Bartering, or the exchange of goods and services without money, has seen a resurgence with the sluggish economy and struggling financial system, becoming an increasingly common solution to tighter family budgets. In July 2009, consumers listed nearly 142,000 ads in the barter section of Craigslist, a 96 percent increase from the year before, according to site statistics. While approaching your car mechanic about exchanging a weekend of pet-sitting services for minor repairs may be unfamiliar territory to some, most people are already familiar with the basics of barter. “We barter in other ways all the time,” insists Jeanne Hurlburt, a professor of sociology at Louisiana State University. “If I give you something, I expect a favor of equal or greater value in return. Every relationship has give and take.” You might mow an elderly neighbor’s lawn in exchange for some tomatoes from her garden, for example, or swap must-read books among friends with similar tastes.
An old African proverb states, “He who wants to barter, usually knows what is best for him.” Barter gets at the difference between money and wealth. Money is a symbol that expresses how we value ourselves and others, and also represents society’s values at a particular time and place in history. Wealth, on the other hand, is a state of consciousness that represents generosity.
Our entire human financial structure began with barter. Our current business model started when individuals saw an opportunity to be of service by offering their excess crops to neighboring communities, in exchange for a commensurate portion of something that they needed. The exchange of goods or services was not designed to generate profit, but to benefit all parties involved. According to the World Business Academy, that is still the fundamental role of business: to be of service to society.
The fundamental problem with Wall Street and corporate America is that they have forgotten the reason that business exists. Profit is built into the market as a necessary component of the transactions, but when it is seen as the only reason, society inevitably loses its way. Success in life, as well as success in business, lies in conscious participation in the expression of abundance and creativity, not merely for one’s own sake, but for others in society. This model of reward, primarily through service rather than money, is rooted in believing that there is enough for everyone and that no one is better than, nor lower than, anyone else.
Barter is a great equalizer. Since it is established upon need instead of greed, the value of something is relative to it being needed. This changes the playing field considerably. We have this rather stratified view of professional worth, thinking that white collar work, for example, is more valuable—and, therefore, should be paid more—than blue collar work. In a barter-based system, those lines get blurry. If, for example, you have broken water pipes and there is water spraying all over your kitchen, you need a plumber much more than you need a lawyer. You are, therefore, going to be very willing to exchange your premier goods and services to get your plumbing fixed. You’re not going to think something like, “I don’t want to trade my really good ‘stuff’ for this menial repair,” saving it, instead, to trade for legal or medical services. You’re going to be present with what’s happening. And you’re going to recognize the plumber’s worth. You’re going to see the value of the transaction. The playing field is leveled. All of our work is of worth, according to the needs of our neighbors.
A Good Trade:
One of the best barter arrangements that we had on the farm was with old Leon and Irene Cady. The Cadys were long-in-the-tooth octogenarians whose family had lived, for several generations, on the property where we now lived. In fact, many of the locals still referred to the farm as “the old Cady place.” The Cadys had no clue what sustainability was, but they loved what we were doing with their old place. In fact, they felt like it was being returned to its roots. Generations of Cadys had been raised there, beginning in the early 1800s. They had watched Vermont, through all of its growing pains, become the eclectic, innovative state that it is.
The Cady family remembered when native Vermonters John Deere patented the steel plow and Thomas Davenport the first electric motor. They remembered the rise to prominence of Burlington native John Dewey and Plymouth Notch born Calvin Coolidge. More importantly, they recounted days when cattle in the state outnumbered people, and the population was about 343,641 year-round residents. They told us, with excitement, about the year that women were first allowed to vote in town elections. And they remembered poignantly the year that poet Robert Frost chose Vermont to be his home.
The Cadys had planted the raspberry patch that still flourished on the farm and, every summer, they would come and ask to pick berries. They were a darling couple! Irene always wore a mid-calf length cotton dress and pulled her gray hair up into a bun under a large-brimmed straw hat. Leon sported a big-billed baseball cap, long sleeve seersucker shirt, and a little clip-on bowtie. They carried pails in which to pick, and hoisted their wicker picnic basket from their car into the shade under a big maple tree to keep their packed lunches cool and fresh. We always looked forward to their picking outings. We traded them all the berries that they could pick for the chance to sit with them, in the old maple grove, while they had lunch and told us stories—lots of stories—about the old days on the farm.
