Healing Wealth

featured image |”You can’t solve money problems with money” by Federico Cruz

Introduction | Scroll down to access featured content

Welcome to a special issue of Kosmos Journal. We are honored to be guest editors and welcome you on this journey into “healing wealth”. It’s important to note that as you read the articles in this issue, we often use expansive definitions of wealth beyond simply financial or monetary wealth. There’s the wealth of ancestral knowledge, of epigenetics, genetics, cultural endowments, legacies of oral traditions and living practices. There’s the wealth of spiritual knowledge, ceremonies, rituals, elderhood, and ways of being in the world. There’s the wealth of relationality, from our bodies to our families to our communities to the broader weave and weft of the living world and the more-than-human realms. There’s the wealth of ecology, another form of relationality, with the waters, the air, the foods that nourish us, and the foods that nourished our ancestors. We are entangled in webs of wealth from our gut biomes to the biomes of living landscapes. There will be times that we discuss financial wealth and the murky and awkward spaces of philanthropy, that strange extension and externality of capitalism itself. 

Healing wealth is a process, not an endpoint. It requires shifts in our perceptions and ways of living beyond the binaries of the individual versus the superstructures. The former serves as the neoliberal focal point of healing, focusing on the latter omits our responsibility of recasting our gaze and interactions with the living, responsive, dynamic, and dare we say, animistic forces of a living cosmos. In order to address our current meta-crisis, the interlocking and cascading crises resulting from the logic of modernity and late-stage capitalism, will require deeper notions of restoration and living in right relations, cultural transformation, the co-creation of life-affirming structures  and regenerative infrastructures, and ultimately the (re)cultivation of life-force. For this task, there is no distinction between inner versus outer work nor spiritual versus political work. We are fractal manifestations of a nested whole. This is germain to healing wealth.

This issue includes a breadth and depth of perspectives and offerings towards the healing of wealth. If some articles or authors resonate, our hearts are warmed. If there are things that push your boundaries or invite debate, we encourage you to allow intuition to guide you. Adult learning often happens through discomfort. And simultaneously, there is no requirement for the reader to continue on. 

We have no disclaimers. The provocations throughout are purposeful. We direct our aim at the global operating system of neoliberalism, and what we describe as the Unholy Trinity of separation, materialism and rationalism at the core of the Western ontology. You will read this word, ontology, throughout the various texts. Ontology refers to our ways of seeing, being, knowing and relating with/through/in the world. It makes up our conception of reality, the way we construct and perceive the “isness” of the world. 

We will tackle ontology through many refractive angles. Dr. Báyò Akómoláfé discusses philanthropy through the lens of neurotypicality. He states, “Neurotypicality is a domain of labor, a plantation that forces us to act in ways that increase predetermined definitions of value.” 

Tiokasin Ghothorse’s offering brings in the wisdom of Earth-based traditions. He states: “The respectful syncretism of mystery and origin is not the grumble of Lakota cosmology but the consternation of a Western identity crisis perpetuated by disconnection to the wiser elder — Earth. The untapped abundance of Native people’s contemplation and consciousness is a daily reminder to speak to a world that has forgotten its origin by the anthropic principles the Western mindset touts for all humankind.” 

Chung-Wha Hong & Sara Mersha from Grassroots International, a philanthropic institution, remind us of the importance of social movements, and philanthropy-as-reparations. They state, “when we take as our starting point that we are holding stolen wealth, with a moral imperative to return it to the people, our work looks very different. The process of returning the wealth can be reparative and healing, and can turn complicity into solidarity. When complicity stops, solidarity begins.”

There are many other powerful contributions ranging from the economic anthropologist, Dr. Jason Hickel offering a synthesis of Democratic Ecosocialism to a descendent of a wealthy family, Justine Epstein, who tells us of her personal journey in actively transmuting her relationship to and engagement with family inheritance. We also offer a longer-form article on Effective Altruism and Longtermism, a growing ideology favored by tech billionaires, disembodied academics and techno-utopians more broadly. We use this ideology as a breachpoint into the deluded logic of late-stage capitalism and offer an alternative, life-centric approach. 

We, nor any of the authors in this issue, claim objectivity or neutrality. We believe in multiple, simultaneous, subjective ontologies. Our antidote logic to the “monoculture of the mind”, to borrow Vandana Shiva’s sticky meme, is a polyculture of perspectives. Many tongues, many voices, many lenses, many layers of entanglement to be excavated. We are not attempting to sever or amputate the Unholy Trinity. Rather, we gesture towards another possible trinity based in interbeing/inter-becoming, relationality and animism. 

We do not claim any of what you read is “new” and we are not trying to create the “new” culture or even cultures. As our elder brother Tiokasin Ghosthorse reminds us, wherever there is the word “new”, the logic of colonization is close at hand. We are attempting to cultivate new/ancient/emerging spiritual/political practices that contribute to a transformation of values from our current modes of extraction, acquisition and consumption to more post capitalist values based on reciprocity, solidarity, mutuality, and shared responsibility. 

Let us be explicit with our project. We believe the process of healing wealth (including money, resources, ourselves, ancestors, relations, biomes, ecosystems, etc.) involves moving from the pathologies of domination and exploitation central to the project of colonial capitalism towards life-centric, liberatory ontologies. Healing requires ongoing practice of liberating ourselves, our culture, our ways of living and being from these logics and, for instance, fiercely examining where scarcity and/or hoarding as reflexive self protection live within and among us. It requires embracing contradictions such as using capital to liberate capital or surrendering and hospicing our current ways of living and knowing to walk or leap into the unknown. It requires ongoing practice of solidarity and reciprocity  working collectively to create and nurture transition pathways towards life-affirming systems.   

This will require alchemical acts. Transmuting the poisons of capitalist modernity- including its ultimate abstraction and mediation, capital itself, into medicine, perhaps even into the ultimate medicine, water itself- is the aim of this issue. May the dams of wealth flow into the places that need it the most. 

Kosmos Guest Editors Alnoor Ladha and Lynn Murphy are co-authors of Post Capitalist Philanthropy: Healing Wealth in the Time of Collapse and are co-directors of Transition Resource Circle.

…and a podcast:

Deschooling Dialogues
Episode 6 | Alnoor Ladha with Orland Bishop

In this far-ranging dialogue, elder Orland Bishop talks with Alnoor Ladha about what unlearning and de-schooling could look like for concepts such as wealth, money and reciprocity.