Cohousing-L Mailing List: Maintaining affordability - a local currency approach

[Guy Koehler, Rivendell Ranch (rivendell_ranch]

A very interesting discussion on how local currencies may promote community.
I read the first link and its references. Your perspectives are looked
forward to.

Guy Koehler
Rivendell Ranch
Hoquiam, WA 98550

http://www.geocities.com/rivendell_ranch

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Dan Overholtzer" <overholtzer [at] comcast.net>
Sent: Sunday, December 28, 2003 8:36 AM
Subject: Local Currencies & the Great Mother Archetype


>
> http://www.ratical.org/many_worlds/cc/Lietaer.html
>
> BEYOND GREED & SCARCITY
>
> <snip>
>
> BERNARD: My analysis of this question is based on the work of Carl
> Gustav Jung because he is the only one with a theoretical framework for
> collective psychology, and money is fundamentally a phenomenon of
> collective psychology.
>
> A key concept Jung uses is the archetype, which can be described as an
> emotional field that mobilizes people, individually or collectively, in
> a particular direction.  Jung showed that whenever a particular
> archetype is repressed, two types of shadows emerge, which are
> polarities of each other.
>
> For example, if my higher self -- corresponding to the archetype of the
> King or the Queen -- is repressed, I will behave either as a Tyrant or
> as a Weakling.  These two shadows are connected to each other by fear.
> A Tyrant is tyrannical because he's afraid of appearing weak; a Weakling
> is afraid of being tyrannical.  Only someone with no fear of either one
> of these shadows can embody the archetype of the King.
>
> Now let's apply this framework to a well-documented phenomenon -- the
> repression of the Great Mother archetype.  The Great Mother archetype
> was very important in the Western world from the dawn of prehistory
> throughout the pre-Indo-European time periods, as it still is in many
> traditional cultures today.  But this archetype has been violently
> repressed in the West for at least 5,000 years starting with the
> Indo-European invasions -- reinforced by the anti-Goddess view of
> Judeo-Christianity, culminating with three centuries of witch hunts --
> all the way to the Victorian era.
>
> If there is a repression of an archetype on this scale and for this
> length of time, the shadows manifest in a powerful way in society.
> After 5,000 years, people will consider the corresponding shadow
> behaviors as "normal."  The question I have been asking is very simple:
> What are the shadows of the Great Mother archetype?  I'm proposing that
> these shadows are greed and fear of scarcity.
>
> So it should come as no surprise that in Victorian times -- at the apex
> of the repression of the Great Mother -- a Scottish schoolmaster named
> Adam Smith noticed a lot of greed and scarcity around him and assumed
> that was how all "civilized" societies worked.  Smith, as you know,
> created modern economics, which can be defined as a way of allocating
> scarce resources through the mechanism of individual, personal greed.
>
> <snip>

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