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Can An Economy of Collaboration Overcome The Economy of Competition?
For quite a while, and especially since the dawn of capitalism, the accumulation of money seems to have become one of our key goals. So instead of regarding money for the currency that it is, it has thrown us off kilter by becoming the goal in itself.
“It’s critical to understand the definition of the word currency,” explains Bernard A. Lietaer in Rethinking Money: How New Currencies Turn Scarcity into Prosperity. “So for me currency is information between a buyer and a seller… Money is not valuable at all, but money allows you to buy things, which are valuable. This distinction should be understood. And it’s not generally known or appreciated by most people.”
Unfortunately, instead of understanding money better and empowering it to flow as it should, we have largely become consumed with the competition for it. Although we often herald money as the bringer of convenience and prosperity, due to our methods of venerating those who have the most unhealthy cravings for it, money has somehow come to represent the scarcity and lack it was supposed to overcome.
“The strangest of all the doctrines of the cult of competition,” explains Wendell Berry in What Are People For?, “in which admittedly there must be losers as well as winners, is that the result of competition is inevitably good…