One day, while eating sandwiches and drinking iced tea together, they told us about the great flood of 1927. They recounted how torrential rains had begun on November 3, 1927. It had already been a wet October and rivers were swollen and the ground saturated. Nine inches of rain fell in a thirty-six hour period and horrendous flooding began. Though all of New England was affected, Vermont was devastated. Leon’s eyes lit up like lanterns as he described the state being flooded from Newport to Bennington. Irene chimed in that eighty-five people died and 9,000 were left homeless. Many of Vermont’s roads, and over 1,200 bridges, were washed away overnight.
The great flood of 1927 changed Vermont forever, as communities turned to the state, and the state to the federal government, for assistance. As the Cadys reminisced about the change that Vermont underwent as it made its way from being an independent “hermit state” to a more interdependent part of the United States, my understanding of this place I had chosen to call home deepened. I understood my neighbors better and my appreciation for my community grew. The Cadys needed berries and I needed to establish a sense of place. It was a good trade, and one that both parties looked forward to each year.
Lessons in Prosperity Consciousness:
My daughter Jec loved learning history from the Cadys—and learning to play instruments by joining impromptu jam sessions on the front porch—and learning philosophy around the dinner table as we compared the relative merits of various Eastern and Western traditions. It didn’t come, therefore, as a total surprise when she announced that she wanted to be home schooled.
Vermont legislation was, in the mid-1970s, quite liberal regarding home schooling, so the option was viable. It was decided that Jec would go to the local high school in the mornings to take the core courses required for graduation and spend afternoons on the farm immersed in advanced studies. Once the logistics were worked out, I panicked, wondering how we were going to locate the expertise needed for her new program. We lived very rurally and it wasn’t as if we had an intellectual smorgasbord from which to choose. This is when I learned about the spiritual economy.
I decided to just put it out there—letting people in various networks know about Jec’s plan—and see what happened. Then, I tried my best to get out of the way and just let things unfold. And they did—far beyond my wildest dreams. The first person to come forward was Pulitzer Prize winner and poet laureate Maxine Kumin. She had a rogue horse that needed some work under saddle and was interested in trading the training for teaching Jec to write poetry. I got the horse going well under saddle and, under Maxine’s guidance, Jec published a beautiful chapbook of poetry. Others who stepped up to the plate included an MIT professor who traded his wife’s dressage lessons for teaching Jec calculus and trigonometry; a Swiss music-box maker who taught Jec German in exchange for fresh garden produce and apple cider; and a New York City–based sculptor who traded teaching Jec the basic techniques of his art for a quiet country retreat at the farm.
Jec’s home school portfolio helped get her into an Ivy League college with a handsome scholarship, as well. Deepak Chopra, in The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success, teaches that we are pure potential. And when we discover that, we have the ability to fulfill any dream we might have. Chopra links the fulfillment of our dreams to experiencing our true nature—our souls. I learned this with Jec’s home-school project. Even though I had some initial apprehension, I practiced stillness and tried to stay out of my own way. Through stillness, I was able to connect to the field of pure potentiality that orchestrated an incredible host of details for me.
Chopra also reminds us to circulate whatever we have in abundance. There is nothing that does this as effectively as barter, which offered me the opportunity to trade my abundance for that of others. The word affluence comes from the word affluere which means “to flow to,” and affluence means “to flow in abundance.” Energy flows. Or, it stagnates. This idea is reinforced by Eric Butterworth in Spiritual Economics when he writes that “the goal should not be to make money or acquire things, but to achieve the consciousness through which the substance will flow forth when and as you need it.” He continues, “When we are consciously centered in the universal flow, we experience inner direction and the unfoldment of creative activity. Things come too, but prosperity is not just having things. It is the consciousness that attracts things.”
My thoughts about Jec’s proposed project had vibrated with intention. I sent out a signal asking for topflight mentors to help Jec meet her educational goals. That thought attracted matching return signals as the parade of extraordinarily qualified people materialized. Years later, when I read about the Law of Attraction in Esther and Jerry Hicks’s Ask and It Is Given, I knew exactly what they were talking about. In the book, Esther and Jerry compare the Law of Attraction to tuning a radio. If you want to listen to something on 102.7 FM, you don’t expect to hear it if your radio is set to 98.7 FM. The radio waves of one frequency can only be received by a matching tuner. Well, the Law of Attraction says that the same thing is true at the level of consciousness. If we want to receive abundance in our lives, we need to set our tuners to the frequency of abundance. For me, that meant feeling the intention as if it were already manifest.
