The Moneyless Man Read Free Page B

from abroad.
    Now, most people are only interested in getting on their individual property and career ladders. It doesn’t really matter what wall the ladder is propped up against, just so long as they are climbing. The street I remember is no longer there; its once-open doors are all shut.
PLANET EARTH LTD
     
    Money allows us to store our wealth very easily and for a long time. If this easy storage were taken away, would we still have an incentive to exploit the planet and all the species that inhabit it? With no way of easily ‘storing’ the long-term profit that results from taking more than we need, we would be much more likely only to consume resources as we needed them. A person would no longer be able to turn trees in a rainforest into numbers in a bank account, so would have no real reason to cut down a hectareof rainforest every single second. It would make more sense to keep the trees in the earth until we needed them.
    Consider the planet as a retail business, whose store managers are our world leaders. These managers of Earth Ltd are on short, four-year contracts, so they elect to make as much profit as quickly as they can, to give them a better chance of their contracts being renewed. They decide to sell some of the cash registers and shelving, to add a bit extra to the year’s bottom line and make the profit and loss account look healthier. It works: the shareholders – us – don’t bother to look at the balance sheet and the managers get their contracts extended. The following year, their ability to make money is diminished due to their reduction of important fixtures and fittings and so they have to do the same again, until they have used up every asset they have. In the mean-time, the shareholders have voted to re-invest very little of the profit, choosing instead to buy goods with a very short life and of little practical use.
    For our planet, it is exactly the same. At the moment, we are liquidizing our assets and spending the profits on products with built-in obsolescence. This is a long-term business strategy no responsible businessperson would recommend. In 2009, Kalle Lasn, founder of the influential magazine
Adbusters
, said:
… we got rich by violating one of the central tenets of economics: thou shall not sell off your capital and call it income. And yet over the past 40 years we have clear-cut the forests, fished rivers and oceans to the brink of extinction and siphoned oil from the Earth as if it possessed an infinite supply. We’ve sold off our planet’s natural capital and called it income. And now the Earth, like the economy, is stripped.
     
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN SELLING AND GIVING
     
    I don’t see myself as a hugely spiritual person in the traditional sense. I try to practice what I call ‘applied spirituality’, in which I apply my beliefs in the physical world, rather than them being something abstract I talk about but rarely practice. The less discrepancy there is between the head, the heart, and the hands, the closer you are, I believe, to living honestly. To me, the spiritual and physical are two sides of the same coin.
    I do see a non-physical benefit to living without money. When we work for people, beyond what we do for family and friends, it’s almost always an exchange: we do something because we get something in return. I believe that prostitution is to sex what buying and selling is to giving and receiving: the spirit in which the act is done is significantly different. When you give freely, for no other reason than the fact that you can make someone’s life more enjoyable, it builds bonds, friendships and, eventually, resilient communities. When something is done merely to get something in return, that bond isn’t created.
    Another major motivation is much simpler and more emotional – I’m tired. I’m tired of witnessing the environmental destruction that takes place every day and playing a part, however small, in it. I’m tired of giving my money to a bank,