Embracing a Gift Economy

 

Call it energy exchange, reciprocal altruism, or random acts of kindness. The true spirit of gift economics is giving without any expectation of reciprocity. We trust in karma. Good things come from good deeds; may they be intangible or material. You can learn it at Burning Man, from Mother Nature, or Mother Theresa. It’s a law; a spiritual one that supersedes conventional economic law. It’s abundance (good) consciousness, and it will only result in one thing. We’re gonna be alright. Our needs will be met. The gift economy is more than just a social theory here, it is a beautiful way to live.

What this means:

In declaring resident membership, we ask individual to determine their own balance with gifting their tools, materials, equipment, and funds while investing in their community.

There are no explicit fees for living here. We can’t operate completely outside the US governmental system, or capitalism. Money comes in handy for paying property tax, organizational fees, medical treatment, personal transportation and to acquire certain useful commodities for building, living, and enjoying. Collectively, creatively, the financial resources will be provided without rigid, obligatory exchange.

Health services are given freely to whoever needs them. We suggest a gift of $50 a day to offset expenses for room, board, and meals. But donations, by definition, are absolutely voluntary and recipients may gift what pleases them or otherwise according to their ability.

No fees for our educational workshops, healing retreats, even for our products or produce -- we may suggest an amount for energy exchange and then we will accept whatever gifts come our way.

This isn’t anyone's original brainchild or any kind of new idea. It’s been going on for a long time amongst many cultures. Examples:

• Sharing of food in a hunter-gatherer society, where sharing is a safeguard against failure of any individual's daily foraging.
• The Pacific Northwest Native American Potlatch ritual, where leaders give away large amounts of goods to their followers, strengthening group relations. By sacrificing accumulated wealth, a leader gained a position of honor. (1)
• Southeast Asia Theravada Buddhist Feasts of Merit, very similar to the Potlatch. Such feasts involve many sponsors of all types, and continue to this day mainly before and after rainy seasons.
• A family, in which each generation pays for the education of the next: this is an example where the gift creates an implicit obligation to give a gift to a third party, rather than to the giver.
• Modernly, conventionally; charitable giving, philanthropy, blood banks and organ donations are good examples of the idea at work. Wikipedia, free software, and open source code are examples of informational gifting communities. It’s everywhere, still.

Hyde argues (2) that when economies turn commodity-based "the social fabric of the group is invariably destroyed” as the paradigm is based strictly on scarcity. Abundance thinking is different. Stone Age gift economies were, as Marshall Sahlins writes, by their nature economies of abundance, not scarcity. He further remarks that a traditional gift economy is based on "the obligation to give, the obligation to accept, and the obligation to reciprocate," and that it is "at once economic, juridical, moral, aesthetic, religious, and mythological.”

How would it be to give out of abundance today, every day, asking nothing in return? As Hafiz observed “Even after all this time, the sun never says to the earth ‘You owe Me.’ Look what happens with a love like that – it lights up the Whole Sky.” (4)

1. Kammerer and Nicola Tannenbaum, Cornelia Ann (1996). MERIT AND BLESSING: In Mainland Southeast Asian Comparative Perspective. . New Haven (Connecticut): Yale University.: Southeast Asia Studies (Monograph 45).. ISBN ISBN 0-93869261-5.
2. Lewis Hyde: The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property, 1983 (ISBN 0-394-71519-5), especially part I, "A Theory of Gifts", part of which was originally published as "The Gift Must Always Move" in Co-Evolution Quarterly No. 35, Fall 1982.
3. Sahlins, Marshall: "Stone Age Economics" (1972). Aldine. ISBN.
4. The Gift: Poems by Hafiz The Great Sufi Master by Hafiz (Based On Work by), Daniel Ladinsky (Translator)