The essence of community, its very heart and soul, is the nonmonetary exchange of value. The things we do and the things we share because we care for others, and for the good of the place. Community is composed of things that we cannot measure, for which we keep no record and ask no recompense. Since they cannot be measured, they can’t be denominated in dollars, or barrels of oil, or bushels of corn—such things as respect, tolerance, love, trust, generosity, and care, the supply of which is unbounded and unlimited.
The nonmonetary exchange of value does not arise solely from altruistic motives. It arises from a deep, intuitive understanding that self-interest is inseparably connected with community interest; that individual good is inseparable from the good of the whole; that all things are simultaneously independent, interdependent, and interdependent—that the singular “one” is inseparable from the plural “one.”
True community also requires proximity—continual interaction between the people, places, and things of which it is composed.
Without an one of the the three—nonmaterial values, nonmonetary exchange of value, and proximity—no true community ever existed or ever will.
If we were to set out to design and efficient system for the methodical destruction of community, we could do no better than our present efforts to monetize all value and reduce life to the tyranny of measurement.
Money, markets, and measurement have their place. They are important tools indeed. We should honor and use them. But they do not deserve the deifications their apostles demand of us, before which we too readily sink to our knees.
Only fools worship their tools.
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There can be no civil society worthy of the name without true community. In fact, there can be no life without it. All life, all of nature, all earthly systems, are closed cycles of nonmonetary exchanges of value, save only the gift of energy that comes from the sun. There can be no life whatever without balanced cycles of giving and receiving.
When we attempt to monetize all value we methodically replace the most effective system of exchanging value for the least effective. Because we cannot mathematically measure the nonmonetary, voluntary exchange of value, we cannot prove to our rational mind the efficiency of the whole or the parts. Nor can we engineer or control that which we cannot measure. Nonmonetary exchange of value frustrates our craving for perfect predictability and control that monetary exchange always promises but can never deliver.
When we monetize value, we have a means of measurement, however misleading, that allows us to calculate the relative efficiency of each part of the system. It doesn't occur to us that we are destroying an extremely effective system whose values we can't calculate in order to calculate the efficiency of an ineffective system. It doesn't occur to us that attempting to engineer mechanistic societies and institutions based on mathematical measurement may be fundamentally flawed. As the popular dictum declares, "What's measured is what gets done." Perhaps that's precisely the problem.
Giving and receiving can't be measured in any meaningful sense. A gift with expectation is no gift at all. It is a bargain. In a nonmonetary exchange of value, giving and receiving is not a transaction. It is an offering and an acceptance. In nature, when a closed cycle of receiving and giving is out of balance, death and destruction soon arise. It is the same in society.
When money's rant is on, we come to believe that life is a right, which comes bearing a right, which is the right of getting.
Life is not a right. Life is a gift which comes bearing a gift which is the art of giving. And community is the marketplace where we give our gifts and receive the gifts of others.