* Book: New Currency: How Money Changes the World As We Know It. By Jordan Bruce MacLeod. Integral Publishers, 2009

This is not a new book but it is very readable, cogently explained, with lots of interesting history of past experiences and lessons learned from them. It’s a very good introduction and background to the emerging new social currencies.

Today we present the book through an interview with the author.

But first the summary:

“New Currency is an exploration of money’s untapped power to change the world. In the midst of a devastating global financial crisis, out of control government spending and grave problems such as terrorism, energy security and climate change, people all over the planet are waking up to the need for profound shifts in the way we respond to these challenges.

In the first half of the book, MacLeod establishes money as the primary leverage point for systemic transformation. He discusses the emergence of a new way of designing money that successfully reversed a town’s 35% unemployment rate to full employment during the Great Depression. MacLeod argues that even while successful and endorsed by eminent economists Irving Fisher and John Maynard Keynes this financial innovation was mostly forgotten, largely because society did not have the shared context to make sense of it and understand its transformative potential. We therefore missed its enormous power to change the world.

With the global financial crisis and emergence of greater understanding of quantum reality, consciousness, and digital technologies, MacLeod argues that humanity is now ready to take a second look at this marked economic innovation. He believes that we are on the verge of making a momentous leap in social dynamics and at the heart of this shift is changing the way we see and hold money.

Rather than seeing money as a fixed object, MacLeod takes us on a journey throughout human history to demonstrate how human consciousness has evolved over time. At each stage of development, the economic tools that were available varied markedly. Yet, with the emergence of new ways of seeing the world, human societies have developed profound breakthroughs in how they use money which have in turn reconfigured economic and social order and grounded deeper values and meaning into the heart of a society.

By understanding the evolving relationship between human values and money, we come to understand that our economic problems are wholly in our power to confront and transcend. MacLeod argues that while our monetary and economic systems have been unprecedented in their power to generate wealth and innovation they are also directly correlated to a destructive strand of cultural narcissism. This in turn leads to real economic development on the one hand but manifestations of exploitation, myopic decision making, environmental degradation and selfishly burdening future generations with our debt and resource consumption on the other.

Today, we stand at a critical point in world history where the choices we make will have profound implications for the future of humanity and the well-being of the planet. In the second half of the book MacLeod concludes that neither socialism nor laissez-faire approaches are powerful enough to address the challenges of the 21st century. MacLeod presents a clear and compelling vision for an economy and global society that is simultaneously more free, inclusive and resilient than anything we have ever known. It is only through monetary innovation and reconfiguring the dynamics of the marketplace, he argues, that we will be able to create the conditions to resolve the most complex problems in human history.”

Excerpts from an interview by the Integral Leadership Review:

“JM: New Currency establishes money as a leverage point for economic and broader social transformation. It examines the historical evolution of money and economic systems and their interdependent co-emergence with novel subjective stages of development. The evolution of our values, or of what Robert Kegan calls subject-object relations, is constantly altering our capacity to relate with the external world. And at the heart of this relationship—at least for civilized society—is our relationship with money. So what’s key to understand here is that how we hold money sets in motion the properties and propensities of our whole economic system and what’s possible in the broader social system. We are not in some final end state in monetary theory that is perfectly objective and scientific in nature. There is an indispensable subjective dynamic that means money is fully in our power to change in accordance with our evolving values, life conditions and aspirations. But I cannot emphasize enough that this change is not at all arbitrary.

ILR: Why is that so important?

JM: Because each economic stage transcends and includes what preceded it. Therefore, the currencies we create must reflect not only our values, but provide very tangible solutions to preceding problems. It is very tempting to take one part of the problem—say inflation or arbitrary, centralized power–we’re facing and design a currency that addresses that specific part. Yet, unless the monetary design addresses the whole of our problems and opportunities, it is necessarily going to lead to pre/trans fallacies. Or to say it another way, we’ll solve one problem only to suffer unintended consequences that make the overall problem worse!

So, as we take into account the evolutionary patterns of money and economic systems, we notice a couple of critical trends. First, there’s the dematerialization of money—which is well documented. What this means is that we’ve gone from our first currencies being cows (yes cows!) and found objects such as shells, stones and so on to increasingly abstract currencies such as coins and paper money and now to digital currencies.

The second trend is the dematerialization of value. The earliest currencies were the most dense, with cows being the most obvious example and then later we see the emergence of coins made out of precious metal. Over time, we see a clear process of money increasingly relying less on material stuff (such as gold) to guarantee its value and more on its function as a medium of exchange to ensure its value. These processes have been what have enabled money to become increasingly relevant, standardized and accessible to an increasing depth and span of humanity over time. Money, imperfections notwithstanding, has evolved to become compatible with more value systems from more parts of the world than at any point in human history. And there is no question that this has helped align international interests and co-operation to an unprecedented degree, as we’ve seen with the global response to the financial crisis and emergence of the G20. Money is increasingly becoming a universal language.

Today, it is the very fact that a dollar is needed to buy commodities that primarily ensures its value stays in tact. So it is this dematerialization of form and value that has enabled it to function, albeit imperfectly, as a global reserve currency for most of humanity.

ILR: … You speak of the connection between narcissism and money?

JM: Yes. The book shows this connection and how money is essentially designed to represent an idealized self, fundamentally separated from nature. This manifests in the economic sphere as a devaluing of nature and an absence of limits on economic activity and production. Quite literally, I propose that the antidote for cultural narcissism is realizing humility in our collective relationships with money and economic processes. There are very specific tools that make this possible and they are discussed in detail.

ILR: How do you think these tools might gain currency in our contentious societies?

JM: That’s a great question. I think they’re only likely to be valued when we collectively realize that this economic system is failing on so many levels—despite the enormous and unprecedented contributions it has made. Money and finance happens to be where we collectively have the most ego-investment and resistance to change so I don’t see it happening any other way. Yet, we see already on Main Street that people are actively looking for alternatives to leaving their money with those they perceive as having acted irresponsibly. As the system fails to solve problems and meet our needs, there’s no doubt that we’ll all have an opportunity to put our money where our mouth is, if you will. There will be a tremendous need to restore trust and to get money flowing again into the hands of entrepreneurs and small businesses and we now have the tools at hand capable of making this happen.”