 Good evening. I'm just going to speak a little bit about Charles and my personal experience of his work. I think like all of you, we've all come here because we've been inspired in some way by his work. I first came across a book called Descent of Humanity, a dear friend of mine, give me a copy. I've been living moneyless for a couple of years and the book completely changed my perspective on life. It made me think about things I'd never even previously thought about before. And so last year when Sacred Economies came out I was obviously very excited, like most of you as well. And for those of you who haven't read it, it's an absolutely incredible piece of work. I think to fully understand how brilliant Sacred Economics is, you have to probably read Descent of Humanity first. In my opinion, I think Charles is probably one of the greatest thinkers we have today. But the one thing that I really like about Charles is that he's actually got heart as well. Like I think he's probably going to speak a lot about economics and the problems with economics and some of the problems with money and how we can fix it. But I think behind a lot of that is there's a spiritual aspect to that and a lot of heart. I think given the fact that he's only got one hour to speak and some questions and answers after, I think we're going to do maybe 45 minutes of questions and answers. I think it's impossible to speak about everything that is in Sacred Economics and in Descent of Humanity. So I really encourage both of you to pick up a copy of both of those books. I'm getting 10% commission of everything so Charles is going to need to sell hard here. But yeah, so one other thing, yes, read both the books. The other thing is that Charles has often come from America. So if you leave here tonight feeling that you have been really touched by what he's spoken about or really touched by the fact he's come here and dedicated his life to trying to create something a bit more beautiful. And then please feel free to offer what you would call a counter gift at the table. We've got a bucket for donations. So yeah, please donate. It's not cheap coming from America, obviously. Is that better? Anyway, yeah, so I'll probably, on that note, I'll probably hand you over to Charles. And I'd like you to give him a round of applause that's kind of worthy of the journey he's made from America. So welcome, Charles. That's nice. Thanks, Mark, for that. Yeah, so I will probably talk at least a little bit about economics. But Mark was kind of getting at something that I think everybody feels when you look at the financial crisis. You have this feeling that it's really not about that. Part of that feeling is that it's almost like this feeling that the world is falling apart. And maybe I should stand back a little. We're getting a little feedback here. A feeling that the crisis that we face today in some sense goes all the way to the bottom. Even the elites understand this when they talk about, in secret, on their financial websites. They call it extend and pretend. Recognizing that none of their solutions can possibly reach deep enough. And I think that many of us are getting that understanding as well, that this crisis goes all the way to the bottom. And all the way to the bottom means that it includes all aspects of our being. What you would call the heart, the spirit, the feelings, the embodiment. And not just this abstract realm of symbols that we call money. I mean, money is really abstract. It's physical reality today at most. It's these slips of paper which weigh hardly anything. And most of it is just bits and computers. It almost doesn't exist at all. So I want to, if you were here for a very comprehensive analytic talk about money systems, you're not going to get that much of that. But I will touch on that, and I will touch on all of the other levels as well. To really make it simple, I can say that all of this work is based on an understanding of the universe based on the gift. It's not just an approach to economics. It's also a cosmology. And it echoes ancient cultures' cosmology. Where they saw the universe is essentially operating on the principles of a gift. And this is something that we can all tap into. It's that feeling of primal gratitude that you have when you're thirsty and you have a drink of water. And you realize that even if you did walk over to the tap and get the water yourself, you realize that you didn't earn the presence of water in this universe. We all have this underlying knowledge that that water was a gift. And that our breath is a gift. And that the ground beneath our feet is a gift. We didn't earn any of these things. That our lives are a gift. We didn't earn being nursed when we were babies and protected and taken care of and clothed and fed. We didn't earn having this beautiful planet that creates food, even if we don't really know how to make it happen. We don't really can't engineer food even today. We can insert different genes and things. But we don't know how to make food. We didn't make the sun either. None of these things were earned. They all came as a gift. And that means that we are born into gratitude. Gratitude being the feeling, the knowledge of having received and the desire to give in turn. And that's written very deeply into human nature. That's why if you... Well, let me just say economics, generally speaking, economics denies that. And they say, no, no, no. Human nature really is about maximizing your self-interest, maximizing your utility. And it's based on biology, which teaches or has taught until quite recently that we are driven by our genes to maximize reproductive self-interest. But I think we know better. One reason that we know better is that you could have a job that pays you really well. But if that job doesn't engage your gifts, you're going to be very dissatisfied with that job. You're going to feel like you're living somebody else's life. The life that you were paid to live, but not your life. I've had those moments before when I was quite young. I was like, well, I remember actually a key moment when I was 28 years old, 27 maybe. I was living in Taiwan. I was a translator and business consultant back then. It was a former lifetime. And we were having a meeting. We were meeting with some people, executives in a software company. And they were discussing their new product features and 3D sound and this, that and the other thing. And I looked around the room and I was like, hold on. You mean you guys actually care about this and your market share? Because I'm just pretending