the Moneyless Manifesto
“My point is that the boundaries of our sense of self seem to be fuzzy and ill-defined. We might think of ourselves as a discrete ‘object’, bounded by our skin (what Alan Watts describes as “the skin-encapsulated ego”),(7)but it’s hard to justify that when even skin itself is constantly exchanging atoms and energy with the wider environment. No person is an island, we are instead part of a flow of energy, food, water, minerals, radiation and so on, constantly passing in, out and through us, much of which has no respect for the boundary of the skin at all. We are no more a bounded ‘object’ than a wave on the ocean is. Like a wave, we are a form through which many objects (in that case, water molecules) are passing. To identify one’s self with the molecules that are within your skin right now is no more appropriate than to identify an ocean with the molecules that are within its form at a given moment.”
*********
“Why is the need for money a myth? Take a minute to look around you. Try to find one thing you believe hasn’t been provided by money. My guess is you can’t. Even if you’ve grown your own food, I would imagine you’d be thinking ‘well, I paid for the seeds, and I paid for my tools’. And that is the power we have granted money – we have come to believe that we need it, that we depend on it to survive. The fact we’ve designed this impersonal and destructive economy of ours around it only serves to perpetuate such delusions. The cultural narrative that is money has such a powerful grip on our minds today that we have come to believe that we could not possibly ever live without it. Through observing humanity’s actions, it would appear that living without clean air, fresh water and fertile soil is considered a more moderate challenge in comparison.”
*********
“…Another such myth is that you and I are separate. When the illusion of this myth also fades (and one of the aims of this book is the dissolution of this myth), me charging you for the gifts I bring to the world (gifts, remember, that I have originally been given), is no less daft than me charging a tree for the nitrogen in my urine when I pee under it, and it then invoicing me for the oxygen it produces and supplies to my lungs. Nature, like me, abhors bureaucracy and administration, so it simply gives unconditionally, wastes no energy on accounting and surveillance, and instead gets on with doing what it was born to do. In fact, its monumental efficiency is down to the fact that nothing – not the bacteria, not the birds, not the algae – is keeping count. And we should be thankful for that reality – there are so many million interactions going on in every square inch of soil alone, at any given moment, that our entire world would collapse if it ever tried to.” …Mark Boyle
From the Moneyless Manifesto, which is now available to read…Free of course.
Leave a Reply