[A-List] The soul of money

["Charles Brown" <cbrown@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

 U.S. needs more soul, less patriotism.

CB
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		AMERICAN MONETARY INSTITUTE
		PO. Box 601, Valatie, NY, 12184
		ami@xxxxxxxxxxx
		

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		A foundation dedicated to the study of monetary history,
theory and reform.
		Stephen Zarlenga, <mailto:ami@xxxxxxxxxxx>  Director
		
		

		The Soul of Money

				Written by Lynne Twist 

		Reviewed by Steven Walsh (Co-ordinator, AMI Chicago
Chapter), February 2007

		Ms. Twist has written a book to change our attitude toward
money.  Twist reflects on her personal experiences as a fundraiser for The
Hunger Project to suggest what money is and how it should be valued.  In
today's world just hearing the words, 'soul' and 'money' together, can be
taken as an oxymoron.  Twist acknowledges this paradox, but prepares us to
shift our view of money:  

		Now, rather than relating to money as a tool we created and
control, we have come to relate to money as if it is a fact of nature, a
force to be reckoned with.  This stuff called money, mass-produced tokens or
paper bills with no more inherent power than a notepad or a Kleenex, has
become the single most controlling force in our lives (page 8).  

		Ms. Twist's view of money as a fiat or convention happens to
be consistent with Aristotle's: "Money exists not by nature but by
law"(Ethics, 1133).  Twist goes on: "Money has only the power that we assign
to it, and we have assigned it immense power (ibid.).  But the way this
power is used comes from the economic world created by Adam smith (pages
46-55) particularly his false assertions about an assumed scarcity: 1) there
are not enough resources, wealth or money to go around; 2) more of anything
is better than what we have; and 3) the rationale: that is just the way it
is: 

		         .and the people who have more are always people who
are other than us.  It's not fair, but we better play the game because
that's just the way it is and it's hopeless, helpless, unequal, unfair world
where you can never get out of this trap (page 53).  

		The negative consequences of accepting the philosophy that's
just the way it is:

		.is that it justifies the greed, prejudice, and inaction
that scarcity fosters in our relationship with money and the rest of the
human race.  For . generations, it protected and emboldened
institutionalized racism, sex discrimination.and still today, enable(s)
dishonest business and political leaders to exploit others for their own
financial gain (page54).  
		
		Globally, .According to Geo 2000, a 1999 United Nations
environmental report, the excessive consumption by the affluent minority of
the earth's population and the continued poverty of the majority are the two
major causes of environmental degradation.  Meanwhile developing nations
adopting Western economic models are replicating patterns that, even in
political democracies, place inordinate power in the hands of the wealthy
few, design social institutions and systems that favor them, and fail to
adequately address the inherent inequities and consequences that undermine
health, education, and safety for all (pages 54-5).

		Taking the lead from Buckminster Fuller and others, Twist
counters the negative values of scarcity by stating there is sufficiency for
all if only we know how to approach our relationship to money.  This
paradigm borrows from a deeper understanding of community in nature (pages
153-5) and likens money to water or blood: flowing it can purify, cleanse,
create growth and nourish versus becoming stagnant and toxic to those
withholding or hoarding it (pages 102-6). 

		At the heart of The Soul of Money there is a moral
imperative: "When hungry children cry for food, they cry out not as
Bangladeshis, or Italians, or children from the other side of town.  They
cry out as human beings, and it is at that level of our humanity that we
need to respond" (page 62). 

		Twist solves the problem of inequity by inviting every
human, no matter how rich or poor (page 101-2), either alone or in
collaboration with others (pages 146-7, 169), to align money with "our most
deeply held values, commitments, and ideals" and with a concern for "the
well-being of the people we love, ourselves, and the world in which we
live"(page 11).  That if we truly do this we can recognize the sufficiency
we have on the earth and we can share and collaborate for the benefit of
all. 

		From my perspective, this is where Twist hits a limitation,
arriving only at that part of the solution that deals with our attitude to
money.  However, our entrenched money system itself is structurally flawed,
and essentially under private control, where banks make interest bearing
loans which serve as our newly created money supply.  The alternative is
that more of the money supply can be under society's direction, through
government, where programs for the public good are much more likely to be
undertaken, especially if Twist's attitude change is realized.
		

		These lessons are recorded historically in Zarlenga's The
Lost Science of Money. The Catholic Scholastics of the Middle Ages worried
about the same problem of hunger and real scarcity.  They recognized private
property, but held this principle on the condition of "utmost need" (real
hunger, for example) that all things were considered as held in common, and
anyone in the utmost need could take the goods held in abundance by another
for the preservation of his life (Zarlenga, 2002:180).  Zarlenga writes that
clearly much of today's commerce would not measure up to the Scholastics'
standards of justice in trade (ibid.).

		This underlying structural injustice in the monetary system
can be seen as early as the first millennium B.C.  The Greek farmers were
novices in the game of money and speculation, similar to the Achuars of the
Amazon Basin that Twist describes.  Greek farmers who were once free became
slaves when harvests were poor and they could not pay off their monetary
debt.  By 600 B.C. the free Greek farmers were a vanishing class of people.
At this time Solon came to power and instituted structural monetary reforms
to take the farmers out of slavery and give them some measure of protection
from the oligarchy's lending schemes. 

		For Zarlenga and other monetary reformers the central point
here is that money is a creature of the law and it will always have immense
importance in society much like water or blood.  It is a powerful tool;
however, an "elite" that is concentrating wealth and supporting Adam Smith's
false scarcity assumptions is presently abusing it.  Once the money creation
power is back in the hands of the federal government Twist's soulful view of
money should be taught as principles of good citizenship. Governments would
then be able to create the needed money in an interest-free manner to spend
on infrastructure, health, education, and other programs that would
eliminate hunger and poverty in the United States, and, as this movement
spreads, all parts of the world (Chapter 24). 

		It is clear to this reviewer the present economic engine of
monetary policy and global warming together is marching humanity off a
cliff.  To stop this Twist rolls up her sleeves and with the likes of Mother
Teresa, the Dalai Llama, the Achuars, Bangladesh villagers from the district
of Sylhet, Senegalese women from the Sahel Desert and soulful people from
all backgrounds and together are part of The Turning Tide to create a
You-And-Me instead of a You-Or-Me world.  We now need to get these soulful
people connected up to the monetary policy reformers like Zarlenga so we all
can move the world forward to one of sustained justice and beauty. 

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