to care about it because you're paying me too. So I had a few moments of gloating superiority. I get that and you don't. But then the next feeling was terror. Because I thought, do I ever get to do something I care about for real? And I couldn't imagine anything doing anything that I cared about for real that would pay me the same amount of money. But I began to think, well, I couldn't do that job much longer actually. And that launched me on a very long journey to discover what it is that I do actually care about. Because I've been so conditioned to doing things I didn't care about for the sake of an external reward. I mean that starts in school, doesn't it? Where the external reward is grades and you do things you don't actually care about to get good grades and that conditions you for a life of doing things you don't care about. So no coincidence, the school system was created by industrialists. I won't go into that story right now. So I wondered, right, so that launched this journey and I also wondered why should it be this way? Why should it be that the things I really care about, there's no money in those? The things that make my heart sing, there's no money in those. And the things I don't want to do very much, that's where the money is. The things that are destroying the planet, that's where the money is. Why should it be that way? Why shouldn't money instead be aligned with the gift? Why shouldn't it be that the things that I want to give to the world are the things that will also give me money? The things that I want to do in service to society and to the planet will generate money that supports me. Why shouldn't it be that way? Why should money be aligned with things that are not sacred to me? And that's where I get the title of Sacred Economics. It's about how to align money with the things that are becoming sacred to us. Starting with the healing of the planet, the healing of society. So I think that everybody has probably had this kind of experience of that feeling like, I wasn't put here on earth to do this. Even if you're paid 10 million pounds a year, if your job was simply to sit there and type numbers, meaningless numbers into a computer, you would eventually start having that feeling. No amount of money would be enough to quell that feeling. Because your gifts have to go, not only do your gifts have to be engaged, but they have to go toward something that's meaningful to you. Or again, you're going to feel that you're not living your life. You know, this is quite a strange situation here, looking out at a sea of strange faces. This was unheard of in hunter-gatherer times, or in medieval times in the Saxon period in England. Everybody you knew was an intimate acquaintance. And everybody that you saw, you knew their stories, and they knew your stories. And you knew that what you did, the way you acted, would come back to you. If you were very generous, then everybody would know that, and they would be generous to you too. If you were very stingy or mean, then the effects of that would come back to you as well. This is related to what I'm going to be talking about, the revolution of the gift economy. And I'm using the word revolution here in a very deep sense. I mentioned it before, this idea that everything is changing. And I want to explain what is so revolutionary about gift economy, or the spirit of the gift, or the cosmology of the gift. It's something that is foreign to us today because we are so conditioned to see the world as a competitive arena in which more for you is less for me. In a gift culture, it wasn't like that. One of the features of a gift culture is that if you have more than you need, you're not going to hoard it for yourself. You're not going to give your access to somebody else who needs it. And that's not just because you're a nice person. It's because that's where security, status, and everything that we call wealth comes from. Because if you give to the people generously in your community, then they're going to kind of owe you one. They're going to want to give to you as well. Like if you borrow, even if it's a small thing, you borrow even a corkscrew from your neighbor. I had to do that last year. I borrowed a corkscrew from my neighbor, and I returned it to him. And now he feels like he has kind of permission to ask me for a small favor too. A gift creates a bond between people, unlike a financial transaction. So if I borrowed my neighbor's corkscrew and I returned it to him and say, here's a dollar, he would actually be insulted. Because I'm saying, I don't want this bond with you. I want the relationship to be over. So today we live in a society that's increasingly monetized. Therefore we live in a society where there are no bonds. And that is the reason, or one reason why we lack community today. Because community is simply a group of people among whom gifts circulate. And you know that if you give to somebody in the community, then the community will give back to you too. So in a gift culture, it's not true that more for you is less for me. We're not fundamentally in competition. Because if you have some good fortune, then your surplus will come to me. Maybe not directly, but you'll give to somebody who will give to somebody who will give to me. And if you have bad fortune, then you'll have less to give to me. So gift culture corresponds to a very different sense of ourselves. What it is to exist, what it is to be. It corresponds to a different way of looking at the universe. Money is not like that. And I'm going to explain why I think, I think I'll move on to that. Money has to do with, okay, this explanation is going to also include the answer to the question, why is it that money is not aligned with the sacred today? Why is it that money is the ally of the things I don't want to do and the enemy of the things I do want to do? Generally speaking, I don't want to over-generalize here. I mean there are some people who do what they love and they're making lots of money at it and it's fine. But I'm generally speaking, money is not aligned with what is sacred to us as individuals. And when you investigate any big problem in the world, anything horrible happening, like why is there a war in Afghanistan? Why maybe now in Iran soon? Why are we cutting down the rainforest? And you ask why is this happening and very soon you get to money. Money is making it happen. So it's obviously if there's anything that's not sacred in this world is money. And that's a puzzle that it should be that way because money isn't a law of the universe. It