Questioning Money

From March 2018 through April 2022, our hope in holding these calls was to grow our capacity to make choices within our sphere of influence, even if only internally, that challenge the norms of fairness, deserving, merit, economic security, material resources as measuring value, and everything else that is part of the modern economic narrative and structures.

Why Focus on Questioning Money?

For years and years, I’ve been fascinated by economics, and never able to make sense of it even though I was always good with numbers and studied theoretical mathematics for some years. It was decades before I understood why: economics is premised on the assumption of scarcity. Indeed, it is defined as the study of the allocation of scarce resources.

Then, on top of that, economics is based on a second assumption that also never made sense to me: that we, humans, are fundamentally motivated by the desire to maximize our own personal gain, narrowly defined, and are willing to do so at just about any cost.

In the years since, I have dedicated significant portions of my investigations, study, reading, conversation, and visioning to examining and questioning these assumptions and discovering and inventing other possibilities.

In one of my blog posts, Life, Interdependence, and the Pursuit of Meeting Needs, I laid out the basic framework that emerges from those years.

It seems to me that freeing ourselves from the grip of exchange and accumulation is a difficult, lifelong process that takes recognizing the grip, understanding its context and source, envisioning alternatives, and working to transform our internal structures that keep us beholden to money.

These calls are for all people who want to grapple with all aspects of the economic system within which we live, which, for most of us, is global capitalism, both external and internalized.

Questioning Money Recordings

You can access the call recordings here