Just the thought

The race for Christmas gifts starts and it’s the right time to start a deep reflection on money. Because only “by transforming money, bringing it back to being a means of exchange and not an end, can we restore our civilization”, as Charles Eisenstein suggests. Here is the complete editorial by the director of Terra Nuova, Nicholas Bawtree, which you can find in the December issue of the magazine.

Faced with the race for Christmas gifts, there seem to be only two alternatives: try to play the game in some way, squeezed between increasingly scarce economic resources and the pounding rhythm of advertising that now permeates every corner of our mental space, or completely refuse for all this apotheosis of consumerism. But have we ever wondered why those who choose the first option are willing to tolerate all the stress that comes with it? Perhaps the reason lies in the fact that at the basis of this ritual there is actually the authentic search for a sacredness in the relationship with the people and objects that surround us; the search for a culture of gift, which has been swept away by the culture of the market and the monetization of every aspect of our lives. It is no coincidence that we rediscover the taste for giving with the innocence of our children, experiencing the magic of gifts under the tree with them. And to experience that magic we are willing to do anything.

This is precisely the right time to start a deep reflection on money. Because only “by transforming money, bringing it back to being a means of exchange and not an end, can we restore our civilization”, as Charles Eisenstein suggests at the beginning of this issue. “The crisis we are experiencing is a crisis of birth: we are abandoning the old mythology to build a new one, to be reborn to a new awareness”.

This transformation is already underway and is expressed, for example, through mutualism strategies that are within everyone’s reach, in the countryside and in the city: from urban gardens to community-supported agriculture, from energy communities to an alternative organization of world of work. But it can also take shape more simply in a gift made with one’s own hands, or in the choice to give away one’s time.

It is not an easy transformation, because in recent decades we have “outsourced” too many aspects of our lives. “We have ceded an intellectual territory to technology and the market, and now it is time to take it back,” continues Eisenstein. “From a certain point of view it is like training a muscle: it depends on where we decide to put our energy, our attention”.

An act of will, in short. Which gives a powerful, even revolutionary, meaning to that expression so used when we talk about gifts: the thought is enough.

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New Earth December 2022