Ecological Economics and the Evolution of Capital: Charles Eisenstein & Carolyn Finney

so I want to name a couple things that I'm noticing here at this conference for one thing it's quite extraordinary the mix of people that we have I speak at a lot of conferences but I rarely am present with people who are really in elite positions in what you might call the matrix when people come to my events or my retreats it's usually because they are you know a former Obama administration official or a former hedge fund manager who's kind of left that world but here we're having people from the World Bank from the Federal Reserve from I mean Larry Summers was here my goodness that world and a world of tea ceremonies and yoga and myth-making Rihanna Eisler sherry Mitchell people speaking about indigenous knowledge all in the same conference together and you know I guess in a mainstream conference you might have like some yoga or something like kind of as a decoration and here's a musical performance but now let's get down to business but I think that many of us are realizing that business has to include all of these things so we're we're embarking on some kind of a reunification one way to look at it would be a reunification of economy and ecology of matter and spirit of the qualitative and the quantitative money is by definition a quantitative phenomenon it's fits in very well with the basic religion of our culture which is science which among its metaphysical teachings is that everything is quantifiable and the ambition of science has been to extend the realm of quantitative thinking and of measurement to all of reality economics has kind of followed that whether in concept or in practice to convert the world into money commodity quantity so they're part of the same intellectual or ideological paradigm so I want to say a little bit and and this is something that is in a process of evolution or transformation so I want to say a little bit about what money is I had a really like amazing experience a few days ago I was in California and I was driving around to different I speaking at some different things that were like hours apart and so I needed a car so I went to this place that has lots of cars and they just gave me one all I had to do is to like perform a simple little ritual with a piece of plastic encoded in ceremonial symbols and I performed this little ritual and they just gave me the car they didn't even know me and I drove it around and then I returned it to them this gives a hint about what money is money is magic it's if some some alien anthropologists came and they would they would study the anthropologists call it the magico religious rituals of our society these superstitious people think that by manipulating symbols they can change reality well what is money but a system of symbol what are the Federal Reserve officials but the high priests who who make their incantations and reality changes what is a banker but somebody who can actually put you under a voodoo curse and and siphon your life energy to feed himself yeah like it Maps really well on to on to on to magic and of course the power of a system of ritual and I don't want to reduce it to this but much of the power of a system of ritual depends on the stories the meanings and the agreements that that symbolic system encodes so basically this is pretty obvious I think that money is a story it is just such a set of agreements that is incredibly liberating because if the story isn't working in theory stories are created by human beings actually that's not quite true it's more the opposite but let's just say that that stories create human beings but let's just say that that for now that stories are created by human beings and we could create a new story all of the things that we see as real the entire money system twenty trillion dollars of debt or whatever these are human creations these are stories if we had a Carrington event you know a solar coronal mass ejection that fried all electronics there would not be any money anymore no more money so I want to explore a little bit about how the story of money could change this is not the story of money is not isolated from our deeper cultural myths in fact it's grounded in the fundamental semi conscious defining stories of our time that I do call myths primary among them is the story of separation which basically says in answers like all myths do it answers deep questions like who are you why are you here what's important and where do we come from and what is the destiny of humanity and basically in the modern era and this is not universally human ok there's also a new and very ancient story that I will talk about but it says that who you are is a separate self in an objective world outside of you a world that operates by force that's Newtonian physics something happens a change happens when you exert a force on a mass and that this world outside of ourselves does not have the qualities of a self does not have intelligence purpose or inherent organization or certainly not consciousness therefore marooned in this alien world of generic particles and mathematical forces competing other separate selves and the arbitrary forces of nature human improvement the human progress becomes a matter of of insulating ourselves from these outside forces of mastering them and of imprinting imposing intelligence onto a world that has none that's called progress that's called development it is so so what realized I was talking about this Dominator paradigm that's kind of baked into the cake of a story of separation and you can see how oh and of course humans separate from nature would be another part of that story so you can see how the money system the story of money as it is currently constituted is part of that story it encourages competition it generates scarcity even things that are fundamentally abundant become scarce when they are subject to money we have basically we have a world of fundamental abundance more than enough food for example probably half of all food is wasted at this point yet so many people go hungry that's artificial scarcity artificial scarcity of water artificial scarcity of community artificial scarcity of beauty this is a beautiful building but okay I'm not gonna go down that road all I want to say but so money is it sits comfortably in a story of separation and also the story of growth the story of that says that human destiny is to become the lords and masters of nature that our well-being that our progress comes through making more and more of the world ours mastering more and more of nature extending our mastery to the Nano realm to the genetic realm to outer space and everything will be and we will solve all of our problems that way so there are I want to go into a little bit of the dynamics of money that it's not just a philosophical alignment but the design the structure of the agreements that we call money inevitably produce competition scarcity and growth and this is has long been considered a good thing especially the growth part because growth what does growth mean in economics growth means the rise in the number of goods and services that are exchanged for money and the ideology of economics says it must be and that's why they're called Goods because you're willing to pay for them that means you want them that means that more and more human wants and needs are being met as the economy grows now there's actually a lot more to the story than that which I will go into there's a shadow side of this but for right now let me just start with with what