Summary of Charles Eisenstein's Sacred Economics

By IRB Media

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Book Preview:

#1 We are born helpless infants, and we are given everything we need to survive. We are grateful for this, and it is the truth of our existence. We feel the same reverence and gratitude when we observe the magnificence of nature, the miraculous complexity and order of an ecosystem, an organism, or a cell.

#2 The most important mode of economic exchange in primitive communities was the gift. While gifts can be reciprocal, they are also often exchanged in circles. I give to you, you give to someone else, and eventually someone gives back to me.

#3 The kula system is a gift network that extends to all sorts of utilitarian items, food, boats, labor, and so forth. Gifts flow continuously, only stopping in their circulation when they meet a real, present need.

#4 The conventional explanation of how money developed is that it evolved from barter. However, this is not supported by anthropology. The only instances of barter were for petty, infrequent, or emergency transactions, just like today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: IRB Media
• Release date: Jun 4, 2022
• ISBN: 9798822512542

IRB Media

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Insights on Charles Eisenstein's Sacred Economics

Contents

Insights from Chapter 1

Insights from Chapter 2

Insights from Chapter 3

Insights from Chapter 1

#1

We are born helpless infants, and we are given everything we need to survive. We are grateful for this, and it is the truth of our existence. We feel the same reverence and gratitude when we observe the magnificence of nature, the miraculous complexity and order of an ecosystem, an organism, or a cell.

#2

The most important mode of economic exchange in primitive communities was the gift. While gifts can be reciprocal, they are also often exchanged in circles. I give to you, you give to someone else, and eventually someone gives back to me.

#3

The kula system is a gift network that extends to all sorts of utilitarian items, food, boats, labor, and so forth. Gifts flow continuously, only stopping in their circulation when they meet a real, present need.

#4

The conventional explanation of how money developed is that it evolved from barter. However, this is not supported by anthropology. The only instances of barter were for petty, infrequent, or emergency transactions, just like today.

#5

Money is a beautiful concept. It was not only ancient economies that were based on gifts. Money arose as a means to facilitate gift giving, sharing, and generosity. But today, our money with its qualities of standardization, abstraction, and anonymity is aligned with many other aspects of the human experience.

#6

Money becomes necessary when the range of our gifts must extend beyond the people we know personally. It appeared in the first agricultural civilizations that developed beyond the Neolithic village: Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, and India.

#7

The money we rely on to survive is actually what blocks the blossoming of our desire to give, keeping us in deadening jobs out of economic necessity. Our purpose for being is tied to the demands of money, which prevents us from ever feeling fulfilled.

#8

The idea that we are here on earth to do something is essentially a religious concept, according to conventional biology. However, we can make a neo-Lamarckian case that the view of biology as consisting of myriad discrete, separate competing selves is more a projection of our own present-day culture than it is an accurate understanding of nature.

#9

The world as a competition among separate selves for limited resources is how we view it, and this belief is reflected in our money system. But is this belief true. Do we live in a world of basic scarcity.

#10

We live in a world of fundamental abundance, where vast quantities of food, energy, and materials go to waste. Half the world starves while the other half wastes enough to feed the first half.

#11

The problem in economic life is supposedly greed, both outside ourselves in the form of all those greedy people and within ourselves in the form of our own greedy tendencies. But what if the assumption of scarcity is false.

#12

The assumption of scarcity is one of the two central axioms of economics. It is false, however, as there is actually enough for everyone if we can just learn to share it. The other axiom, that people naturally seek to maximize their rational self-interest, is also false.

#13

The world is already overburdened with human activity. While it is true that the earth can’t support