Excerpted from an interview of Charles Eistenstein conducted by Transition Culture:

“When you create something then you have to step aside, because something other than yourself becomes paramount, it’s this thing you want to create. When you let go of that ego self then real connection is possible. Like if you’ve been in a band or in a sports team, you feel a more authentic bond…at least that’s what I experienced when I was on the track team in college, even if I didn’t like some of the guys, there’s still a real bond, because we were dedicated to something greater than ourselves together.

At the moment in, for example Italy or Spain, where the economy is going down the tubes very quickly, there’s youth unemployment of 50%, lots of young people just shell-shocked by the whole thing really, wondering what do we create out of this? What would your advice be to someone who’s 20 and living in Spain and just finished college, wondering where on earth they go from here?

My advice would be to take the opportunity to step into the gift. In the old paradigm , employment was about how to make a living, and in the new paradigm employment is about giving of your gifts. When the old paradigm was still working and you could still find a job, it was more difficult to step out of it, you were getting this reward. But today even if you do your best to live in the old paradigm, you still won’t get a job. So you might as well re-orient towards ‘what am I here to give?’ and that’s really something, even if you have a job, everybody wants to do something magnificent with their lives.

People who have a job have that feeling, well I wasn’t put on earth to do this, I wasn’t put on earth to sweep floors or wash dishes, or shift bits around. That’s not saying that those things are bad, but if it’s your career, day in day out, doing something that doesn’t make your heart sing, then everyone I’ve ever met is going to think, well, I was made for something else. In gift culture, the gift you want to give comes first.

As Lewis Hine puts it, you give out and create an emptiness that draws gifts to you and so they come after. You don’t necessarily know how they’ll come back to you, but your focus is on giving. I think that actually the unemployment is giving us a little nudge to do that, and say ‘well, ok, it’s not working anyway so I might as well focus on what I can give, I want to be useful at least’.

I don’t think that unemployment is really going to go away. In a certain sense, Marx talked about this, classical economists talked about this, that technology makes us more and more productive. In theory, we should be working less and less. Futurists were predicting that in 1800, ‘the machine can do the work of a thousand men, therefore, very soon, we will have to work a thousandth as hard’. But instead, we chose to consume a thousand times more and work just as hard.

That choice is no longer available to us, so we’re going to have to work less for money. I think the world would be better off if we all worked less altogether, like hunter-gatherers who worked 20 hours a week. Isn’t it funny that we have to work harder than they did with all this technology? I think that there’s so much that needs to get done today. There’s so much beautiful work out there, more than we can do, the amount of healing that has to happen, the lonely elderly people, the children who need love and attention. There’s a lot of beautiful things that people could do with their unemployment.

But how do people gift that and pay the rent?

Well how do they pay the rent without gifting anything when they still can’t find a job?

They take welfare from the government, one of the stipulations of which is that they don’t do any other work.

Yeah, but they can do volunteer work?

Yeah.

I’m all for taking welfare from the government. I think it’s a great idea if you can manage it, you know, jump through whatever hoops you can, go through the motions and not take too much time, just as a practical matter. Do that in a perfunctory way and spend the rest of your time doing things that are beautiful to you and don’t feel guilty about it. One of the pieces of Sacred Economics’s basic income, or social dividend, is everyone gets a payment that covers very basic living expenses so that work no longer becomes a matter of survival.

You mentioned just now that people should do the thing that’s most meaningful to them or most alive to them. Is there a distinction in Sacred Economics between things that are self-focussed, ‘I’m going to pursue my own spiritual blah blah blah’, something that’s very much about yourself, and things with a more altruistic motivation, ‘I’m going to dedicate my time to the service of others and helping others’. Is there a distinction between those things?

I think people go through phases. There is a time maybe to turn inward, to lick your wounds, to be alone, but at some point if someone’s done that then they naturally turn towards service. It’s in our nature to want to serve, I believe that. Neo-classical economics doesn’t believe that. They say that human beings are fundamentally motivated to maximise their self-interest, and they draw from biology which in the old paradigm said that our genes programme us to maximise our reproductive self-interest. So basically, Rob, if you could, you would just sit around and do nothing for society, that’s what you really want to do, but you know that if you did that you wouldn’t make a living. That’s why you’ve created this Transition movement, because you’re forced to contribute, otherwise you wouldn’t survive.

I think that’s ridiculous, I mean, just try it! Go home and say, I’m not going to do anything. It’s going to be intolerable. People naturally want to give, so it is a different view of human nature. Just sitting and meditating – what happens? Well pretty soon you realise your inter-connectedness with all beings and you desire to do actions that benefit all beings. It’s not like this really tough Bodhisattva vow, I’m going to sacrifice my bliss in order to serve other beings. Everyone’s experienced the joy of giving. Even if someone asks you for directions from out of town, they ask you for directions and you say ‘ yeah, you go down there and you turn right…’ they walk off and you feel good. Where does that come from? You never see them again and you don’t get any benefits, nobody saw you so selflessly giving directions, you just feel good.

I asked if people had any questions, and one of the questions I was asked to bring was “in the gift economy, how do I get a piano?”, i.e. something that needs to be made by skilled people, something that’s using resources, and something on which people can express so beautifully and creatively. Where do the pianos come from?

Sure, pianos, computers, all kinds of things. That’s just part of the misunderstanding, people think that I’m talking about a world without money. Maybe some day money will have evolved to a point where we don’t even recognise it as money. But basically I think that there has to be a way to co-ordinate human labour over vast social distances. Just like in a body how if a cell needs something it puts out a signalling molecule, and that molecule attracts the resources that it needs.

So I think in the social body, money is one of the signalling molecules that says – pianos are needed. And the signal is that people are willing to pay for pianos, so pianos are needed. So if I’m a craftsman, and I’m wondering whether to make a piano, or I’m an entrepreneur and I want to do something, I want to make something – shall I make pianos or shall I make pogo-sticks? Maybe there’s more money in the pianos. That’s maybe a signal from society that that’s maybe what we want. In a way money already works like that, that’s the theory of it.

The problem is that it’s become divorced from things that people actually want and need. I explained how that happened in the book with the way money’s created as debt, so it’s not about eliminating money, it’s about transforming its nature, for example, no longer creating it as debt

Is there a challenge talking about Sacred Economics that our culture has largely moved away from having a sense of the sacred, that we’re surrounded by stuff which is banal and fleeting and based on the instant gratification of desires and the senses, that in our daily lives we very rarely encounter anything sacred? I suppose too often ‘sacred’ was associated with some sort of formal religion which is largely being shunted out of the picture in many societies. So for a generation who’ve grown up with largely no notion of sacred or not really exposed to that notion, how do we rediscover that?

That’s related to the need for crisis and breakdown. If someone has never experienced the sacred then it’s all theoretical, and they won’t know what it is they’re missing from their lives. All they know is that they’re hungry for something, they don’t know what.

What does it mean to you?

When I speak about it I try to invoke it through pointing out some of the experiences that give me a sense of the sacred and that give other people a sense of the sacred. I think most people have experienced those moments. It could be a moment in nature or with a child, witnessing a birth or witnessing a death with a dying loved one, those special moments…or maybe even listening to a band play and there’s that moment of connection, where the band is really singing to you somehow, and not just putting on a performance. I think during these experiences when your real needs are being met, shopping is the farthest thing from your mind.

It seems absurd, and wouldn’t you like more of that? Or those moments of authentic intimate communication with somebody. So I’ll invoke that and say something in your heart knows that this is what life is supposed to be about.”