is it about the money system that that generates competition and growth and then like we so immersed in this story we back projected onto history and we think that as spiral dynamics says that that you know primitive existence is this free-for-all cutthroat melee of each against all actually it was nothing like that and even in nature competition is just one small piece of the operation of nature which is much more especially evolution happens much more through symbiosis and cooperation so alright the best way to explain this is a bit oversimplified and I know that there are some very sophisticated economists in this audience so please listen with a generous ear and imagine that the simplifications are something that I'm aware of but imagine that we decided to play a game of musical chairs here we set up all the chairs and there's I don't know 100 hundred people here and we set up 90 chairs and the music starts and we all dance around and then the music stops we all go for a chair and to make it interesting because you know it's just a game it's not interesting but if to make it interesting if you don't get a chair you lose your house and your kids your kids go hungry and and you don't get medical care all right and so let's set that up and and the music stops and like unless somebody is really self-sacrificing and altruistic we're gonna be elbowing each other and pushing and rushing for the chairs and who's gonna get the chairs it's gonna be the the most aggressive the biggest the most dominant people and others aren't going to get any chairs I imagine sitting back and watching this game there's a politician an economist a biologist and a priest and and and The Economist says look at that human nature everyone's seeking their to maximize their rational self-interest and the biologist says yep it's reproductive self-interest that they're seeking to maximize here and the politician says good thing they have us around to protect them from each other and the priest says I'm gonna go in there and try to convince them to be nicer to each other because that's the way of the world and so we need other worldly values but is that really human nature or is that a product of the rules of the game what would happen if you had a hundred people in a hundred shares and maybe every chair is different so there still might need to be some traded I have long legs you have short legs I'm thin you're fat you know I like soft cushions you like hard cushions and so there still might be some some trading but there's not fundamental competition built into the system so the money system works very similarly to a game of musical chairs simply because money is created as interest-bearing debt that means that there's always more debt than there is money if I'm if I'm say the bank and say I'm the only bank and I lend everybody $10,000 and it were let's make ourselves rich a million dollars and you have to pay me back to make math easy let's say it's 7% interest for 10 years in 10 years you each have to pay me back 2 million dollars and this is where all the money comes from and so here I'm skipping over a lot of things there's the base money created by the central banks there's money people actually use created by commercial banks and so on and so forth but simplifying here everybody owes me 2 million dollars how are you gonna make that money you have to make it from each other you're in competition with each other for never enough half you are gonna have to go bankrupt some of you might get rich because you're gonna make all kinds of things that the others need but the the ground rules our competition and half you have to go bankrupt in ten years except for one thing in ten years actually you don't go bankrupt because by that time I'm continuing to lend even more money into existence so I've lent enough into existence for most of you to be able to pay me back in order to do that I don't just lend it to anybody I only lend it if I think you're gonna pay me back if you're gonna be if you're good at creating goods and services if you can find some something to sell some some trees to cut down to make to make houses and so here we get to the systemic necessity for growth because if you don't have a good business plan if you cannot tell me how you're gonna make even more money than I'm lending you I'm not going to lend you the money lending then dries up and defaults bankruptcies mount you have unemployment deflation a classic crisis of capital that's a vicious circle and I won't get into that too much but I think that let's just I think most people would agree that our economic system only works in the presence of growth without economic growth without investment opportunities that are gonna make more money back then there isn't going to be investment there isn't gonna be lending and money isn't going to circulate in the economy so there is a systemic pressure to find some way to to maintain economic growth which is as I said before the growth in goods and services exchanged for money so to touch on what Rihanna's I was saying caring for children that is not a good service that is exchange for money you cannot lend based on that community's taking care of each other that's not a good in service exchange for money forests growing biodiversity that's not a good service either so what you have in a developed country is you is as more and more of nature has been converted into Goods and more importantly more and more of community and relationship has been converted into services you have fewer and fewer lending opportunities the rate of return on capital Falls and you have to do something to keep it going so that's called colonialism that's called imperialism that's called development where you go to say Kenya and you say gosh what a market opportunity here you still have villages where people sing their own songs you could be buying iTunes you still know how to build your own houses we can Institute property rights and and soon you'll be buying insurance you know how to subsist from the land well let's convince you that that is degrading and that that your lives will be so much better if you embark on the ascent of humanity and live in air-conditioned houses so this is very much what this is an ideology of progress and development Larry Summers articulated in a very clear and forthright manner this triumphalism things are getting better and better and better look at this literacy higher and higher one of the other ladies other other night 75% of the world was in absolute poverty in 1940 making less than a dollar a day but if you live in a traditional village or a hunter-gatherer society you don't need to make more than a dollar a day life isn't monetized all of your needs are met by yourself by your extended family by your community you know how to grow your own food you know how to sing your own songs you know how to do your own healing you and the deeper psychological needs of belonging of identity those are met through intimate relationships to community and to nature when those ties are broken the result is an endless hunger that takes the form of greed and addiction and presents to us the shadow side of economic growth I don't know how many of you have traveled to parts of the world that are less developed and discovered while people are a lot happier here well in our country suicide depression anxiety addiction opioid addiction meth addiction all of these are record levels and the promise of technological utopia is faltering even life expectancy starting to go down and therefore this triumphalist