Somehow, even in my skepticism, there was another, larger part of me that knew that Jec’s home-school program was going to work out. I didn’t know how it was going to work out; I just had a feeling— something kind of transrational—that let me remain still and centered in the field of pure potentiality. I had stumbled upon the secret of the spiritual economy. I learned that, if I kept an internal locus of control, I could choose how I looked at the world and interpreted events. I became incrementally more independent of the ups and downs of the external world, such as my well-intentioned neighbors’ worries that Jec would never get into college or my parents’ concerns about her peer socialization.
I was on my way toward developing a consciousness through which things could flow as, and when, needed. Little by little, I gained the confidence to trust the spiritual economy, rather than feeling dependent upon the precarious consumer economy. Through conscious, willed participation in the expression of abundance and creativity, not merely for my own sake, but for that of others, culturally conditioned scarcity consciousness fell away. I learned that, through adopting community instead of consumerist models, there really is enough for everyone.
Bubbles of Debt:
Knowing that there is enough for everyone is a grounded, practical approach to overcoming scarcity consciousness. It is not, however, to be confused with an abandoned, reckless “shop till you drop” attitude. If there’s enough for everyone, we can just buy, buy, buy, right? Wrong! That is the carrot held out by consumer culture that gets confused for abundance. Instead, it is an egocentric position that only considers one’s own self. This is directly opposed to knowing that there is enough for everyone. And, sadly, sometimes there isn’t really even enough for ourselves—because we have attained our “stuff” by accruing a mountain of debt.
Debt accrual is the antithesis of participating in a spiritual economy. Credit consumers don’t even ask themselves whether or not they can really afford the whole cost of, for example, a vacation or landscaping, but ask, instead, whether or not they can afford the resulting increase in their monthly bills. Their answer is invariably “yes.” They are a creation of the no-money-down and low-interest incentives that proliferated in the FIRE (finance, insurance, real estate) economy of recent years.
In his 1939 book, Business Cycles, Joseph Schumpeter predicted trouble whenever a load of debt was “lightheartedly incurred by people who foresaw nothing but boons.” He was right. Now that the credit and housing bubbles have burst, unbridled debt-financed consumer spending and monthly payment models are being critically questioned.
Mainstream consumer culture wants to reinflate the credit bubble and engineer a return to “the old days.” But this isn’t sustainable. When a nation’s businesses and households take on too much debt and the economy stumbles, the cashflow needed for financing dries up, defaults rise, and a vicious cycle of falling incomes, asset prices, and collateral values begins. Boom-to-bust cycles end only when asset prices, debt levels, and incomes get back into balance.
When we needed a loan on the farm, we self-financed from our own coffers and then meticulously paid ourselves back so that the funds were replenished for future needs. I didn’t use any credit cards. I used cold, hard cash to pay for everything. Using only cash kept the pace of my life slower. I could walk into a store and differentiate between the things that I really needed and things I just wanted. And I didn’t have to worry about lots of small expenditures sneaking up on me at the end of a month since it made me think more carefully about how I spent my money. Cash was actually convenient. I don’t care what the commercials for Visa say, having someone—or multiple people—in front of you in line pull out their plastic to pay for a $3.25 latte can be slow and aggravating. Everyone accepts cash as payment. And the best part was that I never spent money on interest or fees and penalties. Since I wasn’t shackled by debt, I was able to follow my dreams and pursue a more creative, individualized life. A Good Life.
I went to my fortieth high school reunion just as the economy was tanking. I spent the evening talking with an old friend who had taken the “road more traveled by.” She had invested heavily in all of the bubble markets; and having forsaken marriage and children, had chosen instead to claw her way up the corporate ladder to a lucrative job that she hated. Even though she earned a six-figure income, she had substantial debt. Now her retirement monies were seriously devalued, and her real estate holdings were sitting empty as qualified tenants were becoming harder and harder to find. She was approaching retirement age with the prospect of having to keep working in order to finish paying off her supersized home—which was now valued at less than her mortgage. The bank owned her cars and she had hefty credit card balances. On top of it all, her company was reorganizing in an effort to deal with recent economic declines and there was talk about cutting her position to consolidate administrative costs. Stress was eating away at her. She had traded freedom for mainstream culture’s definition of “security”—and it had turned out to be another bubble that had subsequently burst.