doesn't exist outside of human creation. We've created money to be that way. Money is simply a story. It's a set of interpretations of symbols. And we have created, or it's a set of agreements. You could say it's a set of agreements to use something as a medium of exchange and store value in a unit of account. So you could ask why have we created a set of agreements? Why have we created this story that's driving the planet toward destruction? Why couldn't we create a different story? Well we can create a different story. And in fact we will create a different story because the money system as we have known it is falling apart. And the collapse of that money system which even the elites recognize is happening when they talk about pretend and extend. The collapse of that money system is tied into the collapse of the larger agreements that include the agreement of money. So I'm going to, let me explain kind of how money works. Like in ancient Greece the city state was the one that could issue money. So how does it work today? And a lot of people already know this story but I'm going to go through it anyway in just five minutes or so. And if you are an economist you might see many, many ways in which I'm oversimplifying it. Not distinguishing between the monetary base and M1 and M2 or not talking about shadow banking systems and whatever. This is a really basic understanding of it that fundamentally won't lead you astray. So most people know that money today is created by lending. It's lent into existence by banks. So if I'm a bank and I lend you say a million pounds I'm not really taking that money from someone else's savings account and putting it in yours. But what I'm doing is I'm creating new money by an accounting entry in your savings account. New money, a million pounds. Now there are a million more pounds in existence. How do I decide who to do that for? Well I'll do it. If I think that you're going to be able to pay me back. Pay me back not just one million pounds because there's interest on this loan. You have to pay me back say two million pounds over whatever ten years, whatever the interest rate is. You have to pay me back more than I lent you. Well that's not a problem because you are such a great entrepreneurial creative person. You're going to take that million pounds and you're going to make the world's best chocolate. And you're going to sell it to everybody else in the room. You're going to make three million pounds doing that. And pay me back my two million and you're going to get rich too. No problem. The first problem comes from the fact that everybody in the room is in the same boat. Because all money, not just some money but all money is created through that process. So everybody in the room has a million pounds. Everybody in the room owes me two million pounds. Where's the extra money going to come from? Essentially you are all in competition with each other for never enough money. And I don't know if that phrase rings a bell in your life. In competition for never enough money. So the way that money is created creates along with it scarcity, anxiety and competition. Now it wouldn't last very long if that were all to the story. Half of you would go bankrupt and there would be revolution very quickly. But that's not all to the story. Because what happens when all those loans are due? Well by then you can all pay them back because I've created even more money in the interim. I've lent even more money into existence. And that comes with even more debt. But that's okay because when that comes due I will have lent even more money into existence. Like all the while how do I know who to lend it to is if you have a good business plan. If you're going to create goods and services and sell them to other people then I can keep lending money into existence and the system will keep working. No problem. The only problem with this, well not the only problem, but the flagrant problem with this comes if there's a limit to growth. For example maybe the planet can't accommodate more growth. Then we've got a problem because now there's no one with a good, I'm exaggerating, there are not enough people with a good business plan for me to lend enough money to pay back all of the loans from the existing money. There's not enough money and I stop lending because there's no growth that's going to create new business plans. And when I stop lending then the debts keep rising faster than income. Wealth concentrates into fewer and fewer hands. Unemployment runs rampant and you see everything that's happening today. And that's the nature of today's crisis. It's a crisis of growth. And that's why all the politicians are talking about, you know, reigniting economic growth and that would solve the problem. But what is economic growth? What are these goods and services? And can they keep growing forever? Well goods are essentially, okay so it only counts as a good or a service if it's being exchanged for money, right? So if your business plan is, hey Charles, I would like a million pounds to, there's a threatened wetlands out there. I'd like to buy that and protect it. Otherwise it'll be threatened with development. And what do you mean that's not a good or a service? That's very valuable to society. But you're not going to be selling anything. So that doesn't count. If your business plan is, you know Charles, people have forgotten how to cook for themselves. They've lost this skill. And I'm going to teach them how to do that again. And I'm not going to charge them money for it. People don't take care of their own kids anymore. They're shipped off to daycare. I'm going to create a neighborhood daycare co-op so that people can collectively take care of their own kids and they won't have to pay for daycare anymore. There's no money in any of these things. But if your business plan is, I'm going to buy that wetlands, get it over, get the zoning changed because I have friends on City Council. See, here's my Rolodex, here's my business plan, and I'm going to make, okay, that's a business plan. I'm going to set up a daycare center so that people can pay for daycare instead of taking care of their own kids. That's a new service. I'm going to build a supermarket with a deli in it so that people, because they're busy now, and they can pay for food preparation instead of preparing it for themselves. That's a new service. So what's happened over centuries is that the realm, the non-monetary realm, which you could say is the realm of the gift, has shrunk and shrunk and shrunk and shrunk, and the monetized realm has grown. So one aspect of that is that nature is converted into product. The other aspect is that relationships are converted into services. I mentioned a couple, like food and childcare. Two of the biggest growth areas, food preparation and childcare. If you go back enough generations, you see other aspects of human relationship that have been converted into money. For example, entertainment. 