Chapter 18

The Unmasculated Agents of Change

Women do give freely from their breasts to their children (and in infinitely many other ways) but, since the penis is over-emphasized, we are seen as giving from a 'lack' of the 'mark' and, since scarcity has been created to privilege having, we are often actually giving in an economic situation of lack. All of this is exacerbated because men give up the gift economy. Exchange 'gives' the gift of not-giving, while breasts embody the gift of giving.

We could speculate that the breasts are the original model for the index: the nipple is the index, and the baby's mouth is the 'object' which is singled out for attention. Then the 'points' of view are turned around. For the baby, her mouth is the center of attention, and the nipple is the 'object' that is singled out. Then the 'object' does actually point back--and gives milk. Or for the mother, if the 'object' is not pointing back with mouth and tongue, it at least 'gets the point' and receives milk.

Let us look at having as having breasts, having something to give.¹ We are mammals. Though males have small breasts, there are, of course, many ways in which they and women who are not nursing babies can nurture others. (The penis is only actually 'given' to another person when boys become adults, but it is given to view and to comparison much earlier.)

These ways have been misread, hidden and disguised by the discrediting and isolation of mothering in infancy and by the patriarchal focus on the sample, exchange, reflection, having and keeping. The ways of giving include, among other things, language, problem solving, and producing goods and services as a supply for needs without the intermediate mechanism of

¹Is that why we are required to cover them, because they bring up the issue of abundance and the gift paradigm?

exchange--itself derived from masculation. 'Having' is also having hands, the instruments which can be used for giving and for giving care. They do not serve only for tool-making (or worse, arms-making).

The Self-replication of the Sample

The gift the father appears to give to the boy (the gift of the penis) is the gift of similarity or equality, and the value given to equality--to the equation itself, to the boy as equal to the father as the non-nurturing norm who was related to the grandfather in the same way. It is a loaded gift because its psychological use in the society, its misinterpretation, creates an artificial need. Then the child has to try to satisfy the need by becoming like the father. Moreover, the father needs the son to be similar to him, so that he can achieve his position as sample, his own gender mandate as the equivalent to which not only all women but other (smaller) males are relative.

In patriarchy, the father has to show that he has reproduced himself. He has to show that, with the penis index-sample, and being himself the male sample he also has the creative power to make others like himself (showing that the creative power is not all in the mother sample whom he has eclipsed.) It is thus not just the relation of possession that is at the basis of men's obsession with paternity, but carrying out the mandate of the concept form as the realization of their individual, gender and species identities. Although this 'logic' functions across generations, it makes for an altogether false agenda.²

I think it is probably the superimposition of the different one-many incarnations of the concept upon each other that has been the Frankenstein which has created the white monster of patriarchy. In societies where the mother's brother has the

²Women can also follow their father's footsteps here, by competing with and eclipsing other women who are in a mother role. They are themselves, then, usually eclipsed by men. Feminists need to realize that it is not by taking more hidden gifts and obliterating the giver that we will ever make the world a better place. Rather, we should promote the gift logic and honor the model of those who practice it in all areas of life.

educational paternal function, the phallus does not have to be emphasized as the sample which actually 'creates' the boy. In these societies the transmission of culture through teaching and discipline is distinguished from sexuality; the person playing the disciplinary role (the mother's brother) does not have to require that the boy be like him. In societies where this is the case, it appears that there is little violence, and that rape is almost unknown.³

Males, like females, need to remain in a giftgiving and receiving mode, so that their identities can be formed by material and sign co-munication, creating a subjectivity constructed upon an ever-changing nurturing interaction with others (an interaction which also includes a great deal of reciprocal modeling and turn-taking), rather than upon an artificial and absurd injunction to achieve an abstract position of equality with the sample. To make matters worse, this position of equality has hidden within it in a contradictory way two levels of superiority (inequality). It creates a superior category of those who are unlike giftgivers and like the sample (and might, therefore, become samples), and those who are superior because they are already samples. The injunction instates competition where it need not have been, and makes dominance and over-taking the validated mode of behavior for half of humanity.

