Category Archives: Gift economy

Moral Anguish, Human Nature, and “White Fragility”

The actual felt experience of moral anguish as I understand it is entirely different from shame, guilt, or defensiveness. Having experienced it myself and seen and accompanied others, I know it to be soft, wrenching, and entirely open-hearted.

From Philanthropy to De-Accumulation

The path towards flow is simple and immensely difficult: shedding what we have accumulated and restoring trust in natural abundance after having broken it to create artificial surplus and manufactured scarcity; uncoupling giving from receiving and restoring trust in each other’s capacity for gifting after millennia of exchange; and releasing control and restoring trust in ourselves and our capacity to face hardship after being habituated to fixing every little discomfort with money and technology.

Material Risk Sharing for a Livable Future

I want to speak of the difference between “no exit” and “trap”. No exit is organic and part of life, born of the reality of being social animals.

From Exchange to Gifting Part Three: Reintegrating into Flow One Experiment at a Time

In this third part, I want to look more clearly and fully at what we can do, both individually and as groups, communities, and organizations.

From Exchange to Gifting Part Two: Beyond the Exchange/Gift Binary

Many people, even those who live fully within the exchange paradigm and don’t ever think about maternal gifting, prefer going to a farmers’ market, if one exists where they live, or to a local store, rather than to a supermarket. Sometimes they prefer it enough that they are even willing to pay more money. There is a reason for it.

From Exchange to Gifting Part One: Why We Need to Find Our Way out of Scarcity

I [...] looked up economics, and discovered, with anguished relief, that scarcity was baked into the very definition of economics. The one I found at the time was “the study of the allocation of scarce resources.”

Every Tree Wants to Make a Forest: Choice, Togetherness, and the Maternal Gift Economy

Finding our way back to flow means walking back, upstream and uphill. This is the path of nonviolence: walking towards in the face of powerlessness, walking towards in the face of separation, walking towards in the face of scarcity.

Visionary Functioning: Shifting Resource Flow Systems from Incentive to Willingness

(An edited excerpt from the “Resource Flow Systems” learning packet)

Our modern forms of engaging with resources are based on a deep-seated belief about human nature that is so pervasive that it almost never gets said explicitly: that we are only motivated by self-interest, narrowly defined, and that we won’t …

As Things Get Worse

For the last hundred years or so, significant portions of the population within so-called liberal democracies in the global north have known comfort, ease, and personal liberties that have been unprecedented since at least the patriarchal turn. It’s not a new phenomenon for some people within a stratified society to …

How Children Learn About Others’ Needs

In contemporary, patriarchal societies, mothering often leads to mothers giving up on their own needs, because of the lack of a communal context of togetherness and support. One of the results of this is that, as children, we don’t learn about the needs of others as an organic limit we …

The Fearless Heart

Inspiration and tools for creating the future we want. Courage to live it now.