prescription of development that says to the rest of the world be like us is losing its legitimacy even within the people who champion it the most loudly there's a secret doubt gnawing at us begging for a transition somehow and as we feel helpless to make that transition sometimes there's even like a secret death wish like I'm still you know looking forward to y2k with a mixture of dread and anticipations like yeah bring it all down is anybody else worried about y2k still [Laughter] but then it becomes something else peak oil is gonna come and save us or climate change is gonna come and save us and make us make us do the things that we've always wanted us to do so yeah we're facing okay a lot of the financial crisis see and this lingering economic crisis that won't go away that make central banks unable to go back to normal to raise interest rates again that's because of on the deepest level it's a crisis in growth it's that that there is no longer economic growth rates have slowed all around the world for the last 50 years on a global level and in each country going through this trajectory toward closer and closer to a steady-state economy and and the financial system doesn't work that way so this is the underlying crisis that faces us with a choice either change the system into one that works without growth or continue trying to squeeze more growth out of this planet to find something that you can still convert into money if you want to make money this is the classic business prescription this is the business plan that's worked for thousands of years find something that people do for themselves take it away and sell it back to them find some piece of nature make it into a product and sell it but there's not that much left we are reaching ecological and social and spiritual limits to growth growth means the quantification of life but are we really better off when we convert neighborly aid to rebuild your house after a fire - insurance are we better off when we convert wise advice from an uncle or a grandmother into life coaching and psychotherapy are we better off when we convert childhood adventures outdoor in the imaginative kingdom of childhood with with video games the metrics say we're better off are we better off when kids go to school in so-called developing countries learning a curriculum that prepares them for entry into a globalized workforce instead of learning traditional skills goat herding that's not like some simple primitive thing the traditional skills that are required to live in harmony with an ecosystem this is deeply sophisticated knowledge and this is why a little trouble by spiral dynamics that puts us at the pinnacle of cognitive development but when I read ancient Buddhist and Taoist texts I'm amazed at the sophistication and a subtlety of their thinking that's actually beyond I mean read read no barrier by Thomas Cleary for example what like even to apprehend the level of of knowledge that these people had is a tremendous stretched to my intellect and consciousness even to like gloss the surface of it so you could look at at you could turn the narrative of ascent and progress on its head but I won't do that because I think that this course of separation of ascent has taken us to the threshold of an initiatory metamorphosis into a new and ancient story new in the sense that a mass civilization has not experienced it ancient in the sense that this story I like to use technology in has very ancient roots and has been carried by indigenous people and more than Bishop calls some cultures of memory indigenous tradition and traditional people and the esoteric mini ages that have persisted inside of mainstream society that have carried our our original indigeneity as a recessive code in the cultural DNA waiting for the moment of its expression so it is an ancient story the story of interbeing that says yeah you are not a separate self in a world of other you are interconnected interdependent inter existent anything that happens in the in the world is happening to yourself once in some way every species that goes extinct corresponds to something dying inside of you any oppressed people on the earth corresponds to some kind of inner oppression a prison industrial complex means that a part of everybody is imprisoned and it's inescapable and foreign violence is gonna creep back under the fortress walls in these days the literal walls creeps back in under the walls and it comes out as domestic violence and we're all in this together and the world outside of ourselves has an intelligence inherent in it an imminent consciousness and our role then is no longer to make it all ours but to participate in a larger unfolding that is not irrelevant to human beings human beings are not superfluous in this unfolding but our first task is to listen and to ask how do we participate in something larger than ourselves how do we serve the collective of life on earth that is an adult question this initiation is an initiation from the childhood of civilization through adolescence into the adulthood the child properly is in a position of receiving from the mother or the father my own children I don't want them to hold back because I they're afraid I can't give enough I want them to fully receive but and that's what love is for the child it's mostly a matter of receiving but then you grow up you you discover a new kind of love which is about partnership which is about giving and receiving which is about co-creation so I've written a book recently on climate change I elaborate what I call the living earth paradigm and basically and some of it is a bit controversial the basic principle is that life creates the conditions for life that a lot of what we blame on Greenhow greenhouse gases is actually caused by ecocide in particular the destruction of forests and soil but really the destruction of all of gaia zorgons the whales the quarrels the seagrass Meadows the wetlands these are organs of a living being and that means that if we continue to destroy them even if we cut emissions to zero even if we cover the earth in solar panels and install carbon sucking machines in every city and bleach the sky white with sulfur aerosols to reflect sunlight and turn the landmass into biofuels earth will still die death of a million cuts I'm not gonna elaborate the evidence for that now but I will say that this transition and you can maybe feel this this is not a matter of being a little more clever finding a different fuel source to maintain and continue the extraction and the domination and the paving over of Earth but it is an invitation into a different relationship no longer the Dominator relationship now I want to bridge this back to money because that's what Bretton Woods was about and ask what kind of money system would be consistent with a story of interbeing it doesn't do to fight the power of money in our attempt to create a more beautiful world in the attempt to bring about ecological healing so often it seems like a battle and that's because it is given the nature of money as we know it but as I said money is a story and and what new story of money could we tell now I took I even though I disagree with pretty much everything Larry Summers said I also feel like he is a elder who's lived a long time and there's always something any time you write somebody off that's part of the dominator paradigm too and one thing that I took that I really liked was the metaphor of the of the blank page it's easy to create something new but if the page is already heavily written you can't really make