Because it imposes itself as norm, this mode then extends to all of humanity, making those with other values subservient, invisible and not quite human. It places those who are 'equal' in a category which is given to then by the giftgivers, and which appears to confer upon the 'members' a right to make others give to them by the use of violence and/or organized hierarchies--armies or police. By reapplying the same concept logic (which requires a 'one-to-many' relation to develop generality) to this situation, we find that what is most appropriate to the logic, though not to the happiness of human beings, is that a few be the general samples for their different

³See Maria-Barbara Watson-Franke, "The Lycian Heritage and the Making of Men," in Women's Studies International Forum, 16, 6, 1993, pp. 569-579.

categories--which means, of course, that the many do not become 'samples.' Thus we have, for example, many people organized into national groups, each of which has internal hierarchies led by a few men, with one man at the head.

By taking the agenda of the concept form as the logic of the species, and those who succeed in it as the sample for the species (forgetting that women are doing things differently), dominance, over-taking and the attempt to become the concept sample and the species sample become the validated forms of behavior.

Sadly, women have nurtured this state of affairs and the efforts of the sons and husbands who are trying to succeed in it. Now, we have begun to participate in it ourselves. Fortunately, our lack of the penis has shown once more that it is not the species sample and is not necessary for success in the system. While this may have rendered suspect male superiority, it has not dismantled the agenda and the logic, but only displaced them onto other categories. Now, for example, all the people in privileged nations can consider themselves as privileged, or 'samples,' regarding those from other nations who 'should' therefore give to and serve them. All those of one race, both males and females, can consider themselves superior to other races, and they can 'prove' it by dominating other races (and by making them give to them, taking on 'womanly' nurturing tasks).

While all of this may produce horrible and opprobrious behavior of individuals of one group against others, they are all carrying out a male mandate that has been considered 'human' by Western European and many other societies for centuries. It is thus a system based on a false logic that must be held responsible, not the individuals, and it is the system that must be dismantled. Changing the individuals without changing the logic and the agenda only leaves room for other individuals to pick it up. As the old saw has it: "If everybody started out with the same amount, a few people would always get to the top." This just means that, until we understand the sickness and heal it, some people will continue to act out the agenda to the detriment of the others who don't

have the 'drive' or 'ambition' (read: 'who don't have the need to be samples'). The sickness is a kind of self-replicating 'virus' (deriving perhaps from 'vir,' the Latin word for 'man').

Dominator 'Marks'

An example of the imposition of one group as sample upon others is the European invasion of the Americas. It was not just the technological superiority of the Europeans that caused their genocide of the Native people, but the fact that the Europeans were carriers of masculation at many levels: misogyny, private property, language, economics, religion, philosophy, child rearing, law, architecture, agriculture, etc.--all of which were very different in Native cultures. It could have gone the other way. The Europeans could have learned from the Native peoples instead of destroying them.

After imposing themselves as the 'superior' category with regard to a whole hemisphere, our forefathers also took on the one-many property of other human beings as slaves, forcing them to give the gifts which created their profit and allowed for the slave owners' (phallic) capital accumulation. The category of 'superiors' needs to be easily identifiable by large numbers of people. This is the function having a penis has served in categorization. White skin serves the same purpose. In both cases, the 'mark' of 'superiority' reverses the role of the mother, making the deviant become the norm, and the giftgiver appear to be inferior and deviant. In a society in which masculation and exchange are not the modes of life, this dynamic would not exist.

The hypermasculated Europeans killed and enslaved the less masculated peoples of the Americas and Africa, thereby 'proving' that they were in a 'superior'(more masculine) category, which was the norm and which permitted their infinite symbolic priapic growth--which masculated them again into an upper class of the 'superior' category. Having a lot of money also allowed them to buy and produce and build objects by which they could again be identified as belonging to the 'superior' category--the privileged

among the privileged. Houses, vehicles, clothes, jewelry, skyscrapers, guns, education, travel can all be bought and are perceptually clear and macroscopic evidence of 'having,' which locates the 'havers' in the privileged category again and again.

Now I believe that the so-called 'First World' countries have become the 'superior categories,' identifiable by their physical location and citizenship documents, and they are forcing the 'Third World' countries to give to them through political, cultural and economic mechanisms, which are generally invisible to the citizenry. The exploitation that is occurring might continue to be invisible were it not for the influx of immigrants who are wisely trying to locate themselves in the geographically privileged category. The danger is that, through the mechanisms of the 'Free Market,' we will intensify the pattern of male-dominating countries and female-serving countries--finally developing into slave countries and slave master countries. Masculation is being writ large on the earth. (And I have always marveled at the appropriateness of Castro's name.)

