Can Demurrage Fix our Inherent Survival Anxiety Around Money?
How would the world be different if stored money (both paper and electronic) decayed like organic matter?
Demurrage: it’s also been called negative interest. An economic system where money goes bad as it ages.
If we lived in an economic system where money decays like natural commodities then these could be the effects. 👇
If stored money decayed then the world would be required to use that money.
People would no longer be incentivized to stockpile money.
We’d be focused on becoming powerhouses for the transactions of money and for providing as much value to the world as possible.
It’d be an interdependent world. Money would transform from a mechanism of separation to a mechanism of connection.
In order to be more secure, we would be focused on having deeper relationships with other people rather than increasing our separation from others.
The artificial scarcity of the world would go away.
Why does it need to exist in the first place?
Thoughts from Charles Eisenstein:
Demurrage provides a structural incentive for generosity and gift-giving
Interest and accumulation shrink the sense-self to a small ego whereas negative interest widens it to the entire community and all of humanity.
"Our system's built-in scarcity has conditioned us to believe that we "cannot afford" to act from love, to do fulfilling work, to create beauty." - Charles Eisenstein
"Money in the Age of Reunion will be an agent for the development of social, cultural, natural, and spiritual capital, and not their consumption. It will be a mechanism for sharing of wealth and not its accumulation. It will be a means for the creation of beauty, not its diminishment. It will be a barrier to greed and not an incentive. It will encourage joyful creative work, and not necessitate "jobs." It will reinforce the cyclical processes of nature, and not violate them." - Charles Eisenstein
