Words&Dirt

“‘You rationalize, Keeton. You defend. You reject unpalatable truths, and if you can’t reject them outright you trivialize them. Incremental evidence is never enough for you. You hear rumors of holocaust; you dismiss them. You see evidence of genocide; you insist it can’t be so bad. Temperatures rise, glaciers melt––species die––and you blame sunspots and volcanoes. Everyone is like this, but you most of all. You and your Chinese Room. You turn incomprehension into mathematics, you reject the truth without even hearing it first.’

‘It served me well enough.’ I wondered at the ease with which I had put my life into the past tense.

‘Yes, if your purpose is only to transmit. Now you have to convince. You have to believe.’”

––Blindsight, by Peter Watts, pg. 322

“Excess wealth, whether inherited from family or from an earlier time in one’s own life, carries with it a desire to use it well. It is a dharma, a call to service. To squander it on baubles, to give it away senselessly, or to devote oneself to its increase are all ways of refusing that call. The challenge of excess wealth is to give of it in a way that is beautiful. This may take years or decades and involve long-term planning and the creation of entire organizations, or it may happen through a single generous act. Either way, this is the kind of investment that is aligned with a future economy in which status comes from giving, not having, and security comes not from accumulation, but from being a nexus of flow. It is an entirely different mentality from the traditional paradigm of investment, which we equate with the increase of wealth.

Originally I thought that we ought to do away with the word and concept of investment altogether. Then I considered its etymology: it means to clothe, as in to take naked money and put it into new vestments, something material, something real in the physical or social realm. Money is naked human potential––creative energy that has not yet been ‘clothed’ with material or social constructions.

Right investment is to array money in sacred vestments: to use it to create, protect, and sustain the things that are becoming sacred to us today. These are the same things that will form the backbone of tomorrow’s economy. Right investment is therefore practice for the coming world, both psychological practice and practical preparation. It accustoms one to the new mentality of wealth––finding channels for productive giving––and it creates and strengthens those channels, which might persist even when the present money system collapses. Money as we know it might disappear, but the relationships of gratitude and obligation will remain.”

––Sacred Economics: Money, Gift & Society in the Age of Transition, by Charles Eisenstein, pg. 380-1