100 years ago, because we didn't have recording technology, well, 130 years ago, whatever, music wasn't something you usually paid for. Maybe you rich people went to the opera or something like that, but most people sang songs and played instruments. Singing was, you heard singing all over the place all the time. In America, 100 years ago or 80 years ago, every small town had its own marching band and put on its own parade. It was a really big deal and everybody was into it. And so people, and it didn't cost money to do that. But today we pay for music. We didn't used to pay for medical care. Every village had a couple herbalists. Maybe if things got really bad, you'd have to hire the doctor with his little black bag. But people didn't usually pay for medical care. People didn't pay for drinking water, bottled water. That's a new thing, too. So in case somebody is here with the, maybe you kind of wandered into the wrong place and you thought this was going to be about getting rich. Well, it is kind of about getting rich because the growth of all of these things has impoverished us in other ways. But I will offer you a business plan if you are here to get rich. Just find something that people get for free from nature or from each other. Take it away and sell it back. So pollute the water, sell them bottled water. De-skill people and sell them services. Scare them into not letting their kids run free and then they can pay for video games and indoor activities. Almost anything can be converted into money. Play, for example. When I was a kid we would wander off after breakfast we'd wander off. Our parents didn't know where and do all kinds of dangerous things. Come back and we had this kingdom of imagination. And so today all these, you know, adventures we had. Today, closer. Today we, children, purchase these adventures and have online virtual adventures that have kind of replaced the kingdom of the outdoors. Okay, so you get the picture here. This conversion of life into money. Now an economist might say that we're better off because of this. We're better off because it's more efficient for the supermarket deli to make a thousand meals than for everybody to make their own meals. It's more efficient for the daycare teachers to take care of 20 kids rather than for each family to take care of their own kids. It's more efficient for whatever her name is to sing all of our songs for us. And the economists would say that's actually what we want because we're willing to pay for it and we wouldn't pay for it if we didn't want it. But I think that we've noticed that we've only become richer in the ways that we can measure and we've become poorer and poorer in the ways that we can't measure. Life has become impoverished in qualitative ways. So we have lots more food but not as much food that's really prepared with love. We have lots more music but it's all impersonal. We don't have as much music that's actually sung to you. And if you've ever been serenaded by a lover you know kind of what's missing. And we're missing the personal and the authentic and the intimate which makes us hungry for these things. And to meet this hunger maybe we consume more and more and more of the stuff that we can count of the stuff that's available. And I think that's what drives a lot of our consumerism. People think it's greed that drives this endless consumerism and this urge to live in a bigger house and have a bigger bank account and all that. But I think it comes down to what I was talking about before. I mean here we are in a room full of strangers. This is profoundly unnatural. Human beings evolved to look around and you knew everybody intimately and everybody knew your story the name of every hill and of every tree and it was an intimate friend of yours and you knew the stories, the mythological stories of every feature of the land and the story of when your best friend's little brother fell through the ice on that pond and you knew the stories of your friend's children and your friend's parents and they knew you and so therefore you knew yourself. Every bird that you saw every bird you'd know what its song was and what time of day it sang its song and what type of plants it used for its nest and the medicinal qualities of those plants and what kind of soil they grew in and so we were immersed in this connected realm and we felt at home in the universe. Today we are cut off from that and not only by our economic system but the economic system doesn't exist in isolation from everything else. It rests on a deeper foundation and this deeper foundation is also falling apart today. I call it the story of the people. It's the defining myth of our culture. Every culture has one. Every culture has its own answer to the deep questions like who are you? What's important in life? Where do we come from? Where are we going? What is a human being? What's valuable? What's real? The answer that we have there's two aspects of it. There's the individual aspect, the story of self and the collective aspect which I could call the story of the people and the individual aspect says basically that what a self is it's this discreet separate individual in a world of other discreet separate individuals and this world is external to you. Every field of thought phrases this in a different way so religion would say separate this soul encased in flesh and there's other souls out there and then there's God up there and so you're separate from the other soul separate from God and separate from materiality separate from the world because what you really are is that soul you're not the flesh so there's separation right there and I'm not talking about esoteric religion I'm talking about just what religion has been for most of us and science is the same, biology the separate self is this flesh robot programmed by its genes to maximize reproductive self-interest in physics it's again a flesh machine operating according to deterministic laws in an objective universe all obsolete, obsolete physics obsolete biology but that's what it's been telling us psychology you know you're this kind of bubble of psychology bouncing around among other bubbles of psychology