embracing a threat that the authorities can handle as a proxy for the various unspeakable threats that they cannot.

Today, most of our challenges no longer succumb to force. Our antibiotics and surgery fail to meet the surging health crises of autoimmunity, addiction, and obesity. Our guns and bombs, built to conquer armies, are useless to erase hatred abroad or keep domestic violence out of our homes. Our police and prisons cannot heal the breeding conditions of crime. Our pesticides cannot restore ruined soil. Covid-19 recalls the good old days when the challenges of infectious diseases succumbed to modern medicine and hygiene, at the same time as the Nazis succumbed to the war machine, and nature itself succumbed, or so it seemed, to technological conquest and improvement. It recalls the days when our weapons worked and the world seemed indeed to be improving with each technology of control.

What kind of problem succumbs to domination and control? The kind caused by something from the outside, something Other. When the cause of the problem is something intimate to ourselves, like homelessness or inequality, addiction or obesity, there is nothing to war against. We may try to install an enemy, blaming, for example, the billionaires, Vladimir Putin, or the Devil, but then we miss key information, such as the ground conditions that allow billionaires (or viruses) to replicate in the first place.

If there is one thing our civilization is good at, it is fighting an enemy. We welcome opportunities to do what we are good at, which prove the validity of our technologies, systems, and worldview. And so, we manufacture enemies, cast problems like crime, terrorism, and disease into us-versus-them terms, and mobilize our collective energies toward those endeavors that can be seen that way. Thus, we single out Covid-19 as a call to arms, reorganizing society as if for a war effort, while treating as normal the possibility of nuclear armageddon, ecological collapse, and five million children starving.

The Conspiracy Narrative

Because Covid-19 seems to justify so many items on the totalitarian wish list, there are those who believe it to be a deliberate power play. It is not my purpose to advance that theory nor to debunk it, although I will offer some meta-level comments. First a brief overview.

The theories (there are many variants) talk about Event 201 (sponsored by the Gates Foundation, CIA, etc. last September), and a 2010 Rockefeller Foundation white paper detailing a scenario called “Lockstep,” both of which lay out the authoritarian response to a hypothetical pandemic. They observe that the infrastructure, technology, and legislative framework for martial law has been in preparation for many years. All that was needed, they say, was a way to make the public embrace it, and now that has come. Whether or not current controls are permanent, a precedent is being set for:

  • • The tracking of people’s movements at all times (because coronavirus)
  • • The suspension of freedom of assembly (because coronavirus)
  • • The military policing of civilians (because coronavirus)
  • • Extrajudicial, indefinite detention (quarantine, because coronavirus)
  • • The banning of cash (because coronavirus)
  • • Censorship of the Internet (to combat disinformation, because coronavirus)
  • • Compulsory vaccination and other medical treatment, establishing the state’s sovereignty over our bodies (because coronavirus)
  • • The classification of all activities and destinations into the expressly permitted and the expressly forbidden (you can leave your house for this, but not that), eliminating the un-policed, non-juridical gray zone. That totality is the very essence of totalitarianism. Necessary now though, because, well, coronavirus.

This is juicy material for conspiracy theories. For all I know, one of those theories could be true; however, the same progression of events could unfold from an unconscious systemic tilt toward ever-increasing control. Where does this tilt come from? It is woven into civilization’s DNA. For millennia, civilization (as opposed to small-scale traditional cultures) has understood progress as a matter of extending control onto the world: domesticating the wild, conquering the barbarians, mastering the forces of nature, and ordering society according to law and reason. The ascent of control accelerated with the Scientific Revolution, which launched “progress” to new heights: the ordering of reality into objective categories and quantities, and the mastering of materiality with technology. Finally, the social sciences promised to use the same means and methods to fulfill the ambition (which goes back to Plato and Confucius) to engineer a perfect society.