that much of it you can maybe just you know adjust some words and things you can't do that much with it so a lot of what I'm gonna say I'm not gonna say okay here's the design but it's more of sending a post to the future when that page is thrown in the trash when there is a massive crisis then the unthinkable becomes common sense and so I want to inform the common sense and and send a message to the future and many people in this room are doing that as well not just through your ideas but through your organization's through your enterprises that are perhaps kind of marginal these days waiting for the center to disintegrate so that what was in the margins can rush in islands are the future and an ocean of the past can carry coined that phrase so first okay the easy part and I believe Rihanna either talked about this as well the idea of putting monetary value on the things that have not been valued so this is valuing ecosystem services valuing domestic work the care of children all the things that are kind of left out of GDP left out of capitalism to somehow monetize those so that they can become the they can be included in goods and services this is maybe a necessary step but really dangerous because when you value something let's say you value a forest at a billion dollars because of ecosystem services you're also saying that if you could make two billion dollars by cutting it down then you should do that cutting it down paving it over building a strip mine there and where does that billion dollar figure come from what does it include what does it leave out do we really know the value of a forest can we make it finite what if it's a sacred being what's the value of you a million dollars is that the value of your life ten million dollars so there's a danger here especially when the person or the institutions that are performing the valuation have a vested interest in the products that could be made from it also the whole mindset of reduction of the world into number is itself part of the problem so it's not just about putting number onto feminine values that in itself is I think a patriarchal mindset but it's so I want to go further valuing ecosystem services and internalizing environmental costs to two more things the first is to change money so that it functions that the financial system functions in the absence of growth in a steady state or D growth economy and to do that you simply have to change that basic driver of growth which is interest and that's actually not that hard in fact there's a theoretical basis for it laid down in the earliest early 20th century by Silvio Gesell elaborated by Irving Fisher who is one of the top economist in the 1930s and even endorsed by John Maynard Keynes who called it theoretically sound and it is essentially a negative interest financial system where basically where money decays where money is no longer the exception to the law of ecology that all things decay and return to their source I'll be quick with it the metaphor I'd like to use is imagine that I have two hundred loops of bread and you guys are all hungry and you don't have any bread and I've got all the bread I could just keep it for myself and try to to coerce you into rendering all kinds of goods and services otherwise I'm not going to give it to you sorry I've got the bread I've got the power I've got the money I've got the power but that doesn't work with bread because everyone knows that if I hold on to it for too long it's gonna go stale I won't be able to eat it it doesn't do me any good so because of the nature of the bread it's in my interest to share it and to be like yeah you know Kyle when here's two loaves of bread when you're hungry you know and then when I'm hungry someday I'd like you to give me two loaves of fresh bread just like I've given you applied to the financial system basically here's how it would work next financial crisis instead of having a creditors bailout like we had last time you have a debtors bailout the central bank's the Federal Reserve buys all of the distressed financial instruments buys all of the underwater mortgages buys all the student loan buys all the credit card debt or maybe not all but buys a lot a lot massive monetization of of debt and then unilaterally reduces either forgives the debt entirely or reduces the interest rate to zero now the money that it pays to purchase this debt that gives to financial institutions the banks there's a catch here yeah they're bad loans are fully redeemed for new money printed by the central bank but this is negative interest money which basically means that deposits in the Federal Reserve or subject to a liquidity fee of not just like a quarter percent but maybe like three five percent basically that means that if you hold on to money it gets less and less valuable and it becomes so it's an anti hoarding measure and it becomes the economy and and you're happy to lend at zero interest if you hold on to it and a decays at five percent you're happy to lend at zero interest so it allows lending to happen in a zero growth economy I don't think I you know I don't have enough time to really go into the details of it I did in sacred economics basically what it does is it allows us to reclaim those parts of life that have been usurped by the money world by the commodity world the second part I want to talk about real quick and these are all things that can be implemented with digital currencies by the way much more easily than they can with paper currency the second part I want to talk about is universal basic income so here we have here's another way to look at it because of technology fewer and fewer people are able to produce more and more stuff for for so that poses us with a dilemma if fewer fewer people are producing more and more stuff then in order to have full employment we have to consume more and more and that's what we've done even going back to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution the solution to the massive increase in output because of the textile industry which was in the first industrialized industry was to invent the fashion was to invent fashion I mean up until then people only work they had like two sets of clothes most people had two sets of clothes your everyday clothes and your sunday clothes so fashion was invented to increase demand to to ink and and to increase consumption and to allow employment investment and so forth to continue to grow the other solution instead of producing more would be to work less but because money reaches the economy through employment working less is not a viable option unless there's some other way for people to get money and that would be universal basic income or that would be one of the ways to do it which has the advantage also of allowing people to do things with their lives that are not quantifiable so this is a kind of an alternative way to reach the goal that that realized I was talking about instead of paying people to for childcare and monetizing that you can say we are happy for much of human activity to be in the unmonitored realm and we will support you in doing that whatever you no to be your best contribution to life will let you do that will support you it could be to raise children it could be to take care of people it could be to restore ecosystems all the things that you cannot and probably should not monetize we support that we support the qualitative not just the quantitative and so this is a transition into I believe a society governed more by feminine values how would it be financed well we can talk