you are a mind you are a moat of consciousness as Descartes described it you're this little moat of consciousness and so you're separate from other people and of course if there's me here and you there and the universe out there then the more I control of that the less there is for you so our basic answer to who are you already encodes competition, scarcity and anxiety and our money system fits perfectly into that worldview you may have noticed that that worldview is becoming obsolete and we are transitioning into a different story of self and you could call it the connected self the ecological self it's the self that understands that every person out here is part of me a reflection of me a mirror of myself part of myself and same with the world and we're not actually separate all of us are undergoing a shift in consciousness of this nature experiencing ourselves in different ways still very much subject to the habits of the separate self the habits of thought the habits of being but moving, shifting which means that the psychic foundation for the money institution and for all of our other institutions is gone the ground underneath is shifting that is one way to understand why there is a crisis in all of our institutions they're all obsolete they don't shift as fast in our consciousness though they have more inertia they're more solid and that's why we have this disconnect between our consciousness and our institutions and that's why money is not aligned with the things that are becoming sacred to us with the things that are beautiful to us it's still built on the old story of self and it tries to pull us back into that story of self another way to put it is that if what makes your heart sing is not to increase the number of products to find something to sell then there's not going to be a job for you the money isn't in the things that you want to do because the money system is aligned with separation and there's another really important part actually it's also aligned with the story of the people on the collective level and I call that one ascent and this story basically says that once upon a time human beings were these animals helpless, naked, superstitious, ignorant barely surviving subject to the winds of nature at the mercy of natural forces but thanks to our big brains we began to ascend above nature we developed science that replaced ignorant superstition we developed technology that replaced impotent ritual and slowly but surely we became the lords and masters of nature and look at what we've done we have harnessed fossil fuels first we harnessed the animals then we harnessed fossil fuels we've changed the course of rivers we've built taken down mountains and built new ones and exceeded the speed of sound and we can do things that no other animal can do and that's just the beginning someday maybe with nanotechnology genetic engineering atomic power oh that's a little bit that was in the 40s but this myth has been going on a long time Descartes actually wrote about that and futurists were saying that in 1800 yes we were becoming the masters of nature and soon we will live in leisure and ease it's been predicted again and again soon we will conquer all disease that's what they were saying in the 50s it seemed obvious then and so the story says that someday our control over nature will be complete it says someday we will conquer all disease we will synthesize our food we won't even need nature we'll go off into space we will maybe even conquer death by uploading our consciousness into computers our control will be complete gee whiz what's next and as you can tell this story is also becoming obsolete mostly because it's not working very well like I don't think many people still believe as the experts were saying in the 50s that we will conquer all disease by the year 2000 I don't think most people believe the top futurist of the 1980s Alvin Toffler who said by the year 2000 the greatest problem facing society what to do with all our leisure time and he predicted 150 days of vacation a year 30 hour work weeks almost as good as 100 gatherers enjoyed but not quite and you know the space colonies those were supposed to be in place by the 90s I remember when I was a kid remember the rocket mania I had a rocket board game I had model rockets even my shampoo bottle was in the shape of a rocket you know and like you are naive if you thought that we wouldn't have space colonies by the year 2000 so we don't have an age of leisure in fact we're working harder than in 1973 we don't have the end of disease we don't have 200 year life spans in fact life spans are beginning to decline in some places in America for example and our mastery of nature seems to have run into a few problems too as it increasingly is running out of control clinging tightly to that story of ascent we would say well the problem is that we just need some more technology more control more of the same if what you're doing isn't working do more of it which is kind of crazy money is also part of this story of ascent because of its nature because I explained how interest drives growth it necessitates growth and it drives growth because we're all under endless debt pressure directly or indirectly to find something else to bring into the human realm into the realm of money and property so it's part of this growth paradigm and again that story is becoming obsolete and 100 years ago it wasn't 100 years ago if you were a bright young person idealistic, a go-getter you would be totally psyched to invent a faster way to cut down the trees you wouldn't have to apologize for it you wouldn't have to be ashamed of it and everybody would celebrate you as a captain of industry because that story was still robust but not anymore not anymore what we're facing then is this is the nature of the revolution we're facing a transition in our world defining myths the defining myths of our civilization I'll call them myths separation, myth, ascent, myth and I don't mean to denigrate them by calling them a myth because we're going to replace them with new myths but it's a profound change what's the new story of the people then and so really what my work is is to describe what money would look like if it were aligned with the new story of the people and the new story of the self and I know that it's going to have a lot to do with the gift because the gift, unlike money, expands the self to include all of our relationships in a gift culture, as I pointed out it's no longer true that more for you is less for me it's no longer true that you are separate