Those who administer civilization will therefore welcome any opportunity to strengthen their control, for after all, it is in service to a grand vision of human destiny: the perfectly ordered world, in which disease, crime, poverty, and perhaps suffering itself can be engineered out of existence. No nefarious motives are necessary. Of course they would like to keep track of everyone – all the better to ensure the common good. For them, Covid-19 shows how necessary that is. “Can we afford democratic freedoms in light of the coronavirus?” they ask. “Must we now, out of necessity, sacrifice those for our own safety?” It is a familiar refrain, for it has accompanied other crises in the past, like 9/11.

To rework a common metaphor, imagine a man with a hammer, stalking around looking for a reason to use it. Suddenly he sees a nail sticking out. He’s been looking for a nail for a long time, pounding on screws and bolts and not accomplishing much. He inhabits a worldview in which hammers are the best tools, and the world can be made better by pounding in the nails. And here is a nail! We might suspect that in his eagerness he has placed the nail there himself, but it hardly matters. Maybe it isn’t even a nail that’s sticking out, but it resembles one enough to start pounding. When the tool is at the ready, an opportunity will arise to use it.

And I will add, for those inclined to doubt the authorities, maybe this time it really is a nail. In that case, the hammer is the right tool – and the principle of the hammer will emerge the stronger, ready for the screw, the button, the clip, and the tear.

Either way, the problem we deal with here is much deeper than that of overthrowing an evil coterie of Illuminati. Even if they do exist, given the tilt of civilization, the same trend would persist without them, or a new Illuminati would arise to assume the functions of the old.

True or false, the idea that the epidemic is some monstrous plot perpetrated by evildoers upon the public is not so far from the mindset of find-the-pathogen. It is a crusading mentality, a war mentality. It locates the source of a sociopolitical illness in a pathogen against which we may then fight, a victimizer separate from ourselves. It risks ignoring the conditions that make society fertile ground for the plot to take hold. Whether that ground was sown deliberately or by the wind is, for me, a secondary question.

What I will say next is relevant whether or not SARS-CoV2 is a genetically engineered bioweapon, is related to 5G rollout, is being used to prevent “disclosure,” is a Trojan horse for totalitarian world government, is more deadly than we’ve been told, is less deadly than we’ve been told, originated in a Wuhan biolab, originated at Fort Detrick, or is exactly as the CDC and WHO have been telling us. It applies even if everyone is totally wrong about the role of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in the current epidemic. I have my opinions, but if there is one thing I have learned through the course of this emergency is that I don’t really know what is happening. I don’t see how anyone can, amidst the seething farrago of news, fake news, rumors, suppressed information, conspiracy theories, propaganda, and politicized narratives that fill the Internet. I wish a lot more people would embrace not knowing. I say that both to those who embrace the dominant narrative, as well as to those who hew to dissenting ones. What information might we be blocking out, in order to maintain the integrity of our viewpoints? Let’s be humble in our beliefs: it is a matter of life and death.

The War on Death

My 7-year-old son hasn’t seen or played with another child for two weeks. Millions of others are in the same boat. Most would agree that a month without social interaction for all those children a reasonable sacrifice to save a million lives. But how about to save 100,000 lives? And what if the sacrifice is not for a month but for a year? Five years? Different people will have different opinions on that, according to their underlying values.

Let’s replace the foregoing questions with something more personal, that pierces the inhuman utilitarian thinking that turns people into statistics and sacrifices some of them for something else. The relevant question for me is, Would I ask all the nation’s children to forego play for a season, if it would reduce my mother’s risk of dying, or for that matter, my own risk? Or I might ask, Would I decree the end of human hugging and handshakes, if it would save my own life? This is not to devalue Mom’s life or my own, both of which are precious. I am grateful for every day she is still with us. But these questions bring up deep issues. What is the right way to live? What is the right way to die?

The answer to such questions, whether asked on behalf of oneself or on behalf of society at large, depends on how we hold death and how much we value play, touch, and togetherness, along with civil liberties and personal freedom. There is no easy formula to balance these values.

