Chapter 22 from the book: Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition (Kindle Edition), by Charles Eisenstein, [eisenstine-12] gives a pretty good explanation for why the communities, that we need, are so hard to recreate.
Here are a number of quotes from the chapter that I found most relevant.
We have no community because community is woven from gifts.
[eisenstine-12:p419]
There is no community possible among a group of people who do not need each other.
[eisenstine-12:p419]
We are tricked into thinking that money will buy us everything we need.
The gifts that weave community cannot be mere superficialities; they must meet real needs. Only then do they inspire gratitude and create the obligations that bind people together.
[eisenstine-12:p420]
Artificial dependency is not the solution to the artificial separation we have today. The solution is not to meet already-met needs less effectively so that we are forced to help each other. Rather, it is to meet the needs that languish unfulfilled today.
[eisenstine-12:p421]
Ah, this is getting to why rebuilding community is hard. We can learn from the past, but we can’t go back.
Peak Oil will not save us! Instead, we will choose to revitalize local, small-scale, labor-intensive production as the only way to meet important human needs. It is the only way to enrich our lives and to fulfill the New Materialism I describe in the next chapter.
[eisenstine-12:p422]
He is saying, we need to make a conscious decision to change. Waiting until it is forced on us is not the answer.
We feel empty, hungry. And because this hunger is present as much in the rich as in the poor, I know it must be for something that money cannot buy.
[eisenstine-12:p422]
The things we need the most are the things we have become most afraid of, such as adventure, intimacy, and authentic communication. We avert our eyes and stick to comfortable topics. We hold it as a virtue to be private, to be discreet so that no one sees our dirty laundry-or even our clean laundry: our undergarments are considered unsightly, a value strangely reflected in the widespread American prohibition on hanging laundry outdoors to dry. Life has become a private affair. We are uncomfortable with intimacy and connection, which are among the greatest of our unmet needs today. To be truly seen and heard, to be truly known, is a deep human need. Our hunger for it is so omnipresent, so much a part of our experience of life, that we no more know what it is we are missing than a fish knows it is wet. We need way more intimacy than nearly anyone considers normal. Always hungry for it, we seek solace and sustenance in the closest available substitutes: television, shopping, pornography, conspicuous consumption-anything to ease the hurt, to feel connected, or to project an image by which we might be seen and known, or at least see and know ourselves.
[eisenstine-12:p424]
Community, which in today’s parlance usually means proximity or a mere network, is a much deeper kind of connection than that: it is a sharing of one’s being, an expansion of one’s self. To be in community is to be in personal, interdependent relationship, and it comes with a price: our illusion of independence, our freedom from obligation. You can’t have it both ways.
[eisenstine-12:p424]
If you want community, you must be willing to be obligated, dependent, tied, attached. You will give and receive gifts that you cannot just buy somewhere. You will not be able to easily find another source. You need each other.
[eisenstine-12:p424]
What is that unquantifiable extra thing that sometimes rides the vehicle of the bought and converts it into a gift? What is this need, mostly unmet in modern civilization? Put succinctly, the essential need that goes unmet today, the fundamental need that takes a thousand forms, is the need for the sacred-the experience of uniqueness and connectedness that I described in the introduction.
[eisenstine-12:p425]
I’m thinking: quality, creativity, unique, long life, etc.
We are starving for a life that is personal, connected, and meaningful. By choice, that is where we will direct our energy. When we do so, community will arise anew because this spiritual nourishment can only come to us as a gift, as part of a web of gifts in which we participate as giver and receiver. Whether or not it rides the vehicle of something bought, it is irreducibly personal and unique.
[eisenstine-12:p426]
Sacred economics treats the world as more sacred, not less. It is more materialistic than our current culture-materialistic in the sense of deeply and attentively loving our world.
[eisenstine-12:p426]
How about having “things” that we keep repairing and improving, rather than throwing them away?
…to create objects with soul, objects for a rich and beautiful world, we must invest them with life, self, and humanity; in other words, we must invest them with something of our selves. No matter what money system we have, if it does not induce or allow this kind of creative process, then we will not be living in a sacred economy.
[eisenstine-12:p431]
The pursuit of efficiency, the grand project of maximizing the production of commodities, and underneath that, the domination and control of life.
[eisenstine-12:p432]
The problem of mass production: it is too efficient. It produces too much. Too much cheap stuff.
For the full chapter, text see: Chapter 22: Community and the Unquantifiable (archive) [timefortribe-01]. But even better, get the whole book.
References
- [eisenstein-12]
Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition By: Charles Eisenstein 2011-07-12
- [timefortribe-01]
Chapter 22 from: Sacred Econommics | Time For Tribe http://timefortribe.com/about/chappter-22-from-sacred-econommics/ AltLink: https://archive.ph/C4wpm
Also posted at: Community and the Unquantifiable | New Way Group
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