Existence Quantified

Mothers' other-tending gives us, among other things, bodies, language and socialization towards our gender roles. The possibility of receiving more through definition motivates us, like the possibility of being named 'male.' Profit-takers make others into their masculating mothers. They make others give to them, showing they 'deserve' the profit by giving to others conditionally, using them as means.

Perhaps it is also because of the lack of access to the system of a qualitatively diverse langue, and thus our inability to explore a variety of enunciatable values in their relation to each other, that money and exchange value maintain their social hegemony--while appearing and disappearing very quickly, as they change hands in the exchange process itself. The thing 'signified' by the material word 'money' is the product (the would-be gift) undergoing the shift of the substitution of the logic (and the act)

of substitution for the logic (and the act) of giving, i.e. the exchange. The value-in-communication of that 'signified' is exchange value, expressed in a particular quantity of money. Although the langue is not present to maintain a totality of qualitatively different value-mediators, the self-similarity of the substitution of the money for the product and of the logic of exchange for giving creates a self-validating mechanism which continually puts exchange in evidence while hiding giftgiving.⁴

Capitalism unites masculation and exchange, giving each a new goal. For masculinity, the new goal is to accumulate wealth priapically; for exchange, it is to repeat the process of masculation again and again, thus accumulating and having 'more,' deserving an ever-greater quantitative equivalent or masculating 'name,' and putting the owner into the category to which ever-more unseen free gifts are given.

Existence is identified with masculation, and thus becomes quantifiable. This gives people an incentive to have more, so as to be more. Power and potency are merged in a negative upward spiral, by which some 'successful' men (and women) can become more masculated than others--exist more--by having more quantitative 'value.' This makes them seem to deserve to exist more, which allows the upper class to self-validate and to judge those whom they exploit as 'less deserving to exist,' or perhaps already 'less existing.'

Thinking is taken as the basis for the adversarial authoritarian (exchange) identity. The capacity to perform definitions and substitutions is a recognizable constant process, which provides internal constancy (I = I) and focus in the situation of mutual exclusion necessary for private property, and also for the success of competition and ego-oriented activity. (A positive internal identity would otherwise be created through the repeated and variegated processes of giftgiving and receiving.) Exchange instrumentalizes the satisfaction of the needs of others for the satisfaction of one's own needs, and it is valued again and

⁴Money is attached to an image of itself. The president or king's face on coins is perhaps the very image of self-similarity.

again above giving. Those whose will is involved in having (and having more than others) appear to think and to be rational, while those who are still practicing giftgiving (and deriving their identities from it) appear 'irrational.'

Capital is Masculated Will

Capitalism is masculation by accumulation. It is less sexist than the definition of gender because it allows some women to be 'haves' (even 'self-made haves'). However, even successful women may still seem to exist--and to deserve to exist--less than masculated men. Their greater contact with emotions, which we might call the internal presentation of needs, places women partly outside the rationality of capitalism. Then emotions appear to be the 'reason' why women (and men) who have the emotions are not well adapted to the exchange economy.

In a situation in which humans are adversarial and dominating as a community, using each other as means, human e-motion is only a sketch of what might have been possible outside the self-similar 'ratios.' It is our ir-ratio-nal emotion that continues to go out to others' needs, even when we are blocked, cut off from the actions that could fulfill the needs. Perhaps women do continue to feel these feelings more than masculated men because we are still doing giftgiving. They are a way of plotting a course towards a better world. Joy is the celebration of needs fulfilled, the divinely-paced dance of the soul freed from the cage of exchange, living in harmony with itself and others at last.

Emotion--rage--also surrounds harm, which is the damaging creation of new needs, and much emotion opposes injustice as institutionalized harm. However, the question of justice is bound up with the need to define some kinds of actions as harmful. It would be possible to create such definitions without the reprisal that is part of the exchange paradigm, and instead to prevent crimes by satisfying the needs that cause them before the motivation to commit them has had a chance to develop. This

kind of solution is made impossible by the scarcity required by the exchange paradigm, and by the glaring injustices that remain un-defined or appear to be part of an unchangeable system.

