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Charles Eisenstein

Charles Eisenstein Books

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“To most of the roles society offers, I say, “You are made for more than that.” We inhabit, in the words of Ivan Illich, “a world into which nobody fits who has not been crushed and molded by sixteen years of formal education.” The very idea of having to be at a job “on time” was appalling to early industrial laborers, who also refused the numbing repetitiveness of industrial work until the specter of starvation compelled them. What truly self-respecting person would spend a life marketing soda pop or chewing gum unless they were somehow broken by repeated threats to survival? To participate in our society’s depredations is an indignity. [...] Very few of society’s usual positions can accommodate the enormous creative life-force of an unbroken human being. To keep the world under control demands that we bottle up this creative force and expend as much of it as possible in harmless ways—harmless to the status quo, that is, though not to the individual. All the addicts and alcoholics I have known—all of them!—are blessed (or cursed) with what seems to be an exceptional creative energy that is burned up in their addiction. Other people channel it into obsessions and compulsions, hobbies, nervous tics, excessive exercise, overeating, work, and the like, contributing to a more dilute version of the addict’s sense of life betrayed. When we submit to lesser lives, we cannot avoid a sense of self-betrayal: that we are complicit in the plunder of our most precious possession. The roles society offers do not befit the divine beings that we are. It is not merely that a career as a retail clerk is beneath my dignity; it is beneath anyone’s dignity. No one is meant to do such work for very long.”

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Book:The Ascent of Humanity
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“In terms of conventional economics, it may actually be in an individual's rational self-interest to engage in activities that render the earth uninhabitable....it may be more in our "rational self-interest" to liquidate all natural capital right now - cash in the earth - than to preserve it for future generations”

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Book:The Ascent of Humanity: Civilization and the Human Sense of Self by Eisenstein, Charles
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“In a world where nothing matters, the most atrocious events are no longer horrifying; the most piteous victims no longer stir our compassion; the most frightening possibilities, like nuclear war and ecological destruction, no longer frighten us. Sometimes we explain it away as "compassion fatigue", but really it is a disconnection from reality. None of it seems real. We sit back, benumbed, watching the world slide slowly toward a precipice as if it were an on-screen enactment. Similarly, we watch the years of our own lives march on, indifferent to the preciousness of each passing moment. Only once in a while an alarm goes off, we panic for a moment with a thought like, "This is real! This is my life! What am I here for?" And then our environment tempts us back into stupor.”

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Book:The Ascent of Humanity: Civilization and the Human Sense of Self by Eisenstein, Charles
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“When we pay professionals to grow our food, prepare our food, create our entertainment, make our clothes, build our houses, clean our houses, treat our illnesses, and educate our children, what's left? What's left on which to base community? Real communities are interdependent.”

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Book:The Ascent of Humanity: Civilization and the Human Sense of Self by Eisenstein, Charles
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“When we pay professionals to grow our food, prepare our food, create our entertainment, make our clothes, build our houses, clean our houses, treat our illnesses, and educate our children, what's left? What's left on which to base community? Real communities are interdependent...It is strangers whom we pay to perform [these] functions. It doesn't really matter who grows your food - if they have a problem, you can always pay someone else to do it. This phrase encapsulates much about our modern society...we can always pay someone else to do it. As an individual, it is hard not to feel dispensable, a cog in the machine. We feel dispensable because, in terms of survival, in terms of all the economic functions of life, we are dispensable.”

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Book:The Ascent of Humanity: Civilization and the Human Sense of Self by Eisenstein, Charles
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“The situation on Earth today is too dire for us to act from habit—to reenact again and again the same kinds of solutions that brought us to our present extremity. Where does the wisdom to act in entirely new ways come from? It comes from nowhere, from the void; it comes from inaction. When we see it, we realize it was right in front of us all along. It is never far away; yet at the same time it is in a different universe—a different Story of the World.”

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Book:The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible
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“Why are we so desperate to escape the material world? Is it really so bleak? Or could it be, rather, that we have made it bleak: obscured its vibrant mystery with our ideological blinders, severed its infinite connectedness with our categories, suppressed its spontaneous order with our pavement, reduced its infinite variety with our commodities, shattered its eternity with our time-keeping, and denied its abundance with our money system?”

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Book:The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible
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“The point here is not that emissions don't matter. It is a call for a shift in priorities. On the policy level, we need to shift toward protecting and healing ecosystems on every level, especially the local. On a cultural level, we need to reintegrate human life with the rest of life, and bring ecological principles to bear on social healing. On the level of strategy and thought, we need to shift the narrative toward life, love, place, and participation. Even if we abandoned the emissions narrative, if we do these things emissions will surely fall as well.”

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Book:Climate: A New Story
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“Whether or not it is true that climate change exacerbates other environmental problems, the rush to name a unitary cause of a complex problem should give us pause. The pattern is familiar. It is none other than war thinking, which also depends on identifying a unitary cause of a complex problem. That cause is called the enemy, and the solution is to defeat the enemy.”