Over my lifetime I’ve seen society place more and more emphasis on safety, security, and risk reduction. It has especially impacted childhood: as a young boy it was normal for us to roam a mile from home unsupervised – behavior that would earn parents a visit from Child Protective Services today. It also manifests in the form of latex gloves for more and more professions; hand sanitizer everywhere; locked, guarded, and surveilled school buildings; intensified airport and border security; heightened awareness of legal liability and liability insurance; metal detectors and searches before entering many sports arenas and public buildings, and so on. Writ large, it takes the form of the security state.

The mantra “safety first” comes from a value system that makes survival top priority, and that depreciates other values like fun, adventure, play, and the challenging of limits. Other cultures had different priorities. For instance, many traditional and indigenous cultures are much less protective of children, as documented in Jean Liedloff’s classic, The Continuum Concept. They allow them risks and responsibilities that would seem insane to most modern people, believing that this is necessary for children to develop self-reliance and good judgement. I think most modern people, especially younger people, retain some of this inherent willingness to sacrifice safety in order to live life fully. The surrounding culture, however, lobbies us relentlessly to live in fear, and has constructed systems that embody fear. In them, staying safe is over-ridingly important. Thus we have a medical system in which most decisions are based on calculations of risk, and in which the worst possible outcome, marking the physician’s ultimate failure, is death. Yet all the while, we know that death awaits us regardless. A life saved actually means a death postponed.

The ultimate fulfillment of civilization’s program of control would be to triumph over death itself. Failing that, modern society settles for a facsimile of that triumph: denial rather than conquest. Ours is a society of death denial, from its hiding away of corpses, to its fetish for youthfulness, to its warehousing of old people in nursing homes. Even its obsession with money and property – extensions of the self, as the word “mine” indicates – expresses the delusion that the impermanent self can be made permanent through its attachments. All this is inevitable given the story-of-self that modernity offers: the separate individual in a world of Other. Surrounded by genetic, social, and economic competitors, that self must protect and dominate in order to thrive. It must do everything it can to forestall death, which (in the story of separation) is total annihilation. Biological science has even taught us that our very nature is to maximize our chances of surviving and reproducing.

I asked a friend, a medical doctor who has spent time with the Q’ero on Peru, whether the Q’ero would (if they could) intubate someone to prolong their life. “Of course not,” she said. “They would summon the shaman to help him die well.” Dying well (which isn’t necessarily the same as dying painlessly) is not much in today’s medical vocabulary. No hospital records are kept on whether patients die well. That would not be counted as a positive outcome. In the world of the separate self, death is the ultimate catastrophe.

But is it? Consider this perspective from Dr. Lissa Rankin: “Not all of us would want to be in an ICU, isolated from loved ones with a machine breathing for us, at risk of dying alone- even if it means they might increase their chance of survival. Some of us might rather be held in the arms of loved ones at home, even if that means our time has come…. Remember, death is no ending. Death is going home.”

When the self is understood as relational, interdependent, even inter-existent, then it bleeds over into the other, and the other bleeds over into the self. Understanding the self as a locus of consciousness in a matrix of relationship, one no longer searches for an enemy as the key to understanding every problem, but looks instead for imbalances in relationships. The War on Death gives way to the quest to live well and fully, and we see that fear of death is actually fear of life. How much of life will we forego to stay safe?

Totalitarianism – the perfection of control – is the inevitable end product of the mythology of the separate self. What else but a threat to life, like a war, would merit total control? Thus Orwell identified perpetual war as a crucial component of the Party’s rule.

Against the backdrop of the program of control, death denial, and the separate self, the assumption that public policy should seek to minimize the number of deaths is nearly beyond question, a goal to which other values like play, freedom, etc. are subordinate. Covid-19 offers occasion to broaden that view. Yes, let us hold life sacred, more sacred than ever. Death teaches us that. Let us hold each person, young or old, sick or well, as the sacred, precious, beloved being that they are. And in the circle of our hearts, let us make room for other sacred values too. To hold life sacred is not just to live long, it is to live well and right and fully.

