Money! A Surprising Radical Truth
Many of us have sold our soul to the devil in the way we earn money.
It’s a part of the cultural upset Twist refers to, because we participate
with people who are doing work that isn’t really nurturing.
We also teach our children the lie of scarcity very early in life.
Musical chairs, the child’s game played at the first birthday party we
ever attend, is the perfect training program for the world in which we
live. As youngsters we quickly learn the rules of not enough. The child
who wins is usually the most physically aggressive; everyone else gets
left out. The message is anything but subtle.
“Now it’s been amplified to gargantuan proportions by reality TV,
which is on the same model and teaches a kind of way of being with
people that is not our finest hour,” says Twist. The behavior comes
from the belief that there’s not enough to go around, and that you can
do anything to anyone to make sure you have enough for whoever it is
you feel you’re responsible for. You think, maybe some day you’ll help
the people who got left out, but right now your job is to accumulate as
much as you can to keep from ever being left out.
It becomes a way of being, a way of thinking. We don’t even
realize we’re doing it. Then this I-don’t-have-enough fear becomes
internalized, she explains. It goes deep into our psyche, and we start
thinking, “I am not enough.”
We must remember that we are the ones who invented money in the
first place – about 4,500 years ago – to facilitate the exchange of goods
and services. It’s our creation. Over the years, however, our money
system has become so meaningful that we’ve forgotten it’s just a means
to an end, and we’ve made it the end.
We have assigned it so much emotional and psychological meaning,
that it’s become more important than nature, than human life, than
even Spirit or God. We will cut down a rainforest, pollute a river and
even pollute the air we breathe for money. And while we say that money
is wonderful, but our relationships are more valuable to us, Twist notes
that we’ll stop talking to a husband or a wife we were married to for
years over a divorce settlement. Or we’ll quit talking to a brother or
sister for years over a money issue. The truth is we are willing to cut
off a close relationship for money. Our behavior shows that money is
more important.
The Second Toxic Myth
The second toxic myth is, more is better. It’s toxic, Twist explains, because
when it is unconscious and unexamined it becomes an endless hamster
wheel. We need more of everything – more square feet, more land, more
money, more time – it spills over into everything.
 She quotes advertisers as saying that watching
just two hours of TV a day, along with billboards and other
methods of delivery, we receive some 30,000 messages daily telling us
that we need more of something. “It’s an endless tyranny, and we don’t
realize the impact it has on our sense of self. People are desperate to
think they’ve got to have more. We are in a more-is-better culture. It
is constant; it is unconscious; it is everywhere and it is permeating the
very fabric of the cells of your body,” Twist maintains.
She points out that storage facilities are one of fastest growing
industries in the United States. “We’re building houses for all the stuff
that we can’t stuff into our garages, the trunk of our cars, and our
closets any longer.” Another example of our culture gone insane is the
catalog industry. Over 70 billion catalogs are mailed out each year. It
amounts to approximately 60 catalogs a year to every man, woman
and child in the United States. Catalogs are an unregulated industry
which doesn’t use post consumer paper, and is the main source for the
destruction of the boreal forest in northwestern Canada.
The Third Toxic Myth
The third toxic myth – that’s just the way it is – is the worst, says
Twist, because this one keeps the other two in place and stops us from
questioning the whole paradigm. We just give up and sell out.
The good news is, though, there is a key to freedom and liberation
in our consumer culture. It is what Twist calls the “radical, surprising
truth of sufficiency,” an idea she came to embrace from the man known
as the “grandfather of the future,” visionary Buckminster Fuller.
Fuller was a designer, architect and engineer, most famous for his
geodesic dome creation of the 1950s, and for his futurist foresight. In
1976 he proposed that humanity had crossed the most important of
thresholds that would change everything forever. That threshold, he
believed, was humanity’s capacity to do more with less, providing the
capability to ensure that there was enough for everyone, everywhere to
have a healthy and productive life.
This new way of seeing the world would completely change our
relationship with one another. Fuller predicted, however, that it would
take at least 50 years before the world community could make the
appropriate adjustments in the way we related to each other because
all of our structures and systems – education, governments, religion,
economy – were rooted in a you-or-me world view. That is, either you
make it at my expense, or I make it at your expense rather than the
you-and-me view made possible by everyone having enough.
His words resonated with Twist, and changed her. “I got it in my
bones, and once I got it and really began to embody it, everything
started to show differently for me. I started to understand the world
completely differently. And I saw a world where there is enough for
everyone everywhere to have a healthy and productive life.”
Page 3
|