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Author:Charles Eisenstein
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“From our immersion in scarcity arise the habits of scarcity. From the scarcity of time arises the habit of hurrying. From the scarcity of money comes the habit of greed. From the scarcity of attention comes the habit of showing off. From the scarcity of meaningful labor comes the habit of laziness. From the scarcity of unconditional acceptance comes the habit of manipulation.”

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Book:The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible
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“Our intellectual habit is to find the One Cause, our scientific programming is to measure it, and our political gearing is to attack it. When the One Cause is global, we cross our fingers and hand over responsibility and power to distant global institutions. They'll take care of it. We hope. But too often, blaming climate change means not doing anything at all.”

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Book:Climate: A New Story
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“Property is, after all, a social convention, an agreement about someone's exclusive right to use a thing in specified ways. However, we seem to have forgotten this. We seem to think that property belongs to us in some essential way, that it is of us. We seem to think that our property is part of ourselves, and that by owning it we therefore make ourselves more, larger, greater.”

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Author:Charles Eisenstein
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“The regime of control tightens inexorably in our schools, many of which now have video cameras, police patrols, chain-link fences, random unannounced locker searches, metal detectors, drug-sniffing dogs, networks of informants, undercover police posing as students, and a comprehensive system of passes so that there is a record of each student's authorized whereabouts at all times. What a perfect preparation for life in a prison or a totalitarian society!”

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Author:Charles Eisenstein
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“We in the richest societies have too many calories even as we starve for beautiful, fresh food; we have overly large houses but lack spaces that truly embody our individuality and connectedness; media surround us everywhere while we starve for authentic communication. We are offered entertainment every second of the day but lack the chance to play. In the ubiquitous world of money, we hunger for all that is intimate, personal and unique.”

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Author:Charles Eisenstein
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“We need way more intimacy than nearly anyone considers normal. Always hungry for it, we seek solace and sustenance in the closest available substitutes: television, shopping, pornography, conspicuous consumption - anything to ease the hurt, to feel connected, or to project an image by which we might be seen and known, or at least see and know ourselves.”

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Author:Charles Eisenstein
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“Let me repeat that: Our civilization is constitutionally incapable of reversing the annihilation of natural capital, or even slowing it down. Get used to that. When we really understand that, the project of reconceiving civilization itself will gain powerful impetus.”

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Book:The Ascent of Humanity: Civilization and the Human Sense of Self
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“I think the term "interbeing" has cropped up in a lot of places. It's in the atmosphere, because it's just so true, and the time for that truth to be revealed to mass society is here. It's like in those French bakeries where they don't need to add yeast to the dough, because the yeast is so ambient in the air that the dough gets quickened whether or not you add yeast to it. Many people, even without doing a whole lot of study and reading, are coming to the same kinds of conclusions and perceptions about the world as I am.”

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“So much of our politics is stuck in patterns of response that aren't working. When student performance is declining in schools, we implement more controls, more testing, more "accountability," more rigor. We apply even more of those things, from security systems to control of students' behavior through pharmaceutical drugs. That's a situation in which doing is only making things worse. You may have to go through a phase of de-programming, letting go of old habits, coming to stillness, before you can even see what the pattern of action was, and what alternatives there might be.”

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Author:Charles Eisenstein
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“I'm not prescribing non-doing as a universal response to our problems. Sometimes, something obviously needs to be done. And we retreat into a spiritual or meditative state that we fancy up by calling it mindfulness, but really it's an unhealthy detachment and a shrinking back from life. But culturally, it's much more common to be trapped in habits of reaction, whether on a systemic level or on a personal level. That's where the non-doing comes in, which is something that we don't really have room for. I think that it's something we need to embrace as part of the creative process.”

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Author:Charles Eisenstein
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“When you understand that everything happening in the world mirrors something that's happening in yourself, then you can work on the self by working on the external manifestation of that thing in the world. And in fact, there may be no other way. You can sit in meditation for a long time and be blind to huge wounds in yourself, and it's only when you're engaging with the world that the wounds become visible, externalized.”

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“It's not like activist work is a nice add-on to what's really important, the spiritual work. The two are inseparable and it goes both ways. Many people are hardcore activists for decades, and they encounter burnout, futility, or a feeling of imbalance. Sometimes they need to go so far as to drop their activism and go on a spiritual journey. They're realizing that all the stuff they're trying to change in the world isn't just out there in the world. It's in them, too. And as long as they're blind to what's in them, they're going to continually re-create it in all that they do.”

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Author:Charles Eisenstein
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“The word "spiritual" normally means something that's distinct from the fleshly or the material. It's not of the world. But that version of spirituality is bankrupt today. It had its use when the program of science divested matter from the spiritual qualities - - the qualities of a self, or of a being. When science divested the world of those qualities and made it into just a thing, rather than a self, it gave us license to treat it as just a thing, and not as something sacred, conscious, alive, intelligent. So this is tied into the whole trajectory of our civilization.”