Like all fear, the fear around the coronavirus hints at what might lie beyond it. Anyone who has experienced the passing of someone close knows that death is a portal to love. Covid-19 has elevated death to prominence in the consciousness of a society that denies it. On the other side of the fear, we can see the love that death liberates. Let it pour forth. Let it saturate the soil of our culture and fill its aquifers so that it seeps up through the cracks of our crusted institutions, our systems, and our habits. Some of these may die too.

What world shall we live in?

How much of life do we want to sacrifice at the altar of security? If it keeps us safer, do we want to live in a world where human beings never congregate? Do we want to wear masks in public all the time? Do we want to be medically examined every time we travel, if that will save some number of lives a year? Are we willing to accept the medicalization of life in general, handing over final sovereignty over our bodies to medical authorities (as selected by political ones)? Do we want every event to be a virtual event? How much are we willing to live in fear?

Covid-19 will eventually subside, but the threat of infectious disease is permanent. Our response to it sets a course for the future. Public life, communal life, the life of shared physicality has been dwindling over several generations. Instead of shopping at stores, we get things delivered to our homes. Instead of packs of kids playing outside, we have play dates and digital adventures. Instead of the public square, we have the online forum. Do we want to continue to insulate ourselves still further from each other and the world?

It is not hard to imagine, especially if social distancing is successful, that Covid-19 persists beyond the 18 months we are being told to expect for it to run its course. It is not hard to imagine that new viruses will emerge during that time. It is not hard to imagine that emergency measures will become normal (so as to forestall the possibility of another outbreak), just as the state of emergency declared after 9/11 is still in effect today. It is not hard to imagine that (as we are being told), reinfection is possible, so that the disease will never run its course. That means that the temporary changes in our way of life may become permanent.

To reduce the risk of another pandemic, shall we choose to live in a society without hugs, handshakes, and high-fives, forever more? Shall we choose to live in a society where we no longer gather en masse? Shall the concert, the sports competition, and the festival be a thing of the past? Shall children no longer play with other children? Shall all human contact be mediated by computers and masks? No more dance classes, no more karate classes, no more conferences, no more churches? Is death reduction to be the standard by which to measure progress? Does human advancement mean separation? Is this the future?

The same question applies to the administrative tools required to control the movement of people and the flow of information. At the present writing, the entire country is moving toward lockdown. In some countries, one must print out a form from a government website in order to leave the house. It reminds me of school, where one’s location must be authorized at all times. Or of prison. Do we envision a future of electronic hall passes, a system where freedom of movement is governed by state administrators and their software at all times, permanently? Where every movement is tracked, either permitted or prohibited? And, for our protection, where information that threatens our health (as decided, again, by various authorities) is censored for our own good? In the face of an emergency, like unto a state of war, we accept such restrictions and temporarily surrender our freedoms. Similar to 9/11, Covid-19 trumps all objections.

For the first time in history, the technological means exist to realize such a vision, at least in the developed world (for example, using cellphone location data to enforce social distancing; see also here). After a bumpy transition, we could live in a society where nearly all of life happens online: shopping, meeting, entertainment, socializing, working, even dating. Is that what we want? How many lives saved is that worth?

I am sure that many of the controls in effect today will be partially relaxed in a few months. Partially relaxed, but at the ready. As long as infectious disease remains with us, they are likely to be reimposed, again and again, in the future, or be self-imposed in the form of habits. As Deborah Tannen says, contributing to a Politico article on how coronavirus will change the world permanently, ‘We know now that touching things, being with other people and breathing the air in an enclosed space can be risky…. It could become second nature to recoil from shaking hands or touching our faces—and we may all fall heir to society-wide OCD, as none of us can stop washing our hands.” After thousands of years, millions of years, of touch, contact, and togetherness, is the pinnacle of human progress to be that we cease such activities because they are too risky?

