GUEST: Charles Eisenstein, teacher, speaker, and author of "Sacred Economics" talks about money, cultural evolution and the illegitimacy of debt.
Reading Charles Eisenstein can make you uncomfortable. All the things you thought you knew about economics turn out to be not only negotiable but also dependent on community consensus. As he says, the zeros in some bank account somewhere don't have to mean very much.
And since so much of our governmental system is like that, there is room to challenge how everything is supposed to work. Maybe student debt should be bought up by the government and either forgiven or stripped of interest obligations. Maybe countries whose military dictatorships took on huge debts, shouldn't have to pay those "odious" debts back.
Maybe to save our planet, we will have to stop monetizing every exchange of services and reverse the growth of material consumption. We don't need iPhones and Facebook to have supportive relationships. In fact, technology is often an obstacle to genuine human interaction. We pay dearly to isolate ourselves from what we so desperately need.
The dominance of the ruling class seems immutable, until we begin to free ourselves of their imposed reality. Thank you, Charles Eisenstein, for helping us look for new solutions.
