This is a response to a conversation series between Charles Eisenstein and Benjamin Life titled, On "Creating" Culture. My comment got too long to put in the comment section so I thought I would just publish it as an article and share the link with them.
To explain what this is about and the questions being pondered, Benjamin Life writes:
“…how do we create healthy cultures that are not an appropriation of intact, high-context cultures that those of us who feel like spiritual orphans are learning from? How do we move from talking about the thing to actually practicing the thing? And how do we deal with the real grief of not having an intact culture and needing to create it?”
Wow so much to unpack here, enjoying the conversation, wish I had more time for it.
I’m reminded of Ken Wilber’s four quadrants, left-hand, interior quadrants represent immaterial reality, the right-hand quadrants represent exterior, physical phenomena. The above two quadrants are the individual interior/exterior, and the quadrants below are the collective interior and exterior. Religion and psychology are part of the individual interior, culture is the collective interior, thus while I think we collectively create culture some of what individuals, or a group of them, might do will have a greater impact on culture than others. I think Sacred Economics helped put people on the trail of one of those powerful influences when money was examined because it turns out money, the monetary system, has a large subconscious collective influence on society and thus culture.
“Since the dawn of times, monetary systems have been shaping the flows of human activity in every realm of endeavor; food production, education, health, business etc., by determining how we value, apply and exchange our creativity, and the fruits of our labor. It is for this reason the most influential of all human-made systems.” -- Bernhard Lietaer
The word belief has been used a lot here, a word I have defined as the line where thinking stops. John Trudell said while he did not want to disrespect anyone’s beliefs he had trouble trusting the word “because it has a lie in the middle of it” and he would be more comfortable if people would think more than they believe. It is a word I use very carefully.
We must here make a clear distinction between belief and faith, because, in general practice, belief has come to mean a state of mind which is almost the opposite of faith. Belief, as I use the word here, is the insistence that the truth is what one would “lief” or wish it to be. The believer will open his mind to the truth on the condition that it fits in with his preconceived ideas and wishes. Faith, on the other hand, is an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be. Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown. Belief clings, but faith lets go. In this sense of the word, faith is the essential virtue of science, and likewise of any religion that is not self-deception. -- Alan Watts
I put religion with spirituality in the individual/interior, defining it as one’s relationship with the powers and principles of the universe, or “God.” Organized religion is in the collective/exterior, the social realm along with politics and ideologies. Sankofa is the concept of realizing you have taken a wrong turn and must go back to that point to determine a better path. The story of “God created the world” was such a fork in the path. Here Elisabet Sahtouris tells the story.
Our intellectual heritage for thousands of years, most strongly developed in the past few hundred years of science, has been to see ourselves as separate from the rest of nature, to convince ourselves we see it objectively -- at a distance from ourselves -- and to perceive, or at least model it, as a vast mechanism. This objective mechanical worldview was founded in ancient Greece when philosophers divided into two schools of thought about the world. One school held that all nature, including humans, was alive and self-creative, ever making order from disorder. The other held that the `real' world could be known only through pure reason, not through direct experience, and was God's geometric creation, permanently mechanical and perfect behind our illusion of its disorder.
This mechanical/religious worldview superseded the older one of living nature to become the foundation of the whole Western worldview up to the present. Philosophers such as Pythagoras, Parmenides, and Plato were thus the founding fathers of our mechanical worldview, though Galileo, Descartes, and other men of the Renaissance translated it into the scientific and technological enterprise that has dominated human experience ever since.
What if things had gone the other way? What if Thales, Anaximander, and Heraclitus, the organic philosophers who saw all the cosmos as alive, had won the day back in that ancient Greek debate? What if Galileo, as he experimented with both telescope and microscope, had used the latter to seek evidence for Anaximander's theory of biological evolution here on Earth, rather than looking to the skies for confirmation of Aristarchus's celestial mechanics? In other words, what if modern science and our view of human society had evolved from organic biology rather than from mechanical physics?
We all came from original people, indigenous people. Our ancestors had cultural beliefs and practices that were common world around. Within that belief in a living universe there was enormous diversity in language and practice. I think of this when we speak of avoiding cultural appropriation, the specific language, and practices, not the common concept of a living universe. It is a view that in my mind more accurately aligns with science, a living self-creating entity of which we are all a part. That there is no creator outside of the universe, creation is the universe, all that is and isn’t, I like to say. And I am always disturbed by the past tense, “God created” because creation has not stopped, the universe is expanding, evolution continues. I think science, like everything else today, has been captured by the financial hegemon directing it for personal gain but honest science, the investigation into what is, of creation, can inform and enrich our original beliefs.