Life is Community

The paradox of the program of control is that its progress rarely advances us any closer to its goal. Despite security systems in almost every upper middle-class home, people are no less anxious or insecure than they were a generation ago. Despite elaborate security measures, the schools are not seeing fewer mass shootings. Despite phenomenal progress in medical technology, people have if anything become less healthy over the past thirty years, as chronic disease has proliferated and life expectancy stagnated and, in the USA and Britain, started to decline.

The measures being instituted to control Covid-19, likewise, may end up causing more suffering and death than they prevent. Minimizing deaths means minimizing the deaths that we know how to predict and measure. It is impossible to measure the added deaths that might come from isolation-induced depression, for instance, or the despair caused by unemployment, or the lowered immunity and deterioration in health that chronic fear can cause. Loneliness and lack of social contact has been shown to increase inflammation, depression, and dementia. According to Lissa Rankin, M.D., air pollution increases risk of dying by 6%, obesity by 23%, alcohol abuse by 37%, and loneliness by 45%.

Another danger that is off the ledger is the deterioration in immunity caused by excessive hygiene and distancing. It is not only social contact that is necessary for health, it is also contact with the microbial world. Generally speaking, microbes are not our enemies, they are our allies in health. A diverse gut biome, comprising bacteria, viruses, yeasts, and other organisms, is essential for a well-functioning immune system, and its diversity is maintained through contact with other people and with the world of life. Excessive hand-washing, overuse of antibiotics, aseptic cleanliness, and lack of human contact might do more harm than good. The resulting allergies and autoimmune disorders might be worse than the infectious disease they replace. Socially and biologically, health comes from community. Life does not thrive in isolation.

Seeing the world in us-versus-them terms blinds us to the reality that life and health happen in community. To take the example of infectious diseases, we fail to look beyond the evil pathogen and ask, What is the role of viruses in the microbiome? (See also here.) What are the body conditions under which harmful viruses proliferate? Why do some people have mild symptoms and others severe ones (besides the catch-all non-explanation of “low resistance”)? What positive role might flus, colds, and other non-lethal diseases play in the maintenance of health?

War-on-germs thinking brings results akin to those of the War on Terror, War on Crime, War on Weeds, and the endless wars we fight politically and interpersonally. First, it generates endless war; second, it diverts attention from the ground conditions that breed illness, terrorism, crime, weeds, and the rest.

Despite politicians’ perennial claim that they pursue war for the sake of peace, war inevitably breeds more war. Bombing countries to kill terrorists not only ignores the ground conditions of terrorism, it exacerbates those conditions. Locking up criminals not only ignores the conditions that breed crime, it creates those conditions when it breaks up families and communities and acculturates the incarcerated to criminality. And regimes of antibiotics, vaccines, antivirals, and other medicines wreak havoc on body ecology, which is the foundation of strong immunity. Outside the body, the massive spraying campaigns sparked by Zika, Dengue Fever, and now Covid-19 will visit untold damage upon nature’s ecology. Has anyone considered what the effects on the ecosystem will be when we douse it with antiviral compounds? Such a policy (which has been implemented in various places in China and India) is only thinkable from the mindset of separation, which does not understand that viruses are integral to the web of life.

To understand the point about ground conditions, consider some mortality statistics from Italy (from its National Health Institute), based on an analysis of hundreds of Covid-19 fatalities. Of those analyzed, less than 1% were free of serious chronic health conditions. Some 75% suffered from hypertension, 35% from diabetes, 33% from cardiac ischemia, 24% from atrial fibrillation, 18% from low renal function, along with other conditions that I couldn’t decipher from the Italian report. Nearly half the deceased had three or more of these serious pathologies. Americans, beset by obesity, diabetes, and other chronic ailments, are at least as vulnerable as Italians. Should we blame the virus then (which killed few otherwise healthy people), or shall we blame underlying poor health? Here again the analogy of the taut rope applies. Millions of people in the modern world are in a precarious state of health, just waiting for something that would normally be trivial to send them over the edge. Of course, in the short term we want to save their lives; the danger is that we lose ourselves in an endless succession of short terms, fighting one infectious disease after another, and never engage the ground conditions that make people so vulnerable. That is a much harder problem, because these ground conditions will not change via fighting. There is no pathogen that causes diabetes or obesity, addiction, depression, or PTSD. Their causes are not an Other, not some virus separate from ourselves, and we its victims.

