Most of us take money for granted, that money is about as real and predictable as gravity or inches or trees. That money is a physical item and not merely a social contract. Think for a moment what money would be in isolation from other people? If we have nobody else to purchase goods from or who would pay for our services, money looses all its function and meaning, doesn’t it? This thought experiment also provides a kind of freedom, as we see that money is not real in and of itself, as our culture would have us believe.

It would seem that money is there for the sake of our sustenance, to help us provide food and shelter and other things needed to maintain the body, but the way of our times is that money has taken on both life and meaning on its own. We want to earn more, have more, save more, spend more… without really questioning if this “more-ness” actually serves us, individually or globally.

When we stop and consider our participation in the current financial system, we may come to other conclusions altogether. A friend told me some years ago how she was calculating how much she needed to earn, using a formula that included the actual monetary costs that the earning would add: driving into town, lunch out, childcare and other necessities – not for her, but for the earning of money. She made choices about spending less on such items and hence needing to earn less each month. A fringe benefit, of course, was more time on her hands.

What I think we are really after with our “more-mentality” cannot be bought with the current monetary system. Yes, money can put food on the table, and pay for the room to have the table in. But – especially at times like this, when environmental crisis is converging with financial systems spinning out of control – money cannot with any degree of assurance give us anything in the future! No savings account or retirement plan is big enough to feed us if the conditions for creating food are no longer there. Like the old prophecy says: We cannot eat money.

So then, what is it we are trying to get? In Gandhian economics the vision is a system that “meet needs”, rather than “feed wants”. If we unpack some of what drives us individually into the lure of “more”, we find universal needs like safety/security, belonging, self esteem along with what our physical survival calls for. And of course, we’ve all been told that the pursuit of happiness is a shopping based activity.

Safety is not a commodity, and cannot be secured through fences or weapons. Real safety is free, and involves the simple act of relating human to human: It’s known that the best crime prevention in neighborhoods is to know the people who live on your street.

At Canticle Farm in Fruitvale district of Oakland, CA – just around the corner from the scene of frequent gang related shootings – a group is spearheading local food production and neighborhood safety. They started growing veggies in their back yard, then to give away some of their abundance out front on Sunday mornings. Soon they enrolled farmers at local Farmer’s market and are now getting volumes of unsold produce that would otherwise be discarded, to add to what is gifted to neighbors. Guess what! People stop by for their share and to chat and get to know each other in the process. Now a new garden is replacing a front lawn outside the apartment complex down the road, and other neighbors are following suit.

A lot of our habits form out of… well, habit. On a more subtle level we do like others do, to identify with and participate with our group. To belong. Our psychological survival seems to be linked to our sense of belonging. In distant history it’s safe to assume that belonging with a group increased chances also of physical survival. Advertising has always known and leveraged the power of peer persuasion to make consumers out of ordinary people. So, most of us don’t stop and think about what we actually need in terms of stuff, but go with what we expect is the norm. A new cellphone every year or two is “normal”. A wardrobe upgrade to follow fashion is “normal”. And it’s clearly normal in American life – outside of densely populated places where no parking is to be found – to have a car, or two.  At Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage in Missouri, they have 4 vehicles between 70 people.

What about that happiness, then? Research has shown that up to a certain income level, “more” actually is better. If you cannot provide for your own and your family’s immediate sustenance, then higher income correlates to increased happiness. But above that, the correlation levels out… On the other hand, spirituality says that happiness comes from within. And positive psychology shows again and again how people matter more than property to enhance quality of life and be happy.

But it’s not ONLY up to us. We have power to change our spending habits, join the “voluntary simplicity” movement, and maybe transform our personal relationship to money, but we’re also all caught in a system that is setup for failure. Did you ever play “Monopoly”? That board game was apparently created not to celebrate capitalism, but to show what happens when the reinforcing feedback loops of making money on money [aka. earning interest] run their course: the winner takes it all. That still sounds like a good thing – in our culture of competition winning seems good. It’s just that it does not work: in the board game, a Monopoly winner has nobody to keep playing with. Chances are that something similar will happen before too long with our “real” financial system. Between the banks and the 1% they may end up with all the money, but what’s the use when the system is equally efficient in widening the gap between rich and poor, eliminating the consumer capacity of the middle class? Aside from all the personal suffering that is in full swing already, who is going to afford the stuff that makes the rich richer? The system is based on mistaken assumptions, and just like “peak oil” we now also have “peak money”. Or “peak dollar” because of the size of the national debt and runaway inflation. And because we discontinued the dollar’s connection to the gold standard, which actually used to mean that the crinkly green notes in your wallet were backed by something of real value. No longer so. We don’t need to occupy Wall Street, it is likely to collapse on its own – based on this failed setup. But what do we do instead? Gandhi’s advice a century ago was to “spin more cotton”. Today that might translate to “grow more veggies”.

Going back a few centuries, it used to be that money was just a means to facilitate exchange of goods and services, expanding one-on-one bartering to serve more people in more ways. At one point, sort of by coincidence, someone who had more than they needed, thought of loaning some out, and earning a small interest in the process. That little small coincidence – put into systemic use – is what is what is wrecking havoc all around the globe, through it’s mantra of *more*. Growth can seem natural in nature, but endless financial growth is not.  Making money on money is the ticket for disaster, the root of inflation, and the tragic setup for making profit by ruining the earth’s capacity to feed us. All the collected corporate greed is born out of this idea that if one has money, one should be earning interest. A much more life serving concept is that of trusteeship, where the owner of property is seen as entrusted with it, and that any property comes with responsibility to care for it and with the duty to use it to serve.

As a counterpoint to this notion of making money on money, is an experiment from early last century where a town in southern Europe used a local “alternative” currency. Their system was set up so that the person who was holding an actual note of this currency at the end of each month had to pay a minimal fee. Can you imagine what happened? Everyone was spending! Which means everyone was also receiving, as the currency was used in a local setting. The town economy grew – without excavating more natural resources than needed, and without any hoarding of resources. It’s the number of times that a unit of currency changes hands that adds value to individuals, as well as to the economy.

Experiments like that one are bountiful and all around us today. There are myriads of initiatives and groups that are slowly but surely creating new financial infrastructures. This is essential work: nonviolence stresses the importance of constructive program where nonviolent action focuses on building new systems that can replace the dysfunctional ones when they collapse or are overthrown, while also creating more justice, freedom and dignity for all. We have bartering systems and time banks and alternative currencies like the “elms” at Dancing Rabbit. We have the “gift economy” and philanthropy, and the “sharing economy” with couch surfing, carpools and seed swaps. We have socially responsible investing, impact investing and slow money, which ups the ante and invests for good and in direct relationship with the people behind the projects. We have green entrepreneurship and triple bottom lines and greener goods…  slowly but surely transforming our rooftops into power plants. We have ecovillages and intentional communities and cohousing, all exploring and practicing and learning how to live and thrive with less stuff and more human connection. And we have guerrilla gardening and permaculture and urban farms and rapid expansion of local farmer’s markets. And then we have other initiatives striving to map out and help different groups find and connect with each other (including Metta Center’s Road Map), which is essential if we want to solidify the new and more life serving structures, so that *something* is in place if [when] the giant collapses.

No. We cannot eat money. Thank goodness, it’s *food* we need for eating! The freedom then, to work constructively – in local but interconnected initiatives – for a sustainable economy that works for all.