Questioning Our Commonsense Understanding of Money
An Interview with Bernard Lietaer and Julio Olalla 

Bernard Lietaer, author, Of Human Wealth and The Future of Money, has been active in the domain of money systems for a period of 25 years in an unusual variety of functions.  While at the Central Bank in Belgium, he co-designed and implemented the convergence mechanism (ECU) to the single European currency system.  During that period, he also served as president of Belgium’s Electronic Payment System.  His consultant experience in monetary aspects on four continents ranges from multinational corporations to developing countries.  He co-founded one of the largest and most successful currency funds, becoming its general manager and currency trader.  He was professor of International Finance at the University of Louvain and is currently a visiting professor at Naropa University in Boulder, CO.  He is the co-founder of ACCESS Foundation, an educational non-profit whose objective is to communicate best practices in the domain of complementary currencies.  He is currently a fellow at the Center for Sustainable Resource Development at the University of California-Berkeley.

Julio Olalla is the founder and president of Newfield, which now has offices in Boulder, Colorado, Santiago, Chile, London, and Amsterdam.  Julio is a powerful teacher and executive coach, having worked with more than 50,000 people in ten different countries over the last 25 years. He is best known for his masterful skills in supporting others through complex personal and professional issues with great heart, wisdom and innovative thinking.  Julio is one of the founders and developers of the field of Ontological Coaching™, the most powerful approach to and methodology in coaching today.  In the organizational realm, he has worked with senior management of numerous international companies, developing stronger, wiser leadership and management teams. Originally a lawyer in the Chilean government, Julio and his family made their way to the United States after the September 1973 coup d'état.  Julio is the author of From Knowledge to Wisdom: Essays on the Crisis in Contemporary Learning. 

Together with Bernard and Julio, Newfield supports the co-creation of a new, collective understanding of and relationship with money that is healthier for the planet.

Interviewer:  You each speak in your books and seminars about a change of consciousness in mainstream thinking; about a world where the long-term interests of mankind and sustainability of the planet should temper our current education and business practices.  Can you each begin to talk about how your work intersects each other’s, especially as it relates to money?

Julio:  I believe that if we think of shifting human consciousness in any way or we want to understand how the world shows up for us, then language definitely needs to be considered.  How we structure our views of the world is structured in language.  My earlier education in the fields in which I work was in the philosophy of language and how language, which is so transparent to us, actually shapes the world we see.

And part of my work has been about bringing this critical understanding of language out of just being an interesting theory to being a very practical application and tool for people to transform the way they think, live, and act in the world. 

There are a lot of stories and examples I could tell you about this...but how this connects with Bernard’s revolutionary work in the field of money and economics is that I realized that there has been one territory or domain of human experience that has rarely, if ever, been questioned, and that is the phenomenon of money.  We think economics without thinking money.  We hold money as a given without questioning how our commonsense understanding of it actually shapes how we relate to it.

And, as you know, my work in the world is about revealing the presuppositions in which we live for the sake of generating new thinking to deal with the concerns and challenges we face which the old thinking doesn’t address.  What’s interesting is that we don’t call our presuppositions our presuppositions; we call them reality.  We believe that’s the way things are...we take them as truth rather than possible interpretations.

In reading Bernard’s books and working with him over the years, I realized that what Bernard’s work is about is one of the most powerful leverage points for human transformation in a very clear and concrete way.

Bernard:  One of the connections or common ground of our work is in communication; in other words, language.  Language is about communicating with others, and money is about communicating with others.  Most of our exchanges in relationships with others outside our immediate family involve money. 

The common ground Julio and I share is in questioning the transparency, the obvious, the unconscious components of communication, both language and money.  In other words, whether we are communicating ideas or communicating economically, we are typically unconscious of what we are doing.  Becoming aware or conscious is the first step toward new behaviors and thinking.

What we also have in common is our belief that a consciousness shift is necessary as a species if we are to survive on this planet, and also that this shift is, in fact, happening.   We are in the middle of this process already.  There is a significant percentage of society that is becoming aware that our conventional ways of thinking are not going to be sustainable.  And I’m talking about sustainability here in the broadest sense, not just ecologically. 

Julio:  And to make a further connection, in the field of philosophy at the beginning of the 20th century, there was an enormous revolution.  It was called the linguistic revolution, and it was the time when the understanding of language was fundamentally questioned.  Language went from simply being a shared “code” to describe reality to being a force that actually generates or creates reality.  How I use offers and promises and requests and tell my “story” actually generates what is possible for me in action.  And another part of the revolution was that language was now seen as action, not just words relating to action, but action itself.  When we speak, we act. 