Even in diseases like Covid-19, in which we can name a pathogenic virus, matters are not so simple as a war between virus and victim. There is an alternative to the germ theory of disease that holds germs to be part of a larger process. When conditions are right, they multiply in the body, sometimes killing the host, but also, potentially, improving the conditions that accommodated them to begin with, for example by cleaning out accumulated toxic debris via mucus discharge, or (metaphorically speaking) burning them up with fever. Sometimes called “terrain theory,” it says that germs are more symptom than cause of disease. As one meme explains it: “Your fish is sick. Germ theory: isolate the fish. Terrain theory: clean the tank.”

A certain schizophrenia afflicts the modern culture of health. On the one hand, there is a burgeoning wellness movement that embraces alternative and holistic medicine. It advocates herbs, meditation, and yoga to boost immunity. It validates the emotional and spiritual dimensions of health, such as the power of attitudes and beliefs to sicken or to heal. All of this seems to have disappeared under the Covid tsunami, as society defaults to the old orthodoxy.

Case in point: California acupuncturists have been forced to shut down, having been deemed “non-essential.” This is perfectly understandable from the perspective of conventional virology. But as one acupuncturist on Facebook observed, “What about my patient who I’m working with to get off opioids for his back pain? He’s going to have to start using them again.” From the worldview of medical authority, alternative modalities, social interaction, yoga classes, supplements, and so on are frivolous when it comes to real diseases caused by real viruses. They are relegated to an etheric realm of “wellness” in the face of a crisis. The resurgence of orthodoxy under Covid-19 is so intense that anything remotely unconventional, such as intravenous vitamin C, was completely off the table in the United States until two days ago (articles still abound “debunking” the “myth” that vitamin C can help fight Covid-19). Nor have I heard the CDC evangelize the benefits of elderberry extract, medicinal mushrooms, cutting sugar intake, NAC (N-acetyl L-cysteine), astragalus, or vitamin D. These are not just mushy speculation about “wellness,” but are supported by extensive research and physiological explanations. For example, NAC (general info, double-blind placebo-controlled study) has been shown to radically reduce incidence and severity of symptoms in flu-like illnesses.

As the statistics I offered earlier on autoimmunity, obesity, etc. indicate, America and the modern world in general are facing a health crisis. Is the answer to do what we’ve been doing, only more thoroughly? The response so far to Covid has been to double down on the orthodoxy and sweep unconventional practices and dissenting viewpoints aside. Another response would be to widen our lens and examine the entire system, including who pays for it, how access is granted, and how research is funded, but also expanding out to include marginal fields like herbal medicine, functional medicine, and energy medicine. Perhaps we can take this opportunity to reevaluate prevailing theories of illness, health, and the body. Yes, let’s protect the sickened fish as best we can right now, but maybe next time we won’t have to isolate and drug so many fish, if we can clean the tank.

I’m not telling you to run out right now and buy NAC or any other supplement, nor that we as a society should abruptly shift our response, cease social distancing immediately, and start taking supplements instead. But we can use the break in normal, this pause at a crossroads, to consciously choose what path we shall follow moving forward: what kind of healthcare system, what paradigm of health, what kind of society. This reevaluation is already happening, as ideas like universal free healthcare in the USA gain new momentum. And that path leads to forks as well. What kind of healthcare will be universalized? Will it be merely available to all, or mandatory for all – each citizen a patient, perhaps with an invisible ink barcode tattoo certifying one is up to date on all compulsory vaccines and check-ups. Then you can go to school, board a plane, or enter a restaurant. This is one path to the future that is available to us.