about the military-industrial complex and its dismantling we could talk about the the money that comes from I mean really probably what should happen is this massive monetization of debt increase in money supply all out of five percent negative interest rate where does that money go that can get fed back into the economy through a universal basic income this is the inheritance of humanity of all of the culture and technology has been generated over centuries no one person deserves more of its benefits than any other person this is your dividend okay so I'd like to end with a little story coming from the understanding that maybe climate change isn't going to save us what scares me more than human extinction what scares me more than that this is unsustainable is that it is sustainable that we will continue decimating this planet there's a tenth the fish that there were before industrial fishing there's less than a tenth of the whales there were a few hundred years ago there's half of the trees there's 2% of the old-growth forests there's 20% of the insects on and on and on a dying world what's going to change as the summer said we're doing better and better according to what we quantify if we're gonna make a different choice maybe it won't be because we're forced to maybe it's because we will choose to choose a living planet rather than a dying planet because the planet is dying so I had this conversation and here's the story I let's just say I channeled the Oversoul of humanity I wish I had a more palatable way of putting it but here I am in conversation with earth and she says I am Gaia and I am dying and it's already too late but there's another spirit waiting to inhabit earth after this extinction it's happened before reincarnation happens in this planetary body and there's another spirit waiting to come your relationship with this spear this is no longer mother earth this is lover Earth you will not just take you will give and receive equally you will co-create and she very much wants to come and join you and to bring life back into this planet but for that to happen first there must be a courtship you must demonstrate your fitness for this partnership how do you do that it's of course through gifts anything that you do anything that you put out into the world that is in service to life because remember life creates the conditions for life anything in service to life is part of the courtship ritual that says to this spirit yes I am a worthy lover and so this means anything from regenerative agriculture to the regeneration of the social body anything in service to life is a prayer that exercises effects beyond our comprehension because in fact the world does not work according to Newtonian force in interbeing the causal principle is morphic resonance as Rupert Sheldrake describes it the knowledge that any change that happens in one place generates a field of change that allows that change to happen more easily everywhere else any act of kindness any act of generosity creates a field of kindness and a field of generosity and that means that we are all equally powerful that no act is wasted and that every act has cosmic significance I will leave it there and invite Carolyn and I apologize for having gone on so long [Applause] Carolyn fini oh you know I took notes and you're gonna see me looking at notes and then I'm not gonna look at notes and I'm just gonna talk some things I want to say thank you thank you it's my first time here and you speak it was my first time in all honesty is last week that I read some of the things you wrote um so I feel like I'm coming to you for the first time so uh yeah so here I am I'm not an economist important to say that I am so Megan Cote coke saying I'm human I'm a black woman I'm a straight black woman I'm an American eyes just rolled um this conversation isn't always always personal to me it is political to me and it is intimate right and one of the how can I put this experiences that I've been having with the conversations here is that there are often very universal 30,000 foot and it's powerful for me to think big in that way and I can't help but feel feel my smallness and how do I operate on the ground so a few things I was thinking of the metaphor the story I gotta tell couple stories to like but don't be sure um so I was thinking about the musical chair metaphor and I started I always I'm thinking about the issue of land particularly in the United States and I'm just thinking about the Homestead Act that just sounds really random but you'll see it's not so random of 1862 so the idea of us fighting over the chairs right not enough chairs for everybody and thinking about the Homestead Act of 1862 which changed the way we relate to land forever the idea that we and I'm gonna challenge that way too could run out put our stake down 160 acres of land all you have to do is stay on it for five years farm build a home and that land was yours free and clear right so this wasn't only about that you were able to say you belong it was about economic and political power it's about legacy but oh yes actually everybody could not participate right but for the most part it was only if you were a European immigrant and oh yes we have to remember in order for that land to be a available it people have to be removed and killed in order for people to be able to have that opportunity that history is always here right all this land was stolen all of it all of it I don't care how far a large unfolding takes place all of us land is stolen and I believe we've never reconciled that right everybody doesn't get to play musical chairs also who made the chairs right and so how do we attend to that I want to talk about I was in Tasmania a couple of weeks ago I found so random how often do you get south meaning of and uh there was this Australian philosopher was speaking about place and he talked about wrong many of you may have seen this that there was that image a few weeks ago on the news of the immigrant father and his daughter found lying face down dead in the river right and he says they're not just anybody there there's actually it's about the details of who they are that's how we attend to places we attend to the details of that so I want to put that out there too what does that look like for us to attend to the details of who we are in relationship with each other I know we're talking about ourselves in relationship to non-human nature and the earth I get that and who are we in relationship to each other the last story is more personal for me to put out there um so I was living in Seattle in the late 90s and I just looked thinner and younger I was I had a temp job I was living there with a boyfriend at the time and it was five o'clock and I was walking home downtown Seattle and there was a street that no cars you know we're allowed to go on so all of us there were just people we were all walking home looking like pretty much like I look now younger and thinner and I wasn't looking and there was a pothole and I stepped in the pothole and if you've ever a fractured a bone right you hear it first and then you just it was the nause everything just came up on me in the same time so this was what 1997 so it was pretty cell phone days and I say that because I was afraid it was gonna black out all right and so I looked people just kept moving past me I went over to the sidewalk and there was a young what I perceived to me a young family was a young white family was to a man traditional man woman to you little kids and because I thought I was gonna black out