Hopedance

My Personal Relationship with Money
by Bob Banner

Money has always been an issue with me; perhaps because there has never been enough. When there is enough, it doesn’t become an issue. But of course the question is: what is enough?

I was brought up middle class. It seemed that my mother never had enough as my father always seemed to be working. We would go on drives on Sunday afternoons to the more exclusive and wealthier parts of suburban Detroit to gawk and drool over the estates along Lake St. Clair. On those Sundays, somehow it was never suggested that we go to the ghettoes of Detroit and peer out our windows to see the poverty. Nope. Didn’t happen. Perhaps if it did, I would have been brought up sensing how fortunate and lucky I was rather than seemingly always wanting more.

In the 60s, with all the revolutionary zeal in the air, I caught the ideology that I was someone special and didn’t need to work to earn money. I didn’t want to work in the sterile offices or in the rigid factories. I assumed the government ought to take care of me. “Why should I have to work for money?” I would declare elitistly. “I didn’t plan on being born here!”

It’s amazing how deluded one can become and how some of us can latch onto a particular ideology that has at its roots a certain personality type.

Those infantile/adolescent years were shortened when I discovered that if I wanted to change; if I wanted to be happy and more psychologically secure, there were things I had to do to get what I wanted. I had to face the reality of the situation and not my fantasy of how things ought to be. So work, that four-letter word, was what I did. And it felt good — to work hard with my hands and mind and get rewarded with a paycheck. Money that I could use for whatever I wanted: food, a car, gasoline, entertaining women, taking a vacation, traveling, buying books and music. It was a life and I had to sacrifice along the way to get things I wanted.

But after awhile, I felt the shallowness of it all. Everyone working so hard to have their house, their car, their refrigerator, their lawnmower. Where was the community in that? Where were the different needs being fulfilled as they emerged from my soul? Was I becoming like every other working-class American who felt he or she deserved all these products? Was I deluding myself into imagining that I was happy and fulfilled because I was spending my time doing something I really wasn’t feeling passionate about? Did the underlying misery become less palpable when I surrounded myself with all the nice things, the paintings, the books, the car, the bike, the clothing? I mean, everyone else signed the same contract as I, so who should complain? If I weren’t happy, it was because of me and not necessarily the social system? Right?

College certainly didn’t offer classes in happiness or how to cultivate purpose, passion and meaning in one’s life or even how to have a successful marriage or relationship. The classes were just more memorization and information in order to get a job and become like everyone else. And it all revolved around money. Lack of money was the reason for relationships breaking apart. Lack of money determined how much therapy I could afford or how many drugs I could do or how long a vacation I could take. Money became ubiquitous.

One particular graffiti I recall when I lived in Berkeley shook me up. I wrote it down immediately. It became a mantra for the moment. “The omnipresent image of everyone else’s happiness terroristically condemns everyone’s real misery to silence.”

These and other thoughts spurred me to find out more. I had to leave the money system behind. I had to pursue something else beside this dominant “normalcy” where money was so pervasive. I won’t go into all the details, but a commonality was established where a group of people became engaged to follow a similar thread. We all worked and we all had needs and we all put our money together. We ate together, bought cars together, grew food together, published a magazine together, played sports together, danced and sang together and shared our accumulated “things” as well as our hearts and souls.

And throughout the various experiments, money did NOT have this enormous power over us. The garden was shared, the cars were shared, the expenses were shared, the decisions were shared. I couldn’t have possibly done all that by myself with the income I was making. Through a group, there was a beginning trust. There were arguments, sexual jealousies, collective decision making, unruly methodologies for creating resolutions. But because money was not all that pervasive, other things began to evolve with the sense of trust. a sense that I didn’t have to do everything for myself. I could expand my psychic boundaries. I could have more time for relationships and fun and dancing and eating fantastic meals together and having the time to study what I wanted to study, learn to open up emotionally and vulnerably and sexually with people, and begin to learn about the world in ways that I couldn’t possibly have done if I were working and worrying and dealing with money issues most of the time. Whereas money dominated my usual perspective, living with a relatively harmonious group allowed the shackle of money to dissipate so I could move and grow into areas that I could never have done alone.

Yes, it all did take money and yes we were all working and sometimes jobs would shift because either the individual would shift or the group’s requirements shifted. And because we sensed we were all becoming larger (“More Than Human” by Theodore Sturgeon was read my many of us) by being in the community, it made the sacrifices seem not that big of a deal. When the decision was made that I ought to lead a landscaping crew rather than work at the loading dock, it felt right. Money was just money. Work was just work, no matter what it was. We were all continually learning and what was important was the collective mind, the family that we belonged to — and our becoming more expansive, loving, positive, happy.

Of course this is the kind of thinking that can also be the beginnings of abuse and cult-like behavior. You would have no debate with me about it. My only point is: let us put on the questioning, filter/looking-glasses and see how incredibly and unconscious cult-like the dominant culture is that demands each one of us go through our lives figuring out how to satisfy all of our needs while living in isolation. Why is it that we don’t question the cult that we are all living in right now? Why is it that whenever people move out of the box, they become labeled a cult and their organization or group becomes thrashed? It’s almost as if any attempt at “escaping” the clutches of the cult-like dominant paradigm will get ridiculed and ostracized and condemned faster than you can say the word c-u-l-t.

So, what alternatives are out there that question the money factor? Fortunately we have many viable ways that people in their creative impulses have established: ways in which their lives and real needs are more important than simply accumulating money to satisfy the counterfeit needs. There are the microcredit loans from the Grameen Bank that help women in developing countries increase the success of their livelihoods. We have barter, local currencies, the LETSystem, the permaculture credit union, the Gift Economy via Burning Man, a cashless economy at Auroville in India, and numerous others. We simply need to find them, read about them, talk to other people and start making changes!

This issue of HopeDance reports on some of these activities. Good luck in your searches and hopefully these examples will inspire you to either pursue an activity that has already been established or give you the courage to listen to your own impulse and create something new.