Another option is available now too. Instead of doubling down on control, we could finally embrace the holistic paradigms and practices that have been waiting on the margins, waiting for the center to dissolve so that, in our humbled state, we can bring them into the center and build a new system around them.

The Coronation

There is an alternative to the paradise of perfect control that our civilization has so long pursued, and that recedes as fast as our progress, like a mirage on the horizon. Yes, we can proceed as before down the path toward greater insulation, isolation, domination, and separation. We can normalize heightened levels of separation and control, believe that they are necessary to keep us safe, and accept a world in which we are afraid to be near each other. Or we can take advantage of this pause, this break in normal, to turn onto a path of reunion, of holism, of the restoring of lost connections, of the repair of community and the rejoining of the web of life.

Do we double down on protecting the separate self, or do we accept the invitation into a world where all of us are in this together? It isn’t just in medicine we encounter this question: it visits us politically, economically, and in our personal lives as well. Take for example the issue of hoarding, which embodies the idea, “There won’t be enough for everyone, so I am going to make sure there is enough for me.” Another response might be, “Some don’t have enough, so I will share what I have with them.” Are we to be survivalists or helpers? What is life for?

On a larger scale, people are asking questions that have until now lurked on activist margins. What should we do about the homeless? What should we do about the people in prisons? In Third World slums? What should we do about the unemployed? What about all the hotel maids, the Uber drivers, the plumbers and janitors and bus drivers and cashiers who cannot work from home? And so now, finally, ideas like student debt relief and universal basic income are blossoming. “How do we protect those susceptible to Covid?” invites us into “How do we care for vulnerable people in general?”

That is the impulse that stirs in us, regardless of the superficialities of our opinions about Covid’s severity, origin, or best policy to address it. It is saying, let’s get serious about taking care of each other. Let’s remember how precious we all are and how precious life is. Let’s take inventory of our civilization, strip it down to its studs, and see if we can build one more beautiful.

As Covid stirs our compassion, more and more of us realize that we don’t want to go back to a normal so sorely lacking it. We have the opportunity now to forge a new, more compassionate normal.

Hopeful signs abound that this is happening. The United States government, which has long seemed the captive of heartless corporate interests, has unleashed hundreds of billions of dollars in direct payments to families. Donald Trump, not known as a paragon of compassion, has put a moratorium on foreclosures and evictions. Certainly one can take a cynical view of both these developments; nonetheless, they embody the principle of caring for the vulnerable.

From all over the world we hear stories of solidarity and healing. One friend described sending $100 each to ten strangers who were in dire need. My son, who until a few days ago worked at Dunkin’ Donuts, said people were tipping at five times the normal rate – and these are working class people, many of them Hispanic truck drivers, who are economically insecure themselves. Doctors, nurses, and “essential workers” in other professions risk their lives to serve the public. Here are some more examples of the love and kindness eruption, courtesy of ServiceSpace:

Perhaps we’re in the middle of living into that new story. Imagine Italian airforce using Pavoratti, Spanish military doing acts of service, and street police playing guitars — to *inspire*. Corporations giving unexpected wage hikes. Canadians starting “Kindness Mongering.” Six year old in Australia adorably gifting her tooth fairy money, an 8th grader in Japan making 612 masks, and college kids everywhere buying groceries for elders. Cuba sending an army in “white robes” (doctors) to help Italy. A landlord allowing tenants to stay without rent, an Irish priest’s poem going viral, disabled activitists producing hand sanitizer. Imagine. Sometimes a crisis mirrors our deepest impulse — that we can always respond with compassion.

As Rebecca Solnit describes in her marvelous book, A Paradise Built in Hell, disaster often liberates solidarity. A more beautiful world shimmers just beneath the surface, bobbing up whenever the systems that hold it underwater loosen their grip.