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“The discoveries of the last couple decades are showing that properties of a self do actually inhere in matter, that matter seems to have properties of self-organization and life, even intelligence, consciousness. I can't say that science has proved these things, but it at least suggests the possibility. As we re-invest the world with sacredness, "spiritual" comes to mean something very different. If only a human being has these qualities, then spiritual work is inner. It's all about your own consciousness.”

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“You could conceive spirituality as the study of the immeasurable, of the qualitative. But that's very different from the way we typically use the word. A spiritual person, in the popular conception, is somebody who's kind of aloof from the world, introspective, meditating, communing with non-material beings. That's the spiritual realm, and we elevate it above the material realm. What's more worthy, what's more admirable? Who's the one who has done this hard work on the self, and has done a lot of "practice"? That's the spiritual person.”

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“Even if we profess to be non-judgmental, there's an inherent judgmentality and hierarchy in which the spiritual person, the conscious person, the mindful person, is more developed than the typical truck driver or waitress or heroin addict. This is a red flag, another problem built into the concept of spirituality. The truth is that every person you meet is in some way more developed than you are, and that the multiple modes of development that a human being can pursue require the whole of humanity to pursue. We're in this together. Enlightenment is a collective effort.”

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“I'll start with where we are right now. The map that I'll use is this birthing process, this kind of profound transition that we're going through, where the old narratives, the old story, the old mythology is wearing thin, beginning to fall apart. And as it does so, people hold on to it even more tightly. They haven't let go and won't let go until it becomes simply impossible to hold on to it anymore. And we're nearing that time, but not yet. Right now you can still pretend everything's normal, even though it's greatly hollowed out.”

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“Narratives that were taken for granted when I was a kid are still there, but they don't have the same depth and fervor anymore. Even the makers of the propaganda don't fully believe the propaganda. The surface structures are more frozen than they ever were, but the core is hollowing out, and it's becoming very fragile. People don't believe in the system anymore. But they're still going along with it because, one, they don't know what else is possible, they don't even know anything else is possible. Secondly, everybody else is doing it. So they go through the motions.”

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“I think people become environmentalists through experiences of beauty and grief. There was that pond that you visited when you were a child, and there were frogs and turtles. You go back there and it's dead now. The forest you went to, now there are bulldozers, now it's a strip mall. These experiences of beauty followed by grief affect us more than learning that CO2 levels are now 400 parts per million.”

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Author:Charles Eisenstein
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“We have to create conditions where people feel safe to feel and to care. That goes against a lot of our programming about how to make something change in the world. Sometimes you can pressure people into changing, you can force them, but the powers-that-be have more force than we do. I don't think we're going to win in a contest of force. I think we need to induce a change of heart. The narrative of "us versus them" is ultimately part of the problem. Traditional activism, which is about overcoming the latest bad guy, isn't deep enough. It just brings us another version of the same.”

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Author:Charles Eisenstein
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“We can't change the fossil fuel companies' behavior in isolation from the rest of the industrial system. As long as they have customers, they're going to continue to operate, whether or not we divest of their stock. However, divesting might be helpful in terms of disrupting the story that what these companies do is perfectly okay. This situation differs from apartheid in a key regard though: racial equality in South Africa was no threat whatsoever to capitalism as we know it. Ending the fossil fuel era is a much deeper change.”

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“Even if I had money to invest I wouldn't invest it in oil companies - - or their bankers, suppliers, customers ... really that means the whole stock market. I'm not opposed to divestment, but I think by itself it won't get very far. The demand is still there, the fossil fuel infrastructure is still there. Where I would like to see our political energy go is to stop ecocide on a local and bioregional level. Each new energy project involves horrible abuse of mountaintops, groundwater, forests, etc., because all the easy resources have already been extracted.”

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Author:Charles Eisenstein
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“Are you going to divest in the banks and pension funds? Plenty of people are willing to invest in stock of those companies. You can argue that when a lot of people divest, it makes the stock price artificially low, which makes their price-to-earnings ratio more favorable, which makes it a better investment for the people who don't give a damn - - and is it really going to change corporate behavior? It begins to create a climate of antagonistic opinion, the result might be that the corporate executives will retreat even more into their own selfjustifying narratives.”

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“I am certainly not proposing that we wait passively for the people in power to change their minds. I think we need to be confrontational, to expose the truth in ways that are uncomfortable and that, yes, require courage. What I caution against is using hateful rhetoric to inspire action, and I see a lot of that today. We strengthen the underlying field of hatred, dehumanization, and conquest. It certainly doesn't engage what allows people to do courageous things and to commit deeply, which is the experience of beauty, love, grief.”

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