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

Revolution. Pelt traders moved in thereafter, and the Hudson Bay
Company established its first outposts in the 1830s. All of these
people were only interested in the furs, and otherwise left the Indians
alone. But decades before the missionaries arrived to try to change
the 'pagan' traditions of the indigenous people, some communities
started to unravel because of their contact with the traders'
commercial exchanges. Tribes that had replaced the gift exchanges
within their community with monetary exchanges were those that
fell apart within a generation.
This process has repeated itself all over the world whenever
traditional societies start interacting commercially with the Western
world. As soon as non-reciprocal monetary exchanges begin to occur
within these traditional societies, their communities start breaking
down. I have seen this happen at first hand in the 1970s in the
Peruvian Amazon when the Peruvian national currency started
circulating within some tribes.
In light of all of the above, we should consider community not as a
state, but as a process. If it is not nourished by regular reciprocal
exchanges, it will tend to decay or die. That is why I define a
community as a group of people who honour each other's gifts, who
can trust that their gifts will be reciprocated some day, in some way.
Revisiting the strange global epidemic of community breakdown,
we can now see what may be a common mechanism behind the
breakdown of Amazon tribes, the transformation of Italian extended
family into nuclear families, or the Western nuclear family crisis.
While other factors certainly play a role, there is one key that fits all
of these phenomena. Non-reciprocal monetary exchanges have
started taking place within each of these community systems. Some
economic theories consider the monetization of all transactions as a
key sign of 'development', because from that moment they are
captured in the national statistical system. No wonder that the