Another fork in the road is the money but more difficult to pinpoint since there have been multiple exit ramps from the current system which we have generally blown past. The problem is that the current system is institutionalized usury, the abuse of monetary authority for personal gain. We have used commodities for money or to “back” money, and we have for the last 300 years or so used credit for money but why do we not use money for money? Money is an ancient innovation, a symbolic payment system for paying debt as we’ve all felt indebted to the universe, especially our Earth, for life and sustenance and because it is so important to life was a sacred ritual. A native friend of mine is a surveyor, and when he comes to a site to survey, he makes a payment to the Earth Mother, of tobacco or cornmeal, for cutting some of her “children” to clear the way for his transit view. We need to make Earth and our money sacred again.
Money is a social power embodied in custom or law as an unconditional payment system and designating that which is to be used to represent it. Later it became a medium of exchange to facilitate trade. Various currencies such as feathers, bones or seashells, were employed for this purpose, cowrie shells may still be being used in some places in Africa. However, as Aristotle noted, money plays two roles, one as a medium of exchange and the other as an instrument of power due to its superior liquidity and ability to be accumulated. As you mentioned in Sacred Economics, Silvio Gesell solved that problem with demurrage, a parking fee on money. This is where we get into the subconscious influence of money.
Money has psychological consequences, and they can be negative or positive depending on the nature of the monetary system, how money is created, by whom and for what. The current global monetary system, institutionalized usury, besides the physical consequences of concentrating wealth and power to the top, driving destructive economic growth and predatory competition, research shows it also has negative psychological consequences due to its separation from the sacred, such as loneliness/alienation, non-cooperative/hyper-individualism, and unethical/criminal behavior. Usury can be regarded as the sin of sins, the progenitor of the seven deadly sins we see rife in society. All religions once banned the practice, it was the only thing that made Jesus angry enough to get violent. In his Divine Comedy, Dante put the usurers in the deepest reaches of hell. He characterized the practice as “an extraordinarily efficient form of violence by which one does the most damage with the least effort.”
The ancient Greeks recognized that the most vital prerogative of democratic self-governance was to issue the money as a debt-free medium of exchange and yet democracy remains out of our reach as the power aspect of money has empowered usurious rulers whose primary interests are profits and power.
Issuing money as a public utility changes the first cause of money to care, money issued as a debt-free, permanently circulating asset for the common needs of the people. The act of creating money to spend for the common welfare makes it a care-based system which would have profound psychological effects on society and governance. What we have now is a profit-based system of usury, the sin of sins, which also has profound psychological consequences, but they are negative.
Changing the money will change the way we live by replacing the profit-based system with a care-based system. It is not complicated, the first cause of money now is profit, it is issued as debt for private gain. I Think that money with a new first cause of care will have profound psychological impacts on society, reversing the negative influence of usury. The legislation is already written and legally vetted to do that and was introduced to Congress in 2011 but was never voted on since financial corporations through campaign donations and lobbying have a lock on public policy with our servile legislators.
I think it will take a huge movement to change the system and there is much confusion provided by experts to keep it down, but the American Revolution was all about the money issue because money is the governing factor, it determines who rules, who decides. Greenbacks to provide for the nation’s defense against an effort to dissolve it were publicly issued money too, and while in circulation debts were disappearing. This is why the bankers hated them.
Another psychological effect of money was demonstrated at least three times in history in monetary systems using a demurrage currency. The most recent during the Great Depression was in Wörgl, Austria where $2.5 million in public works were accomplished issuing only $6000 due to the high velocity of circulation of the stamp scrip. It also had a profound psychological effect due to the dynamics of net present value. That is a mathematical equation that shows how the demurrage currency increased the value of things in the future. This shifted the thinking of people from short-term to long-term. Ancient Egypt and the High Middle Ages are two other examples. Of course, people were unaware of this equation and did not make such calculations in their heads, it was a subconscious psychological effect. Our most ancient ancestors, the indigenous people, practiced long-term thinking, considering the impacts of their actions on 7 generations into the future. We have a tool to help get us there once people know what the task is. I think by right action we can collectively create a new culture.
So, this brings us to the apocalypse, the “lifting of the veil” on the crimes of the power elite, the reality of the system under which we live, a reality we reject in favor of a more caring system. It is the end of their world order in order to get back to and restore the garden. I saw a TikTok video the other day of a woman saying that the reason why change is afoot is because more and more people are able to see through the lies they are being told. Yes, the truth will set us free to create a new culture.