from me because now your good is also my good so gift economics is aligned with the connected self the new story of self the connected self, it's something that even if our minds can't quite grasp it it's something that we can feel, you know why else would it hurt to read to see those pictures of, you know after the golf oils fell and there's those seabirds, you know staggering on the shore, soaked in oil like why should that hurt so what, you know in England, I mean, we don't get shrimp in England from the golf of Mexico, we get it from somewhere else who cares, Fukushima that's just some people in Japan that radiation isn't going to get over here, who cares but it hurts us the fact is, the truth is that what happens to anybody and anything and to the planet is happening to us as well and we can no longer escape that 50 or 100 years ago it seemed as though we could escape the consequences of our actions it seemed as though that we were exceptions to ecology where everything circles back that we were separate from nature but today we can't escape it anymore the circle of karma is getting tighter so this is something that we can feel something that we know just like we know the truth of the gift that we're here to do something that serves something greater than ourselves we're here to give of our gifts we know that and for a long time and this knowledge resides in the heart and for a long time it was in conflict with our logic and our systems and this conflict is beginning to resolve now and we're entering into a new logic in which it makes total sense what we feel makes total sense because the story of separation is becoming obsolete in physics even it's becoming obsolete it's no longer true in physics that there's these discrete separate entities in an objective universe the distinction between subject and object is becoming very questionable in biology it's changing too it's not these discrete selfish genes we're learning that genetic material is routinely exchanged between organisms even across species that were expressions of a genetic plenum plenum, plenum I don't know how to say that word anyway that was supposed to make you think I was smart gotta throw a few big words in there to make up for my lack of credentials I shouldn't have admitted that either okay, the new story of the people what is the ascent over nature the domination, the conquest of nature what's replacing that what's replacing the growth paradigm take a hint from biology some environmentalists in great despair they say humanity must be nature's great mistake nature's big mistake because look at us all other creatures come into equilibrium with their environment but we're just growing and growing exponentially forever but actually in nature there are periods of exponential growth and rapid growth and they go for a while and then they level off and into an equilibrium state for example, a child grows very fast has one final growth spurt in adolescence and then he stops growing it's only unnatural if you try to prolong growth past that point like I have a 16 year old son he's about 190 centimeters and you know what maybe I should be worried actually he grew 10 centimeters 3 years ago 8 centimeters, 2 years ago only 4 centimeters last year and now he's not growing at all how can I get growth how can I reignite economic growth I mean, how can I reignite his growth that would be insane maybe if I fed him hormones or something like that just like we could get our economy to grow a little bit more all we have to do is frack it and drill in the wildlife reserve and whatever capacity of the atmosphere remains to absorb our waste let's use that up let's squeeze a few more drops of growth out of there to keep this system going a little longer because that's all we know how to do but what we're facing is a transition from adulthood into a post growth economy a steady state economy when growth ends and the transition to adulthood happens there's two things that mark that transition and I think we're seeing both of them in our civilization the first thing is that you fall in love the love relationship changes when you're entering adulthood the child loves his mother loves his father and his main role his main role in that relationship is to receive but when you fall in love you no longer just want to receive you want to give also it's an equal relationship even a co-creative relationship you want to create something together you want to do something together you want to even create a family together and I think that humanity and I'm talking about the mass culture civilization I'm not talking about the indigenous this is a different story but the bulk of humanity now industrial civilization is falling in love with earth no longer wanting to be in that role of just taking but wanting to give in turn as well it started really as a mass movement in the 1960s when books like Silent Spring came onto the scene I read that when I was a kid it had a huge impact on me huge impact I wouldn't be here if it weren't for Rachel Carson and people read these books and they saw what was happening and they no longer desired just to extract to take from earth but they desired to protect the earth photographs of earth were beamed down from the satellites and the astronauts came back with these pictures of the planet and it was so beautiful I don't know if anyone here is old enough to remember the first time that you saw these and how powerful it was right Christmas Eve 1966 powerful it was the first time many people saw the earth without borders drawn on it and it was so beautiful and people, something changed then the astronauts they had these they all had these spiritual experiences when they went up there they had these epiphanies I quote some of them in my books my favorite is I think it's by Rusty Schweikart and he said when I was on the moon when you're up on the moon looking down at earth that you can cover with your thumb and I was up there and I realized he said I realized that everything precious to me was all on that little speck all of music, all of art all of history, love death, birth all of literature, all of culture everybody I've ever loved all on this little blue dot that I can cover up with my thumb and he said I was never the same after that the relationship is different now the relationship is different now the second thing that happens in the passage to adulthood is that you go through an ordeal primitive cultures understood the necessity of an ordeal and they would create them on purpose so they would take you out into