and I couldn't make it to a payphone anytime I looked over at them I think can you please help me I just and they moved away not a single person in the streets that this progressive City helped me now I made it to a payphone a cold brief and I just sat on the curb you know hoping that he would get there before I passed that and he did so I used that because many of us have I'm sure many of those stories some of us have many of those stories let me say that's real it didn't matter how much education I had how much money I had in my pocket how well I was dressed actually there was something else at play and for me in part it's because we we collectively particularly in this country have not actively dealt with our past which has helped to get us here the idea of money you know so many of us have been and are still commodities we are the thing that sold we are the thing that is not human how do we attend to that how do we attend to the issue of power the village intimacy of what if what you said that Larry Summers and I came in late so I I just heard the response to Larry Summers which was kind of fun that triumphalism has been is legitimate it's never been legitimate for I'm not saying you're seeing this but it's never been legitimate for some people it's never been legitimate some people say that again how do we hold that what does it mean to actually do our internal assessment of who we are to each other how we value them with some people more than others the question of our guilt does nothing what are we actually willing to do how does that was that operationalize as we think about this larger and folding I'm actually not interested in going forward in the same way we've been I mean I know that's not what you're saying and I'm offering but I I need to know something about the details cuz I don't trust the details yeah [Applause] yeah I feel better now oh oh sorry at the end when people talk about sustainability the first thing that comes to my mind is what do we want to sustain yeah if we could sustain it do we want to sustain it so I think that that racism and all the other isms are part of the same mindset that of you could call it other ring that turns nature into an object in order to exploit something first you have to reduce it to exploit a human being you have to or even in a war to kill a human being it sure helps if you can turn them into a caricature a dehumanized or demonized caricature so if you want to have a system of slavery you have to make make the enslaved race in the case of the United States black people you have to make them somewhat less than human in order to exterminate Jews and Nazi Germany you have to make them subhuman and in a way like on a more subtle level that is happening to everybody all the time when we get reduced to a consumer or to a labor force or to a market so the so this is why I think that that ecological healing and racial healing are part of the same movement they're about about recognizing and gender healing I mean all of it it's about giving full beingness back to those that we have objectified and devalued I'm going to say a little bit about the musical chairs metaphor yeah and apply it to race also like imagine this is a similar social experiment imagine if we lock all the doors and give everybody not quite enough food and do that social experiment that's gonna create conditions oh it's gonna create a large pressure at least for us versus their relationships so like or the musical chairs say we have a hundred people 90 chairs and you know it's like gosh I think the white people are getting too many chairs maybe the although there's I don't know maybe eighty percent of us are white people here so imagine that that part of the circle where the white people are that's only missing a few chairs and the part of the circle where the black people are that's missing a lot of the chairs so a ideology of racial equality says we gotta mix it up and make not enough to make the chairs equally available to everybody everybody should have at least a fair opportunity an equal chance to go for one of these fake chairs but a deeper level of transformation would be to say well why are their chairs missing in the first place so if we take that for granted if we take ten tears are missing for granted then it's always going to be a game of us versus them it or two intensifies those so can I offer also I was thinking about what I heard you say around the margins of Center for me margin to Center is a really limiting model because the Center for me what's innovative and different often happens on the edge okay so you know and I'm thinking about the musical chair metaphor why do we even need chairs is it possible that there are you know some of the conversation I'm hearing in the past day or two is that what I'm how I'm interpreting is that there's different ways of knowing and being in the room that we could we can we may not know how to tap into but it's there and how do we allow space for that to happen the possibility that we may not need the chairs what if we didn't so it wasn't about we got to get ten more for you you know or ten more for whoever so we can fit everybody in because maybe the circle that we're sitting in is not the best circle for us to be sitting in in the first place how do we make conversation for that that's like this what does that make sense um I got I mean I I'm not sure what what the metaphor of chairs is like anymore well I was I guess what I'm so I know we I know that I have to work in relationship to an existing model we've been talking about the economy's the way we are around money what we value it exists and we have to operate in a relationship to it what I'm also hearing is what if we came up with something else what I'm also hearing is we're still using the same model to come up with something else right so a quote that I've heard at least three times while I've been here including I use it all the time too is the Einstein if we you know but you I'm Stein's quit about them we can't change their solve a problem with the same consciousness that created it I mean I'm always thinking of moms Mabley the comedian who says if you always do what you always did you always get what you always got right and so I'm you know I can be funny about that but I also want to say how do we create allow for that I don't know that emergence space what does that actually look like Taniya did not play musical chairs because there's a filler game to play or maybe it's not a game at all but how do we make space for that that larger unfolding for me partly what's exciting about this moment it offers an opportunity for us to make a different choice and part of making a different choice is reconciling what we've done up into now attending to our relationship not just with non-human nature which sometimes I think we go there quicker than we actually go to this right so they both sustainability it's about relationships so we can talk all about how what we need to do to protect that mountain out there but if we're not working to protect each other I don't believe we're gonna take care of the mountain and frankly the mountain will take care of itself in its own way if it's supposed to die be renewed what have you I can make that argument I know a lot of people don't like it but this one right here I need you I need you so but I'm saying how do we attend to that what does that look like does that make sense yeah yeah I think that that the on some level I think we all understand that the global climate is intimately connected to the social climate