Capital is the masculated ego. It is incarnate value-attribution to the shift into exchange, the masculated will, which directs energy towards amassing more wealth and power. It is the desire and ability to be more. In fact, more money is more being (more ability to substitute, to take-the-place-of). The 'free will' of capital, like the free market, isn't really free. It is channeled towards the survival and supremacy of itself, according to the mandate of masculation. In other words, it is not free to practice giftgiving and nurturing (contradicting itself, self-sacrificing, not creating scarcity for others, not creating its own increase of abundance). Giftgiving is irrelevant to it. No value is given to giftgiving because value for exchange is caught in its self-similarity, and the irrelevance of giftgiving covers up the oppressiveness of exploitation through 'equal' exchange.

Both the free market and capitalistic free will are oxymorons, if you consider the term 'free' as 'gratis.' (Even shopping is free labor, but unrecognized--the labor of 'free' choice. We are not free not to shop and not to choose--because we will not eat. If we do not have the money, we are not free to shop and to buy. We do not 'deserve' to be.) But even understanding 'free' as 'liberated from constraint,' the market and the will are free for their practicers at the cost of greater constraint for their victims. The perpetrators of the free market and of capitalistic free will are free from 'other-orientation,' from the commitment to serve others' needs, and they have to be if they are to succeed. Some of our multinationals are even more masculated than our individual sons.

What we think of as the ethical stance of free will is just the possibility of individual masculated egos to choose according to gentler values in contradiction to their socialization to power, or allow themselves to be restrained by the equations of 'justice' (while most women already choose according to a 'different voice'). By availing themselves of their discarded ability to

nurture, men contradict their masculated wills to dominate, and to be more, accepting the 'constraints' of other-orientation.

Meanwhile, those who have been socialized to nurture are free to imitate masculated ways, adapting to a sick society. They can develop an exchange ego through working within the social projections of masculation like the market, espousing the values of patriarchy. However, women continue to be socialized differently, towards nurturing and, therefore, are always potentially in a situation of dis-ease within the system and in conflict with themselves internally.

Women also tend to choose 'humility,' criticizing themselves for a masculation that does not apply to them, ridding themselves of a defect they do not have. They criticize masculation as if it were a part of themselves, rather than recognizing it as, at most, their own internalization of a self-similar pattern of males (with whom they are not 'equal') and of the society at large. Thus, women fill churches, therapy sessions and self-help groups, inspecting their souls for trace-elements of arrogance and power-tripping, when in fact they are the victims of that masculated behavior by husbands, bosses, schools, universities, businesses, governments, and other patriarchal institutions. While providing a community and common values, most 'healing' approaches still hide the giftgiving values which give them life behind a male-dominant smoke screen of the masculated values of individual independence, responsibility, guilt and retribution.

If we look at capital as the masculated will, we see it as free to gain power, to 'be more' at others' expense to infinite accumulation. The practice of philanthropy allows the capitalist to make the 'free' choice of 'other-orientation' after the fact, while s/he continues to 'make money.' Charity allows the capitalist to become a 'more complete' person, balancing exchange with giftgiving and, at the same time, satisfying some of the needs that have been created by masculated patriarchal ways and institutions.⁵ While these attitudes may be better than

⁵Even groups like United Way which collect millions of small contributions from the many funnel them into projects that take care of individuals and do not rock the boat.

unmitigated exploitative moneymaking, they only improve the lot of a few individuals, while making the individual charity-giver a better individual. The ego-orientation of the system captures our giftgiving as it encourages us to use our gifts to others for our own self-improvement.

It is only by giving to social change from a meta level--with a meta message that says, "This co-municative gift is made to change the system towards giftgiving," that the capital-will becomes general, liberated and liberating--giving to change the (exchange) system that created it. This choice frees capitalism from masculation and, by providing the financial resources, frees everyone finally to be nurturing, to practice a gift economy, a women's way. Those who are in positions of privilege cannot create change by pretending they are not privileged, or by simply giving away their 'marks' to become individually unprivileged. Rather, they need to find ways to use their privileges at a meta level to validate the model and logic of giving rather than the model of exchange.

There is a phrase which I heard as attributed to Winston Churchill: "The point is not to distribute poverty equally but to distribute wealth equally." Apart from the use of the word 'equally,' I think that the idea is very important. What we need to focus on is wealth for all, not a new system of poverty for all. It is not by making ourselves equally poor that we will change the system for the good of all. In fact, only abundance allows giftgiving to flourish. Therefore, we must use our wealth of resources, the money accumulated in capital, our land, our education, experience, communicative skills, political, psychological, and business savvy, our groups and networks to create an intelligent, non-violent transition from the system based on exchange to a system based on giftgiving in abundance.