And there are many, many distinctions I could offer here that I don’t have time for in this conversation, but related to money, you can see that money is an agreement.  Mutual promises and requests and offers are being made in the exchange of it.

The work that Bernard and I do, unearthing the presuppositions in which we live, is intimately connected because there is absolutely no way to deal with or heal our relationship with money without also being very aware of the phenomenon of language and how it impacts our possibilities for new learning and actions.

Bernard:  And an even stronger connection in our work is around emotions and their impact on our capacity for action.  Emotion is the space out of which language as well as our monetary exchanges arises.  Advertising people know this very well.  They have gotten very refined in convincing you that you are incomplete unless you spend money on x...whether x is a car or shoe or a house in the right place.  In fact, the consumer is an emotional junky.  And the territory of learning that Julio has pushed further than anyone I know is in the ontology of emotions.   We are always acting from some emotion.  We also have our relationship to and with money in some emotions that ultimately impact our choices and our well-being.

Julio:  You cannot conceive of language without emotions.  There is no way to use language without being in a particular emotional field.  Bernard often speaks about the wounds of money...for those who have it or those who don’t, they have similar wounds. And it is extraordinary to see that every aspect of their communication in life is directly impacted by their emotional relationship with money.  And, of course, the other is true in that their emotional life is shaped by their relationship to money. 

Bernard:  Our conceptual and rational thinking has led us into the difficulty we have with our relationship to money.  The homo economio (human in the system of economics) is a hyper-rational being—he dismisses anything that is not rational as irrelevant, and he optimizes utility for personal satisfaction regardless of any emotional content.  Now, that’s the theory.  The practice is just the opposite.  We are in fact extraordinarily emotional about money and what we do with it, and that is completely denied in our culture. 

Additionally, money in particular is considered completely value-neutral.  It does not affect the relationships with the people you use the money with, or it is not supposed to affect the kind of exchanges you make.  It’s just a convenient medium of exchange to make rational decisions.  That is the hypothesis that our monetary system, and therefore relationship with money, is built on and all of it is invalid and unquestioned.  It is responsible for the great suffering we have when it comes to money.

You can see that there are a lot of underlying issues in our relationship to money that must be looked at if we are to change that relationship in a healthy way...

Julio:  I think the biggest revelation for me in working with Bernard over the years is our false belief that money is “value neutral,” that it is a passive medium of exchange. 

Money comes from a structure, from a view of the world that contains within the structure fear of scarcity and greed.  It’s not that each of us, as individuals, have fear about money (and we may have); it’s that the monetary system itself – because of the way it was built and the structure it was built within – has within it fear of scarcity and greed.

I have led programs for very wealthy people, and without exception all the participants have enormous issues around trust and a lot of strained relationships with others.  It is such a common phenomenon and their stories are so consistent that I can’t just say it is their psychological issue.  I can’t write it off that they all happen to have difficulty relating to money and to others because they are flawed in character or have personal “issues” in relating to others.   

What if the monetary system itself brings with it the fear, scarcity, and greed?  And so, few people have undertaken to look at this and the consequences it is having in our world, especially related to sustainability.

Bernard:  Breakdowns of trust are inherent in the system.  The system is also inherently and automatically polarized.  If you have a lot of money, it is much more likely you’ll get a lot more, statistically, and if you don’t have much, it is very difficult to make enough money.  It is a universal experience generated by the kind of system we operate within.

Bank debt money can only keep its value if it is scarcer than its usefulness.  So we have created a money system that can only function if money is scarce.  If you get rid of the scarcity, it becomes value-lessed.   That scarcity-based system is not innocent when it comes to our own personal relationship to money.  It’s just that we don’t see it, so we think our problems with money stem only from our own incompetencies to deal with it.

Julio:  And there we can make an enormous and positive contribution to others.  We can help them see what is inherent in the system and where their own stories and incompetencies get in the way of a healthier relationship to money.

Interviewer:  It’s remarkable that you’re writing about this in the field of economics. It is very unusual, Bernard.

Bernard:  What we are talking about here is social or collective development.  For 20 years, we’ve put the spotlight on personal development; now it is time to focus on social development. 

Societies change and need to become aware of themselves, just as individuals needed to change and become aware of their own selves.

I do believe that our society is becoming aware of itself.  And a civilization becomes aware of itself when it is dying; when it is ready for mutation; when we have reached maturity and are ready for major changes.  I believe that is what is happening.

For more information, email Lynne Williams or phone +1.303.904.3177.