the bush and tie you to a tree without food or water for three days and you would have a vision or they would feed you large amounts of psychedelic plants or they would subject you to severe physical pain, scarification or they would send you on a vision quest and you better not come back until you've had a vision and we'll know if you haven't and some people don't come back whatever it was these rituals were intense enough to cause your identity to fall apart everything that it seemed so real and reliable and permanent was blown away and you didn't know who you were anymore and that opened you up to take on a larger identity and you would come back from their ordeal as a full member of the tribe we don't have these ordeals really today and that's one reason why you might find yourself in your 20s or even in your 30s feeling like you're a child playing grown up somehow like here I am dressed like an adult and with a job and adult clothes and adult body but why do I feel like I'm pretending like I'm playing make-believe here anyway this ordeal would make your world fall apart and allow you to take on a new identity a larger identity that included the tribe but I think humanity is going through that ordeal right now that's what all of these crises are doing to us the world is falling apart all the things that it seemed so real so secure, so permanent are being revealed as as illusion especially obvious in the money system a generation ago there was nothing more practical, solid and permanent than blue chip stocks and triple A bonds and your pension that was the essence of practicality and today we no longer trust in the permanence of these things and many people do have the sense that the world is falling apart they almost get a sense of vertigo like if you lose your job so what's happening then is that humanity collectively is also being propelled into our full membership in the tribe of all life on earth in which we no longer just receive but we give in turn so translating that into economics that means that our economy can no longer be an exception to ecology but has to become part of ecology and that's what we want it to do today it isn't partly because of the way the money system works for example costs to the ecosystem costs to future generations costs to society are external to the balance sheet you can make lots of pollution but your product will still be very cheap because it doesn't include the cost of that pollution so one thing I talk about in the book and this idea is not really that radical or that new Pigot was talking about that in the 20s and 30s but it's to internalize these costs so that profit motive is aligned with the good of society and the planet and so that would align money with the new story of the people which is co-creative partnership in love with earth and that's the only kind of money system I think that will make sense the only kind that will end this conflict between what makes my heart sing and where the money is like what if the big money were in ecosystem restoration what if the big money were in permaculture what if the big money were in social work healing the damage that's been caused by thousands of years of separation that's where we want to go anyway which means that the division between work and play between work and life work and leisure also begins to crumble and we no longer have to make ourselves do things we don't want to do in order to make a living work has gotten a bad reputation economics talks about the disutility of work meaning that you really don't want to work but you have to to make a living so you or to get these things that you want but if you had your druthers if you didn't have to work then you would sit around in front of the TV eating chocolate bonbons all day because why would you want to work so one of the aspects of separation that's breaking down is this dichotomy between work and joy and we're understanding that yeah we want to work and it's not that money makes us do the work we don't want to do it's that money stops us from doing the work that we want to do so today so that's one I'm not going to talk too much longer I'm going to have questions soon but I just wanted to give one example like a lot of the book sacred economics is really about the nitty gritty of how in fact do you align money with the new story of the self and the new story of the people and how do you align it with the principle of the gift another principle of the gift and I mentioned it before I'll give the richer you are in the book I quote an anthropologist I think it was Richard Me who did his field work in the Kalahari desert with the kong otherwise known as the bushman and they had a word for wealth that he translated as wealth that word was kai kai kai and a rich man was called a kaiha so Richard Lee asked his informant Zoma he said what is it that makes a man a kaiha is it because he has lots of kai in his hut, he refers to beads and pretty things, valuables you know he has a lot of kai in his hut does that make him a kaiha and Zoma laughed at him and said no, you don't understand we don't call a man a kaiha who makes lots of kai circulate who gives a lot of his kai then we call him a kaiha and Richard Lee said it seemed as if you were saying that wealth is a matter of how many friends you have rather than how much stuff you have so another question I play with in the book is how do you make money like that and by the way I'm not thinking about money I don't think economics should only be about money but how do you make money take on this aspect of a gift culture where if you have more than you need then you give it to somebody who needs it and that creates good will that creates gratitude that makes you secure because then if you need something they will take care of you too it was certainly the case in most hunter gatherer societies when possessions were a literal burden because they were nomadic and you had to carry them around also to a great extent true in early agricultural societies before money especially where if you had a really rich harvest that year and you have a granary full of grain is it really going to do you much good to keep it yourself no, because it's going to rot it's going to go bad rats are going to eat it you're better off giving it to everybody around you and then they'll remember that when they have a good harvest they'll give it to you too I don't mean to make it sound so calculating I mean this dynamic was embedded into kinship systems and systems of reciprocity but money's not like that if I have more money than