A step in the right direction would be to stop the waste spending that is now taking place on armaments and the military worldwide. Another step would be to for-give the so-called 'Third World' debt, realizing that the debt is an artificial, exploitative mechanism which has actually already been paid back many times

over. At the same time, stopping the destruction of the environment would ensure that abundance could continue to accrue in the future, rather than disappearing into an artificially impoverished and toxic ecosystem. The well-planned reduction of exploitation and waste would allow the accumulation of wealth which would permit giftgiving among individuals, as well as among groups and nations.

Women's Leadership

Because of the way the categories of masculation have proliferated, many of us belong to several different categories. We are privileged as white, but unprivileged as poor. We are privileged as wealthy, but unprivileged as women. We are privileged as male, but unprivileged as persons of color. We need to unite across the unprivileged categories because we are conscious of suffering, but we also need to unite from within privileged categories to remedy the suffering, to change the system for all. In fact, if we re-establish the mothering model and equip ourselves with the logic of the gift economy, we will give attention to others' needs and satisfy them, not only at an individual, but at a social level. The true overturning is not to put one category in a privileged position in place of another, but to put into effect the general norm-al mother-based other-orientation that bridges and breaks down categories altogether.

Masculation validates self-interest at all levels (even group or category self-interest). We must also be able to validate other-interest at all levels. The answer does not lie in categories at all, but in giving and receiving, co-municating with each other as human beings, and collaborating to solve the general problems, the needs of all, by changing the system built on masculation.

This is the paradigm shift that the New Age and other spiritual movements have been longing for. It is not based only on consciousness--though consciousness plays an important part in the necessary change of perspective--but on the real and practical satisfaction of needs and solutions to problems. Such a

practice must be aided by cultural sensitivity and foresight, devising ways of satisfying psychological and spiritual needs, such as the needs for dignity and respect, for the independence and self determination of everyone who is transitioning out of the exchange and into the gift mode. The paradigm shift can be created by women, crossing all categories. Its operators are already everywhere in the international women's movement. The unmasculated agents of change are already planted in every household.

Chapter 19

Dreaming and Reality

I think that our subconscious-conscious division might be an internal replay of the two paradigms. (Perhaps even the functioning of the right and left brains plays out this division.) Of course, this is hard to see because, at least while we are awake, it is always within consciousness that we are present to ourselves. And in consciousness, we are often serving our own definitions of ourselves, carrying out their self-fulfilling prophecies.

The gifts of words hover somewhere in our mental cupboards, ready to pop out whenever necessary. They are there vibrating in resonance with everybody else's words of the same kind. As we move through the external world, everything we encounter has the quality of a potential relation to our words and their combinations, and/or to the words of others. Our communicative needs for bonding with each other in relation to the world arise and are satisfied by the collective products of previous generations, which we collectively and individually recombine and use to create ever-new gifts, to which the parts of our world are related as their substitutes in communication.

We create our subjectivities ad hoc, together, by giving gifts to one another both materially and linguistically. The great potential for human development through this process is hampered by patriarchy. Only enough of our collective humanity remains for us to continue to understand each others' speech, transmit information, and function as somewhat efficient promoters for the egos we have developed through definition, self-definition, and exchange. The fact that we do somehow continue to live is evidence, not of the functionality of the masculated ego, but of the creativity of giftgiving and life

itself, which carry us along in their flow in spite of the ego's self-reflecting empty shell and the self-similar society.

In patriarchy, the community we form by communication is usually shattered into many pieces or remains a wish, an abstraction floating somewhere behind our backs (a might have been, an ideal, a different possible world). Our word-gifts have been turned towards the purposes of exchange through advertising and propaganda, and we motivate ourselves according to priority lists which define us and others, putting ourselves as privileged ones at the top, bolstered by privileged one possessions or relations and positions within other hierarchies. We do not even notice the presence of society in our words, much less in our lives, because private property (even of our consciousnesses) does not encourage us to look outside at others as the source of our good or as having needs we can satisfy. Our thoughts appear to be our 'own,' because we are isolated from others. Instead, as individuals we are the alienated community, thinking.