the economic climate that one of the issues are most interested in now is polarization political polarization and because I recognize that if we are at odds with each other fighting each other and expending all of our energy on that if we are living with all these divisions all these other rings then our collective ship is not going to be able to change course it's just going to go on its own inertia and that's why I was trying to say that with with that with a metaphor that every kind of healing is part of all kinds of healing yeah so and I see the most powerful practice for any kind of healing whether it's environmental or social or racial where gender healing is the process of making the truth visible so like the story like the story that you told about breaking your leg and no one's going to help you like just to have that entered as a data point in people's experience of life even if it's not accompanied by shame it still changes the way that you see the world and then maybe to also tell the story I mean it'd be interesting to hear the other data point of the people who wouldn't help you yeah you know you know what I thought of um I thought of like I kept pulling into gas stations and someone would come to me oh my god sir can you please help I you know my my my wife is diabetic you know she needs to get the house we don't have any money you know our cell phone isn't working you know please help and I'm like oh yeah okay you know here's 20 bucks you know and like that happen like four times and I'm like okay this is a scam and this is what I meant by like let's put us all in a room with not enough and see what we do to each other so yeah where it takes me is one of the mind forms of the story of separation is to find somebody to blame find somebody to name as evil so you know and we're on team good and the problem will be solved if we eradicate evil and so this programming is so deep you know an invitation to find somebody to hate that if that's not healed nothing will be healed so I'm with you there and I always want to complicate it because there's accountability so made me think of a couple of things accountability reconciliation and redemption so I so Liam Neeson the actor Liam Neeson good looking good actor right you know what a few months ago he made some admission on a show that like forty years ago a white woman friend of his got raped by black man and he said he went out for a week he was looking for a black man he just wanted to basically and he said he said I said all this out loud and then realize I had to work through my own racism so on so forth but when he just recently made this admission you know people wrote him off because that's people were done with him he's done I thought about I'm gonna come back to that in a second how Alice Walker who wrote a color purple talked about she wrote at ten years after color purple came out as a film which was about you know this part of the story was about a black man who abuses women in his life and in the story mister the character's name is mr. right he at some point everybody you know comes up against him says you can't do that anymore it sort of pushes him out for a while Alice Walker said when that movie came out it was played by Danny Glover she got more hate mail from black people than anybody now she talked about how she loves black people more than anything but the hate mail was that you revealed all this you told this story made mister look bad this black know this whole thing down here and she talked about the problem with mirrors that when you know for all the hurt that has been done to people of African descent European descent um you know in digit all that hurt is there and still the mirror can be in front of us and we can't we don't want to look at all and that it is about redemption that to explain to people that if you follow to the end of the story they bring him back in but they doesn't mean they didn't hold him accountable because what we don't want is the repetition of it happening again it isn't simply enough I'm just saying this because you're sitting here for me to say you know I love you I don't want to throw you away but you did that thing so now you're asking me to trust you sustainability strong relationship for me at the foundation of that is about trust so I need to know that you've done the work I don't need you to be perfect I just need you to be real and so how do we help to nurture that and for me too because I'm not perfect you know I need to look in the mirror to write and roll you know I like to think that I'm not just any one thing and that comes to the fore but how do we continue to model that for each other when we're having conversations about money and commodities and the economy and climate change and those huge issues that are made up of details right I want to get back to the details without losing the gift of vision mhm yeah so this is a this is a something I'm really interested in what like what is encoded in the word accountability and what does that mean when it doesn't mean punishment yeah when it doesn't mean coercion yeah I think what it actually means is is to create mechanisms of transparency so that things cannot be hidden this actually touches on economics and money too because most of the abuses that happen around money are because of secrecy if everybody could openly see where all your money came from and where it all went in ancient times like in or in in posh societies even but even to some extent in medieval times if you were very wealthy everybody knew it and you couldn't escape the duties incumbent upon being wealthy or being powerful and in fact well this actually is getting a little off your topic but but yeah I wanted to UM yeah offer because yeah cuz account like where did that where did that come from keeping account originally it was a community function where it was recognized who had given what and who had received what so it originated in it wasn't it wasn't like some bookkeeping thing that you keep private in fact money itself arose as accounting prior to coinage so like to extend the metaphor of accountability it basically it means that we like yeah maybe you don't trust me right now with good reason so what would make you trust me is if my actions are witnessed and visible by a community that feeds back to you and if I am willing to allow myself to be seen yes bully then you have then then trust isn't just a matter of you and me it's held by a larger group so let's bring up let's bring you all in for some questions if I can just be like with job forget where I am but yeah it's it can be tempting to get fixated on this needing to be universally interoperable right that one of the useful functions of money is I can get a haircut and then later take it to this very different context of a food co-op er you know somewhere else and it works there too and there are many types of relationships many contexts of relationship and many different forms of information that are appropriate not all of them numerical right some of the stuff that that you were bringing up in your earlier talk made some of this possibility visible that we're able to do this kind of accounting in forms that are appropriate to those relationships and I believe that it's possible for us to do those they don't have to be universal that isn't have to be one size fits all we don't have to have the single signal that is communal communicable across all of these things though participants can choose to share something that was maybe said about them in one context or the way in