For a long time we, as a collective, have stood helpless in the face of an ever-sickening society. Whether it is declining health, decaying infrastructure, depression, suicide, addiction, ecological degradation, or concentration of wealth, the symptoms of civilizational malaise in the developed world are plain to see, but we have been stuck in the systems and patterns that cause them. Now, Covid has gifted us a reset.

A million forking paths lie before us. Universal basic income could mean an end to economic insecurity and the flowering of creativity as millions are freed from the work that Covid has shown us is less necessary than we thought. Or it could mean, with the decimation of small businesses, dependency on the state for a stipend that comes with strict conditions. The crisis could usher in totalitarianism or solidarity; medical martial law or a holistic renaissance; greater fear of the microbial world, or greater resiliency in participation in it; permanent norms of social distancing, or a renewed desire to come together.

What can guide us, as individuals and as a society, as we walk the garden of forking paths? At each junction, we can be aware of what we follow: fear or love, self-preservation or generosity. Shall we live in fear and build a society based on it? Shall we live to preserve our separate selves? Shall we use the crisis as a weapon against our political enemies? These are not all-or-nothing questions, all fear or all love. It is that a next step into love lies before us. It feels daring, but not reckless. It treasures life, while accepting death. And it trusts that with each step, the next will become visible.

Please don’t think that choosing love over fear can be accomplished solely through an act of will, and that fear too can be conquered like a virus. The virus we face here is fear, whether it is fear of Covid-19, or fear of the totalitarian response to it, and this virus too has its terrain. Fear, along with addiction, depression, and a host of physical ills, flourishes in a terrain of separation and trauma: inherited trauma, childhood trauma, violence, war, abuse, neglect, shame, punishment, poverty, and the muted, normalized trauma that affects nearly everyone who lives in a monetized economy, undergoes modern schooling, or lives without community or connection to place. This terrain can be changed, by trauma healing on a personal level, by systemic change toward a more compassionate society, and by transforming the basic narrative of separation: the separate self in a world of other, me separate from you, humanity separate from nature. To be alone is a primal fear, and modern society has rendered us more and more alone. But the time of Reunion is here. Every act of compassion, kindness, courage, or generosity heals us from the story of separation, because it assures both actor and witness that we are in this together.

I will conclude by invoking one more dimension of the relationship between humans and viruses. Viruses are integral to evolution, not just of humans but of all eukaryotes. Viruses can transfer DNA from organism to organism, sometimes inserting it into the germline (where it becomes heritable). Known as horizontal gene transfer, this is a primary mechanism of evolution, allowing life to evolve together much faster than is possible through random mutation. As Lynn Margulis once put it, we are our viruses.

And now let me venture into speculative territory. Perhaps the great diseases of civilization have quickened our biological and cultural evolution, bestowing key genetic information and offering both individual and collective initiation. Could the current pandemic be just that? Novel RNA codes are spreading from human to human, imbuing us with new genetic information; at the same time, we are receiving other, esoteric, “codes” that ride the back of the biological ones, disrupting our narratives and systems in the same way that an illness disrupts bodily physiology. The phenomenon follows the template of initiation: separation from normality, followed by a dilemma, breakdown, or ordeal, followed (if it is to be complete) by reintegration and celebration.

Now the question arises: Initiation into what? What is the specific nature and purpose of this initiation?The popular name for the pandemic offers a clue: coronavirus. A corona is a crown. “Novel coronavirus pandemic” means “a new coronation for all.”

Already we can feel the power of who we might become. A true sovereign does not run in fear from life or from death. A true sovereign does not dominate and conquer (that is a shadow archetype, the Tyrant). The true sovereign serves the people, serves life, and respects the sovereignty of all people. The coronation marks the emergence of the unconscious into consciousness, the crystallization of chaos into order, the transcendence of compulsion into choice. We become the rulers of that which had ruled us. The New World Order that the conspiracy theorists fear is a shadow of the glorious possibility available to sovereign beings. No longer the vassals of fear, we can bring order to the kingdom and build an intentional society on the love already shining through the cracks of the world of separation.

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