If we could go back to materially nurturing one another, we would recreate our community and ourselves on a more solid earthly basis, healing each other and the planet. Instead, we look at ego values and not at bodies--the egos of the rich compete against the bodies of the poor. Evidence of parasitism abounds. Every nuclear test site, dump, mine, oil well attests to the destruction of the mother for the purpose of the gifts renamed 'profit' that exchange brings with it.

Our sharing has been pushed into a mythological past (or infantile bliss) and into by-products of our ego activity, and has become the collective unconscious since con-sciousness (knowledge together) in our society is based on definitions and exchange. Perhaps it is not Persephone, daughter of Demeter, who is the most important character in the Greek mythological story of a mother's loss but Hades, the son of Gaia, the boy who became the god of the underworld.

Knowledge of the Heart

Our hearts pump our blood to take the oxygen and nutriment out to our cells that need it, then when the blood is exhausted, it comes back to the heart to be nurtured. This is a physiological archetype that the exchange paradigm prevents us from following. Individually, too, our subconscious prompts us with buried information, and ideas come to us from nowhere, out of the blue, gifts from an unknown source we perhaps call our Selves, imagination, God.

Humans are basically loving beings. Our social structures and the logic of exchange are patriarchal distortions of love. The sharing and caring which we experience in the original mother-child relation are often the only experience of free love we have, and they become the model for us for the rest of our lives. This is the reason early childhood is so important for our psychology. All the rest of our lives, we have to deal with the various distortions and blockages of love. Our nostalgia for childhood, even for the womb, is nostalgia for a primary period of health which has never returned, because there is no social or economic structure that permits it. Our independence is so distorted that we belittle dependence instead of honoring it. We insist on standing alone, and yet we are a mass of individuals crying to be touched, fed, caressed, supported.

The free circulation of the blood between the mother and the child in the womb is the natural paradigm of a healthy society. It is the model of life-giving collaboration, where both hearts pump the same blood and nutriment is shared. Like the wind that moves from a higher to a lower pressure area, good circulation moves from those who have more to those who have less. Once the child is born and draws the air into her needing lungs, beginning her interaction with the free outside world, she receives and perceives as much as she is able of the abundant environment and gives her new humanness to the gaze of the onlookers, her touch to other bodies, saying who she is and will be.

The circulation of the womb has begun on a new level--out from within a body to between bodies. The hearts no longer pump the same blood but pump laughter, language, motions, gestures--to the need which is recognized, goods and caretaking flow. The child creatively receives, is an interpersonal creature, an interpersonal heart, a subject of attention, who also gives attention. Milk flows to the needy stomach through the baby's own actively receiving mouth. It is not denied. There is no blackmail, bribe, payment. Though her signals may let us know her needs, these are not exchanges but free products issuing naturally from her whole being.

Like synapses where nerves do not transmit impulses through direct contact, but by means of processes over a different space, life in many forms is transmitted freely by the mother to the child, by the child to the mother and to the others who love her. Mother and child are pleased with the freedom of their giving. Neither is embarrassed by the relation of dependence, which requires and permits the circulation, just as no one is embarrassed by our dependence on air, which requires and permits our breathing. We can take what is freely given and give freely in this relation, enjoying and touching each other from the outside, sensation passing through and into sensation, sharing in time outside the womb.

Since our society is embarrassed by dependence--by the need for free giving--but actually would do anything to have it, we build ever larger barriers against it, including in the barriers a certain amount of flexibility, places to let off the pressure that builds up in us, because we cannot have what we really need. Yet, we keep working towards having or getting more than enough ourselves, so that it will seem free to us--only to us, not to others. Since we tap only our own experience as babies with our mothers and later find that the world and its rules are different, we may think that nobody else ever had or needs to have the experience of free nurturing.

Instead, the free circulation from those who can give to those who need, the ability to ask freely, to receive freely, to give freely, is the basic process through which the flow of life circulates

unimpeded. The consciousness of the various things which are given and received is shared as perception or language are shared, freely in all the transformations, as the gifts pass from one person to another, from nature to people, from people to nature and to different people. This is the new consciousness of nature, an evolution, a new shared life of life.

Giving and receiving life is not confined to conception, pregnancy or physically birthing babies. Rather, it takes place in every act of need satisfaction. Exchange, by placing itself between the giver and the receiver, the giver and the gift, the receiver and the gift, has obstructed the synapse and confused us. The processes are distorted, unfree. We no longer intelligently and creatively give and receive life, but base our interactions upon masculation. A prize has recently been offered to the first male who becomes pregnant, but giving and receiving is exploited and belittled everywhere outside the womb.