It’s part of our nature to question ourselves and I had done my fair share of that. There had been times, of course, when I had wondered if my choice to take the “road less traveled by” had been the right decision. But, in talking with my old friend, I felt my freedom. I had no debt—none. By following the principles of the spiritual, instead of consumer, economy, I had been able to live my life without accumulating debt. My home and cars were paid for. There were no student loans left lurking in the wings. I had no credit card balances. Instead of racking up debt, I had relied heavily upon barter, exchanging goods and services with others—and built some solid social capital as a natural extension of the process.
While others had diversified their portfolios, I had diversified my career interests and had worked part-time in both philosophy and dressage, thereby expressing my dual passions and keeping myself intellectually and professionally vital. No burnout. And if one source of revenue dried up, the other was always there.
My retirement plans hadn’t been built around Wall Street but were, instead, rooted in the social capital I had invested in the concentric circles of my own community. No Madoff ponzi schemes. No evaporated 401(k). Most importantly, I was content and wasn’t being ravaged by the gnawing effects of stress. In the words of Robert Frost, I took the road “less traveled by and that has made all the difference.”
The average American household’s credit card debt in 1990, according to the American Bankers’ Association, was $2,966. By 2007 it had risen to $9,840, and jumped to $10,700 in 2009. About 43 percent of American families spend more than they earn each year. According to a recent USA Today article about debt, 78 percent of baby boomers have mortgage debt, 59 percent have credit card debt, and 56 percent have car payments. From 1996 to 2007, the total number of bank credit cards increased 46 percent and credit card companies made $43 billion in income from late payment, over-limit, and balance transfer fees. Charge-off rates in January 2009 were 40 percent higher than the previous year.
Personal debt is one of those things that people like to forget about. As long as they can keep making the monthly payment, they think they’ll be okay. And yet their future earnings are being eaten away at an accelerated rate, with no end in sight. Americans have never been so indebted, owing on credit cards, personal loans, student loans, and home mortgages.
Once people are sufficiently debt saturated, they begin to throw caution to the wind and just buy even more “stuff.” They figure that getting their personal debt paid off is hopeless, and just begin to accept it as a normal part of their economic lives. So they keep buying—and buying. The buying actually becomes cathartic, an outlet for hidden anxieties that lurk behind all of the “new stuff.” And debt-financed shopping sprees are given the thumbs up by big corporate messages telling buyers that they are stimulating an otherwise flagging economy. Consumerism has become a new type of nationalism.
Consumer Nationalism:
Consumers are bombarded with public relations sound bites reminding them that they are responsible for supporting a prosperous and endlessly growing economy. We are reminded of Mill’s discomfort with certain aspects of this type of thinking as he felt that it could lead to “trampling, crushing, elbowing, and treading on each other’s heels.” Those are strong words.
We saw, however, a tragic, literal example of Mill’s worst fears in November 2008 when an employee was stampeded to death on Black Friday—the biggest retail day of the year in America—as consumers stormed a Long Island Walmart in a shopping frenzy. Roughly 2,000 people gathered outside the Walmart’s doors in predawn darkness, chanting “push the doors in,” as the crowd pressed against the glass and the clock ticked down to the 5:00 a.m. opening.
A stampede plunged the outlet into chaos. Drunk with the excitement of bargain hunting, with credit cards in hand, shoppers trampled, crushed, elbowed, and tread on each other’s heels—literally—with sufficient abandon to cost a thirty-four-year-old, innocent temporary employee his life. When shoppers were advised by store administrators that they had to leave—that an employee had been killed—they retorted by yelling, “I’ve been in line since Friday morning!” and they just kept shopping!
Items on sale at the store included a $798 Samsung 50-inch Plasma HDTV, a Bissel Compact Upright Vacuum for $28, and Men’s Wrangler Tough Jeans for $8. This certainly wasn’t a scenario that suggested a consciousness that recognized that there was enough for everybody. No spiritual economy. This was consumer economy at its worst. No sense of fair or equal exchange. Unsustainable. Would anybody consciously exchange a $20 discount on a TV for a man’s life?
Sherry L. Ackerman, Ph.D. is the author of The Good Life: How to Create a Sustainable and Fulfilling Lifestyle. The book springs off from her 22 years of living on a back-to-the-earth commune in Central Vermont and offers practical ideas for not only surviving--but flourishing--in today's collapsing Empire.