This article is excerpted, with significant edits and additions, from the learning packet Restoring Flow Using NVC. NVC is an acronym for Nonviolent Communication.[1]
Life emerges from flow, functions in togetherness, and results in choice. Life evolved to create natural abundance, the capacity to regenerate, to give again, like a fountain that never stops. Ancient wisdom holds that when we trust life and take only what we need, not more and not less, there will be more when we need it again. Within this, humans developed the maternal gift economy from the biological necessity of caring for dependent beings for longer than any living creature. We evolved to collaborate, so we can share resources in care for the entire web of life. We did this, sustainably and peacefully, over many thousands of years.
Disrupting flow: accumulation and exchange
When overwhelmed by calamity beyond our collective capacity to metabolize, we lose our trust in life and orient instead to controlling life, whether temporarily or indefinitely. This is the origin of patriarchy, which emerges from scarcity, functions in separation, and results in powerlessness.
The urge to accumulate, central to patriarchy, arises from loss of trust in the regenerative natural abundance of life. As scarcity deepened with states, war, money, debt, and slavery, accumulation shifted to being an end in itself, beyond any foreseeable need. Accumulation disrupts flow because less can then circulate as part of the mystery that cares for all that lives.
Exchange expresses loss of trust in others and in the flow of giving and receiving. Within exchange, giving is instrumental, done in order to receive. As such, there is never true giving nor true receiving. What goes on to others does not carry the energy of what was received. Each transaction cancels itself within itself. Mystery, goodwill, care, and gratitude are no longer cultivated over time within the flow of ongoing relationships.
Finitude, scarcity, and our current predicament
A relaxed and trusting attitude towards finitude is essential to creatively care for needs with available resources. Scarcity, a fear-based orientation to finitude and the foundation of economics, which is defined as the study of the allocation of scarce resources rather than of finite resources, stunts this capacity and overshadows the needs-based flows of the maternal gift paradigm. Even though we produce and consume more than ever before, both in total numbers and per capita, more of what’s available on the planet is held within scarcity, more is wasted, and the enjoyment of life per use of resources quotient, if that were ever measurable, is lower than ever.
Within scarcity, when we lack trust in the possibility of optimal flows, orienting to needs is literally beyond capacity. Instead, we have created larger and more concentrated state apparatuses over time, based on ever more control. Over time, ever more of what we need moved from being locally available in relationship with land and community to being traded in instrumental relationships. Most of us, too, have become commodities, selling ourselves, as bodies and as minds, for money to care for our needs.
The continued functioning of the gift economy, now at least partially involuntary, and often what profit arises from, is mostly invisible. Needs appear mostly as “effective demand” – “the level of demand that represents a real intention to purchase by people with the means to pay” – which is far removed from actual need.
Instead of finding the most collaborative, creative, and caring ways of attending to needs within the means of our precious planet, most of us have internalized the Homo Economicus picture of humans as selfish beings intent on maximizing personal gain. We have learned to protect ourselves from others who wouldn’t care about our needs by not caring about theirs, enacting a brutal self-fulfilling prophecy.
We are used to thinking in terms of who “deserves” what, which cements separation from self, other, and life. We neither know nor can say what our needs are if we see ourselves as not deserving. We close our hearts to people who don’t have enough access to resources, justifying it by saying they don’t deserve more. And we convince ourselves that we deserve comfort, ease, and convenience to make up for the hardship of our modern, isolated, individual lives.
The limits of individual change
This collective situation doesn’t bode well for the dramatic reduction in consumption of resources necessary for any future to be possible. The solution to any problem appears, often, as something to buy. When we aim to reduce consumption individually, we are literally battling an entire mindset and systems that push in the other direction, towards the endless consumption that infinite growth requires. Only few and rare individuals can find sufficient trust in life and in others and sufficient will to walk away from the modicum of comfort they may have.
Moreover, if many begin to reduce consumption, economic collapse will likely follow. Long before then, we will likely be pushed to consume more, even though it’s clearly unsustainable. Let’s not forget that after September 11th, 2001, Bush invited people in the US to go shopping. In addition, for vast numbers of people, reducing consumption means growing starvation, while 1% of us are responsible for more pollution than two thirds of us, with little sign of being ready to reduce consumption.
No individual solutions exist for systemic problems. Even if a significant proportion of people were able to reduce their consumption dramatically without triggering a total collapse, some 100 companies are responsible for about 70% of carbon emissions, and there’s no systemic support for consumption reduction by any stretch of any imagination.
Another dimension of this quagmire is that reducing consumption sufficiently requires sharing resources with each other on a large scale. And yet the deep imprint of individual ownership, private property, and instrumental relationships make that nearly impossible.
The journey of realigning with life
Restoring the flow of life means re-learning to care for needs directly, without the separation of exchange and without “deserve thinking.” This means either developing new capacity or restoring atrophied capacity.