I need I'm not going to say well I'm not using it now I'll just let you guys use it because money doesn't go bad doesn't go bad because you can invest it in interest the more you have the more you can get now we can talk about inflation and risk and things like that so I'm just going to generalize to say that especially if you have a lot of money you can beat inflation by investing it free of risk free of risk used to mean things like treasury bonds I can't remember if they call them in England guilds or something but today it means anything that you know the government will bail out so the risk for interest rate is actually much higher if you have enough money so money is not like grain let me just give you an example there's maybe 250-300 people here so say I have 500 loaves of bread right now in a pile and I'm selfish bastard I want to maximize my self-interest is it in my self-interest to keep those all and not let anyone have any no because I can't eat that much it'll go bad it'll go stale it'll be better for me to give everybody two loaves say this is a loan at call when I ask you for two loaves of fresh bread just as good as this bread you have to give me two loaves of fresh bread I don't have the leverage to say I'm only going to give you these two loaves if you give me three loaves back I don't have that leverage money is not like bread but it could be like bread if it decayed like bread does, like grain does like the world does money doesn't decay, it's this unnatural thing it's an exception to the ecological principle of return and it doesn't have to be that way in fact money systems have been devised where the money does decay and were actually applied during the Great Depression in Austria and in the United States and as multiplicists and I'm not going to go too much into technical detail here because well it's hard to give a little piece of it without sounding really naive and oh Charles must not have thought of this, that and other thing but there's a really long chapter in the book and I cite some pretty mainstream economists who have played with this idea William Beuter a few other ones Federal Reserve Papers even and the idea basically is to impose a liquidity tax on reserves on bank reserves in the central bank which basically means that money instead of growing at say whatever percent interest it decays at say 5% interest cash would have to have some kind of built in expiry or decay rate also and so what that means is that if you have say if you're a bank and you have 10 billion pounds of reserves and you just hold on to those reserves by the end of the year they're only worth 9.5 billion so it becomes in your interest to lend them even at zero interest rather than to hold on to it to make a very long story short it allows the money system to work in the absence of growth it allows the money system to still work when the marginal efficiency of capital is less than zero basically meaning that the economy isn't growing and there aren't a lot of investment opportunities that will bring even more money back it allows the system to work without growth and it brings the economy in line with ecological principles and some of you who kind of understand what I'm talking about might feel very curious and have a lot of questions and I invite you to read more about it my work is online as well as in print one of the aspects of gift economy that I practice is to offer my work as a gift for example I don't charge for my events as best I can avoid it and but I allow opportunities for people to give if they want to that's how the gift works you give it and then the gratitude and sense of value of the recipient motivates the return gift and you guys have been sitting here for a very long time so I can take this in a lot of directions and I'm going to stop in a minute here and take questions a lot of the book is also about the personal dimensions of internalizing this cosmology of the gift and aligning our lives with the felt understanding of inner beingness today to do that you have to fight not only I don't want to say fight but resist not only your own habits that are inherited from the past habits of separation habits of scarcity but also you have to resist the structures that are around us the people who say that's crazy to do something just because you love it and you don't know how the return gift is going to come you put it out there and you don't know what's going to come back to just trust like that that's crazy and there's a little voice inside of you that says that's crazy and there's a whole money system that says that's crazy one thing that's happening is that those little voices are getting less compelling and the systems around us are getting less compelling because they're not working anymore we're still in a transition stage one reason that I'm here tonight is to kind of be on the side of that voice that says it'll be alright and it's time for me to live my life not the life that I'm paid to live not somebody else's life and to say that that's not crazy it's not crazy because from the perspective of this new story of the people this new story of interconnectedness what you do unto the other you are in fact doing unto yourself it will come back to you as surely as if you hurt your liver you'll be hurting yourself like liver and self are not separate our existing ideology understands that but it doesn't understand that world and self are not separate but now we're coming into a new logic that affirms that and so it no longer seems so crazy and I guess that'll be my final message is that this time of being very lonely in listening to that crazy voice is over and more and more we will all receive help from other people who are also living in different ways living in the gift living from the understanding of connectedness from the understanding of inner beingness all of us in a different way it's not like this big heroic transformation every single person I meet I don't care if they're an investment banker or a garbage collector or what every single person that I meet has in some way begun to pioneer this new territory this isn't a transition that we make by ourselves through our own efforts and I've meditated a lot so therefore I am more in inner beingness than somebody else that perception comes from separation doesn't it they're someone else not me so I've done it and they haven't no it recognizes that that every person is a mirror of myself and so this is a transition that we all have to make together and that we are making together so thank you for your attention