THE FUTURE OF MONEY Bernard A. Lietaer - library.uniteddiversity ...

eality operates. Her claim is that from atoms to galaxies, from plants
to organs in our own body, all exhibit processes which she describes
as 'tuning in and gently giving' as the core exchange mechanism. For
instance, your kidneys are 'tuning in' on what the rest of your
organism needs, and 'gently give' what they can for the benefit of the
whole. Ken Wilber's holon theory develops a similar idea.
How communities break down
It should not come as a surprise that to unravel the fabric of a
community you do the opposite of what helped create it in the first
place. Therefore, I propose as a general rule that communities break
down whenever non- reciprocal monetary exchanges replace gift
exchanges.
Let us revisit specific examples of community building described
above, starting with the last one, the scientific community. They all
show that community unravels every time exchanges involving the
'normal' national currencies replace gifts.
Dr Jonathan Kind, Professor of Genetics at MIT, says, 'In the past,
one of the strengths of American bio-medical science was the
freedom of exchange of materials, strains of organisms, and
information.. . But .., [that the universities are trying to make money
from the commercial potential of recombinant DNA], if you sanction
and institutionalise private gain and patenting of micro-organisms,
then you don't send out your strains because you don't want them in
the public sector. That's already happening now. People are no longer
sharing their strains of bacteria and their results as freely as they did
in the past. The fabric of one corner of the scientific community has
started unravelling.
The first significant contact with north-western American Indians
was made by Captain Cook around the time of the American