Moneyless Menifesto (Mark Boyle).Pdf
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Moneyless Menifesto ( http://www.moneylessmanifesto.org/ ) Foreword by Charles Eisenstein Introduction 1. The Money Delusion 5 2. The Moneyless Menu 18 3. The POP model 25 4. Challenges and transitional Strategies 29 5. Labour and Materials 39 6. Land 49 7. Home 57 8. Food and Water 65 9. Washing 79 10. Transport and Holiday accommodation 86 11. Living Off-grid 91 12. Education 99 13. Health and Sex 106 14. Clothing and Bedding 118 15. Leisure 123 16. The Beginning is Nigh 129 Notes 131 FOREWORD by Charles Eisenstein Going into my first conversation with Mark Boyle a year ago, I was feeling a little bit defensive. “He probably thinks he is better than the rest of us,” I thought. “More ethical, more pure, less complicit in the sins of civilization.” His very lifestyle was an implied accusation. When we actually began talking, though, I found Mark to be free of sanctimoniousness or self-congratulation. That is why his message resonates with so many people. His evident goodwill, care and compassion disarms us so that we can take in what he has discov ered: going moneyless is a gateway to connection, intimacy, adventure, and an authentic experience of life. Far from being a path of sacrifice to qualify oneself as good, it is a path of joy and – dare I say it? – a path of wealth. One contribution of this book is to open that path to others. Often I hear people preface their thoughts on right livelihood with, “Of course, we all have to make money…” We have mortgages to service, bills to pay; there is, after all, a ‘cost of living’. We take it for granted that we have to pay merely to be alive. What Mark shows is that this assumption is part of an illusion. While we might for very good reasons choose to use money, we may not actually have to. To break free of that illusion requires a profound shift in our perceptions, habits, and core beliefs; a shift in our way of being in the world, even in our sense of s elf. The monetized life is a life that separates people from community and from Nature, channeling our interdependency through an anonymous medium. Money promises that, if only we acquire enough of it, we can be independent. We can be independent of the people arou nd us: “I don’t need their help – I can pay for whatever I need.” We can be independent of the nature around us: “If the water is polluted, I can buy it in bottles. If the soil is toxic, I can buy organic food from afar. In the worst case I can afford to move away.” Here, then, is another illusion: we cannot actually achieve independence via money. All we can do is transfer our dependence from one place to another: from the people and places around us, to money and the distant institutions it associates us with. In fact, we are connected beings, utterly dependent on the rest of life to sustain us. Civilized humanity has denied that dependency for a long time, seeking lordship over Nature, transcendence of Nature. Money has been part of that illusion of mastery. But today we are moving into an ecological age, seeking to rejoin the circle of life in all its dimensions – ecological and social. Mark Boyle offers us one way to do this. The circle of life is the circle of the gift. Except in those rare instances of bart er, living moneylessly reconnects a person to the immediate experience of giving and receiving, and to the ties that result from that ex perience. Receiving a gift, one feels gratitude toward the giver, toward the giver’s community, or even toward the universe, and with it the desire to give in turn. Giving a gift, one feels a connection as well: a freedom to ask something of, and receive from, that person, community, or planet. Whereas a money transaction is a closed relationship, over as soon as the money is pai d, a gift-relationship is open-ended. Gifts create bonds, connections. This, and not some imagined exculpation from the sins of industrial society, is the best reason to live moneylessly. None of this means that living moneyless is the only way to enter the spirit of the gift. After all, money itself can be given as a gift. However, money as we know it is fraught with noxious, disconnecting states of consciousness that are contrary to that spirit: scarcity, anxiety, grasping, competition. Going moneyless is therefore a short-cut to the spirit of the gift. What about the collective level? Can we build a society on the spirit of the gift? And would this necessarily be a moneyless society? Perhaps so, in the long run, but even then we will need some way to circulate various forms of wealth, to coordinate labor over vast social distances, and to direct human creativity toward a common purpose. Money, although increasingly dysfunctional today, i s supposed to perform these functions. In a more enlightened society, money would do so while evoking a whole new set of intuitions about wealth, security, and the nature of work, and a different way of being in and relating to the world. Indeed, I and many other theorists are working on how to transform money so that it is no longer the enemy of ecology, sustainability, justice and abundance. That is why I believe Mark’s work has a significance beyond merely describing a more joyful, connected way of living. He is also contributing to the psychic groundwork of a new system – even if that system includes something we might call money. The revolution before us is only worth joining if it goes to the depths that Mark has explored: the surrender to the flow of life, the recognition of generosity as a core principle of human nature, the trust that as I give, so shall I receive. It is my hope that this book will deepen its readers’ belief in the possibility of such a world. Charles Eisenstein August 2012, author of Sacred Economics – Money, Gift & Society in the Age of Transition Introduction Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth. – Henry David Thoreau We were crunching our way through the fresh January snow one blue-skied afternoon, my little hand in hers, when my mum gently told me that Santa Claus wasn’t real. She was being kind of course, a pinch of tough love to save me the ignominy of telling the more streetwise kids what he had brought me that Christmas. But I was seven and a half, and I had already begun questioning the credibility of this rather portly gift economist for myself. My suspicions kicked in when I was about four. Up until then, Santa gave to me unconditionally, just like my own mother’s breast had once done, regardless of whether I was naughty or nice. As my fifth Christmas approached, I remember being told that things weren’t so easy with the big guy after all, and that I wasn’t deserving of his kindness any longer unless I was a good boy. Santa’s love, and life with him, seemed to be slowly turning conditional. But us little kids knew that conditionality was not the way of Nature (the bramble never asked me if I was naughty before giving me its blackberries, nor the stream its water), so I smelt a rat. Yet voicing such doubts, I feared, could have resulted in a sudden drought of new toys, so for two and a half years I blanked out the thoughts, shut up and went along with the fanciful story. Little kids can be cun ning too. Despite my strong suspicions, I remember experiencing various emotions as mum confirmed my doubts. Most of these feelings manifested as questions. If Santa wasn’t real, but just a myth that all us kids believed – or chose to go along with because we perceived some benefit from it – then where on Earth did all the toys under our noble fir tree come from? Who made them if not his little helpers? Feelings of hurt quickly abounded. Why did those I loved lie to me for so many years? Why did they believe that telling me th at some strange, fictional entity had brought me the toys would serve me better than telling me the truth: that those I loved had given them to me? Was it a case of my parents wanting to give me what many religions believe to be the purest of all gifts: the gift which seeks no gratitude or recognition, in the mindset “that the only true charity is anonymous”?(1) Or had our culture long since twisted this most life- affirming of stories into a gradual lesson in conditionality, an incremental acclimatisation to the economic sphere my school ing was already preparing me for? Was it now being used to accompany me on that lonesome modern journey from the unconditional to the conditional, a precursor to a life where everything I received would be conditional on what I gave in return? A life where I would only give, or behave in a certain way, if I received something else. Or was it more simple than that: a society of people mindlessly passing down and reliving an old story, one long since manipulated by corporate marketing departments, with little thought about whether this revamped myth was actually serving them well or not any longer? Like all big girls and boys, deep down I wanted to know the truth, as disconcerting as it was.