Tag 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.

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.”

Matching Resources to Needs: Learning to Receive through Participating in “Money Piles”

Embracing the consciousness of togetherness, of caring for the whole, of interdependence, is immensely challenging in cultures that are not based on these values, regardless of where we are positioned on the power map of the world. Most especially, I find that those of us living in modern settings are …

The Impossible Will Take a Little While – Experiments in Gift Economy (Part II)

In my last post I spoke about the immense challenges inherent in experimenting with a gift economy within the current economic structure. In this post, I look at how experimenting with the full gift economy can only take place from a position of privilege, and what, ultimately, we can do …

The Impossible Will Take a Little While – Experiments in Gift Economy (Part I)

This post started in response to a colleague who, like me, is aching to bring about a gift economy in the world and is willing to take heat and failure along the way without ever giving up on continuing to experiment. Although she is ecstatic to make it possible for …

Venturing into Risky Waters – Talking about Money

by Miki Kashtan

from Occupy Wall Street

I have written about money before, though not much. It’s been a complex topic to address. Because it’s so central to our way of life in modern times, both individually and globally, I feel drawn to address it, to excavate meaning, to find …

Starting the Future Today

(I am back from a three-week hiatus. For the time being, I am not writing about the Occupy Movement, though I imagine I will return to this theme.)

In April, 2004, in the last week of her life, my former colleague Julie Greene participated, with my sister Inbal and with …

The Fearless Heart

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