The Sacred Economics Eisenstein Summary

The Sacred Economics by Charles Eisenstein's explores the history of money and gift in society. It convincingly demonstrated to me that :- "The more you give, the more you get in present and afterlife" Eisenstein clearly explained that "gift" don't have to be in the form of money, it can be the old clothes you donate to the orphans, the willingness to help your colleague to finish his/her report, your presences when someone is down in their life being a shoulder to cry on and so forth without expecting in return. Gift culture was vastly practiced by our ancestors and by giving we lay up treasures in heaven, which means when we are with Almighty, He will give back what we gave to all. Unfortunately, gift culture intuition is alien to us now.
We are afraid of the string that attached with the gift we give and even worse with the one we receive because gift naturally crafts obligations. We tend to take few steps back when someone offers something because we don't want to owe anybody anything. We don't want to be indebted to anyone and our business world make the situation even worse by manipulating gifts culture as a marketing strategy. This business strategy or business model has been in use for many centuries. This simple ‘free gift' formula is used to attract customers and make them commit to doing business with the particular company. For instance, the beauty industries are promoting free sessions for a facial or weight management for the public but what really happens when you sign up for the free session, the consultants there will analyze your condition and somehow will manipulate the user to sign up for a package. The package price could be three times more than the free trial session. The obligations and commitments that arise from gifts have detached us from this wonderful idea
Clearly, if anything is sacred today, it definitely isn't money. A point to ponder, is money a positive or negative influence in politics or in our life? Does accumulating money keep you in peace? Does money bring out the best, or the worst us? Commonly, the answers would be money is something malevolent. The thought that we have to help another human or animal isn't motivated by money. We are taking it for granted. But why should that be the case? Eisenstein said “money, after all, is a social agreement, or actually a system of agreements that essentially express what that society holds valuable. It rewards certain activities but not all”. One of the ways that money had made the human a beast is by having intermediaries such as agents, brokers, dealers and so forth as a channel of distribution for a certain product to reach the users from the creator. Everything has distributors, name it from buying a property to a pen. We are paying a lot of sum to them. But the new innovative business model called peer-to-peer(P2P) platforms or sharing economy have changed the game. Make services cheap or free, and it would be the way of reinventing the economy to deliver participation and choice alongside social justice. The size and scale of Uber, Airbnb, and several other firms now rival or even better than those of some of the world's largest businesses in transportation, hospitality, and other sectors.