Knowing what we need. We are born with biological clarity about what we want and what is enough. No baby drinks milk beyond what’s needed. Year by year, we are trained into confusion, through scheduled feeding, shaming us for what we want, and advertising bombardment that fabricates a sense of need without biological necessity. Distinguishing what we truly need and what is enough from attachment, habit, or even addiction to comfort requires a deep revision of our sense of self.
Separating out relational from material needs. With the collapse of communities that capitalism created on a global scale, most needs, including relational ones, translate into money. Money and things are now a way of proving that we and our gifts are valued and that we are remembered and cared about. We pay therapists for support previously shared within communities. We pay people to care for our babies and warehouse our elders. Many of us are afraid of asking others for anything, especially in global North contexts. We have given money trance-like power, well beyond a “simple” medium of exchange.
Orienting to the needs of those we don’t know. Many indigenous traditions think ahead seven generation when making decisions. This, and taking only what we need, are part of why indigenous cultures and matriarchal societies have been so stable for so long.
Corporations think only three months into the future and pride themselves when they externalize costs – to the environment, to the public, to governments, to communities, and to workers. The staggering gap in care arises from relationships being instrumental.
I believe our continued existence will require deep collaboration and caring about everyone, including people we will never know; an evolutionary leap from caring only about people we know closely. Collaborating rather than competing increases resilience: where humans collaborate well, the larger web of life thrives, too.
My experiments with integrative decision making and gift flows have increased my trust: even as our collaboration muscles have atrophied from capitalism, they are still available for stretching. Even as a very low-capacity species, depleted by millennia of patriarchal trauma, we can orient to needs when we see them, especially during serious and immediate crises. We do this with no expectations, because we care about people we don’t know, simply because they, too, have needs.
We are now a globally interconnected species. We depend for our basic needs on people who live far away, often very different from us culturally, linguistically, and materially. Resources are already flowing all around the world. All we need is to shift the mechanisms that detect what’s needed from being mediated by exchange to unfolding through gifting and collaborative calibration. We are facing a fork in the road: we either learn, quickly, how to willingly make that kind of flow possible by opening our hearts to everyone’s needs, even outside extreme circumstances, and how to surrender to the trust that others will care about our needs, too – or we perish.
The gift of collective capacity for restoring flow
For most of our existence, the commons have been our primary way of engaging with each other and the web of life. Land and what’s on it were cared for by communities without being owned by anyone, even after private property had already begun. The commons meant living in subsistence economies with little reliance on market mechanisms. Billions of people still depend on the commons for at least part of their sustenance, even after the massive land enclosures that destroyed the commons in much of the world as part of the transition to capitalism. I find the modern attitude of mild contempt and superiority towards subsistence tragic, especially given the impact of continued land enclosures on massive scales, now especially in Africa, leading to the impoverishment of the many for the greater profit for the few, and to more people depending on market processes for basic sustenance.
Even now, those of us who struggle materially know that coming together to share resources is what makes living possible, often glorious, even in difficult conditions. Meanwhile, those of us in the comfortable classes of the global North, where market economies are fundamentally all there is, no longer remember and have almost entirely lost capacity to care for needs directly in relationship with land and community. We have lost access to the evolutionary legacy of how to creatively use available resources or how to consider impacts on others.
Restoring flow and the commons when we have already been severed from land and community is different from sustaining community when we still have access to ancestral knowledge. It requires a significant shift from what feels in flow even as it’s based on distortions internalized through modern, capitalist, patriarchal conditioning: the artificial and temporary exit from the web of life supported by the exchange economy. Even when we know that we need to find, again, enough empowerment and enough capacity to turn towards each other and community, we struggle with making this shift.
That said, ongoing experimentation has resulted in a growing body of knowledge about principles and practices for the necessary liberation work and for creating structures and agreements that compensate for low individual capacity.[2] Doing this work, we learn, collectively, to speak about our needs, name our preferences through requests, respond accurately with information about our willingness, and share impacts on us as information for the whole. With sufficient rigor, enough of us can find empowered capacity, within community, to initiate action in response to known needs and enough processes can be in place for maintaining togetherness while coordinating responses and integrating differences.
While possible and conceptually simple, this is not easy work. It takes commitment and dedication to the rigor of agreements and active willingness to experience discomfort. May more of us find our way there while we still can.
Notes
[1] Learning packet Restoring Flow Using NVC. NVC is an acronym for Nonviolent Communication, a process developed by Marshall Rosenberg, Center for Nonviolent Communication.
[2] Such experiments are happening within the Nonviolent Global Liberation community and documented in blog posts and learning packets on The Fearless Heart website.
© 2024 Miki Kashtan, miki@nglcommunity.org