which they've been recognized for contribution in one context into a different one and if for them it's useful then that flows back around as well yeah have you seen or witnessed anybody working in that domain have you do you have any any pointers towards things that that tie on this bridging of relationship well yeah I think I think this is a really good a good thing to think about the the whole problem with money actually at least according to David Graeber who offers a pretty convincing account of it is that originally money was used as a way to facilitate sacred relationships it wasn't used for commerce it was used for marriage or if you maybe killed somebody you'd you'd take these sacred things and you give them to the family it was it was it was not used for trading things but when those two systems like other things were used for for for what wasn't even barter it was a it was a gift economy but but when large math civilizations emerged and commodity money began to be used at cetera etc and began to people give a in keeping track of it eventually these two things merged and so the sacred relationships entered into the realm of property and that's how you got patriarchy the ownership and objectification of women as well as slavery so these so the idea of separating realms of human interaction and saying yes some stuff should be off-limits to money completely and some stuff maybe should be off-limits to certain kinds of money maybe you need one kind of money that facilitates a global coordination of labor for things that require that and other things should be way more local and maybe she'd use a different kind of money or maybe shouldn't use money at all so you know that I can't say that there are models for this I mean sovereign currencies are to some extent possibly a model for it local currencies have I can't say okay here's the one that's working I mean I can definitely say that people are experimenting with these things they're on the margins maybe when the center collapses all of the marginal things and I'm not just talking about you know marginal ideas I'm also talking about marginal people marginal genders marginal ways of being large marginal ways of knowing marginal human capacities all the things that we've excluded and other waiting yeah so I love you I love your metaphor of the musical chairs and the way that you answer at the answer that because actually in Brazil we play the game in big companies in many different issues and you don't need it means you say that you're gonna lose your house but people literally fight with each other they push each other and have the whole picture of people marginalize everyone that goes out they keep like like support you say like I want you to die or whatever and then you do a different one around where people cannot leave and we actually bring out the chairs like so you have to stay in the game you're not allowed to just have like people and chairs to see it so it keeps bringing out like the hundreds of 20 chairs 30 chairs and people keep playing the game and they sit on each other or in the in the lasting chairs and what to happen with them these miles the way that is shift the game this they start to run around at first they do the same game like you say like you're not going to leave the game but they still keep running around trying to save the chest until they realize okay actually have place we're not gonna leave the game and then I start to sit in each other's lap so I have the crowd and the whole game shifts and the reconciliation happens right away because usually you sit down and if you've got mine right but then when you're doing the second round people you sit down and you see that's it you know have you have space and the reaction of people when someone sits and you lose you feel like and I someone say like you know do you have space you belong the whole game shots the behavior people's and I never thought so deeply as you as you doing now how I do the game you learn a lot but it's powerful I would say like what would that be in your perceptions that reaction I would love that you could see the game is powerful okay what if it is true it's possible again where you're not playing anymore the chairs we don't need a chest everyone has to sit everyone sit actually even with no chairs and they are way more happy so I would like to hear a comment of you on that to say something I'm not considering I want to make sure I understand that you what what I heard you say when I you were offering is an idea that you know building on the idea that we don't need the chairs and that people were offering even themselves as a relationship that's what you were saying okay yeah you know I think that like on a big metal level there's kind of a evolutionary purpose to this whole story of separation and all of the scarcity and misery that has persisted on earth for so long like in these really difficult circumstances we're learning to love each other anyway learning to be generous when it's hard and developing like a bigger capacity to love so yeah like if we can do it in this artificial scarcity imagine the beautiful world that we could create when we let go of artificial scarcity and have enough chairs and the empathic capacities that we've developed in hardship and what I in just a short response and I've been hoping I could figure out a way that this would make sense to say it is them and this works is that the Cornel West quote justice is love made public and so understanding that we can talk about love and we have to attend the the Justice pieces comes back to me the reconciliation the recognition the remembrance you know the honoring that the apologizing for that but embracing that that is also for me the part that's justice so and I believe we can hold boast you know I can love you and also think about what I'm a how I may have been culpable and complicit even if I didn't know even if it wasn't my intention but it's about how I attend to the impact of my intention that for me is the love I want to be engaged with because then it gets back to I can trust we can be in a new kind of relationship that honors our humanity and part of our humanity is our imperfection and that we do make mistakes and we will continue to make mistakes I'm less worried about the mistake I'm more concerned about how we are able to show up and own those mistakes sure as far as I'm concerned we can stay here all day dead okay the first is the pot debt cancellation yeah because that is what maintains the entire world destroying machine especially third-world debt if you say if you say hey Ecuador don't cut down your rainforests because we need them for the planet oh but by the way you owe thirty billion dollars in foreign debt and you gotta keep making the payments and the only way you can do that is to cut down the rainforests so do that but don't do that but do that but don't do that and that situation is global and not just on nations but on individuals in various indirect ways too so some kind of debt cancellation that's let's try and do too much in my talk and one of the things I wanted to do was that and then - then to have a system I mean this is historical like like this has happened in ancient Athens debt cancellation when when the debt becomes unpayable and everybody becomes enslaved to it then like I mean imagine okay that's enough [Laughter] [Applause]

Channel: Bretton Woods 75

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Id: jdix7GOTD-o

Length: 78min 4sec (4684 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 09 2019