Our Common Dream

We could look at judgments of reality and unreality (and of waking and dreaming) as depending on whether or not the exchange mode and the masculated concept relation have come into play. Dreaming explores other syncretic relations, frees samples from their phallic investment and satisfies our needs for understanding through symbolism, which is not one-to-one or one-to-many but 'over-determined'where one image represents a number of different and seemingly unrelated issues, items or events. Complexes and syncretisms¹ of various kinds allow for associations we might never make within our hierarchical classification system (and social class system).

¹People who associate (form a society) with one another usually practice giving-and-receiving with each other in a variety of waysand would do it more if they did not live in an exchange economy. That is why giving and receiving are a key to the idea of 'associations' found in dreams or among words. A schizophrenic who was asked to perform Vigotsky's experiment told the experimenters that the 'sample' was a policeman telling a crowd of people what to do. We have traced enough self-similar patterns at this point that the policeman-crowd relation can easily be seen as a 'one-many' concept derivative. The policeman actually dominates the association-crowd, while the schizophrenic gives us the gift of a needed connection ('association') which has not been made. (See Hanfmann and Kasinin, op.cit.)

In dreams, our images do not have to toe the line, relating themselves to samples or to words, providing us with factual socially validated help for managing our lives in the 'real' waking world. Instead, they can free-wheel it, satisfying our needs as soon as they come to mind, or memory. They are subjective, me-first sometimes, but without the hegemony of the masculated ego. In dreams, our needs are gratified according to the pleasure principle, without our having to work for their satisfaction. Our real needs are symbolized, our intuition addresses them. Real help is given. In dreams, we are treating ourselves as if we lived in a gift economy. The reason why dreaming is only subjective and based on wishful thinking is that the external world is framed by exchange. Author-itarian therapists might frown at this 'regressive' and 'infantile' mode, but why not see it from the other point of view, as utopian and maternal? Dreaming seems to be the satisfaction of co-municative needs on an individual basis. If we could satisfy our co-municative needs collectively, we could all live our dreams.

Upon waking, a reality judgment comes into play at the same time that the one-many cognitive strategy kicks in. Then we use the one to uphold the other. We marvel at how silly our dreams were, discount our syncretic thinking, thus validating our one-many thinking. This makes us deny or forget and disqualify our dreams as inferior to our waking states, perhaps because our strategies for remembering are one-many as well. Children syncretically belong in the 'category' of dreams, as silly, non-rational and non-phallic. Women and wishes are also often relegated to the dream netherworld.

By over-valuing and phallically investing conceptual thinking in the society at large and projecting it into the structures of institutions, we have collectively created a social reality which is different from our dreams and inhospitable to that way of thinking. As we validate 'reality' each time we wake up, we also discount the kind of reality our dreams are made of and the many non-phallic parts of our waking world. Thus, it may happen that, every time we wake up, we unwittingly assert

dominance, misogyny and the hatred of children, of nature and of giftgiving, as we say to ourselves, "That was not real--this is real."

If nothing else, dreams do satisfy one need shared by all--they provide an alternative, much as Communism did to Capitalism (and vice-versa), communicating to us that the 'real' world is not the only world, and masculated, phallically-invested conceptual thinking is not the only way of thinking. If dreaming functions according to unmasculated gift processes, it is a clue to a better world, like language and mothering. Humanity's common dream is the map of a world to come. The injunction to humanity to 'wake up' is mistaken. Instead, we need to change re-ality to make our dreaming come true.²

The Imposition of Re-ality

Language itself speaks to us, and it tells us that the collective unconscious has seen some things that we ourselves have collectively ignored. I believe language is full of clues to just the issues we have been discussing--the masculated concept, exchange, hierarchies and giftgiving. The words we are presently mentioning on this page are clues along the royal road to the discovery of the nature of 'real-ity.' (Spanish real is royal.) What the clues are telling us is that you can't get there on the royal road alone. You have to approach the 'subject' from another direction.

So kingship or thingship, from Latin--rex (king) or res (thing)--is telling us about the 'one-many' basis of re-ality. The pun existed already in Latin. It points to self-similar dominance patterns in our knowledge of the re-al, outside the giftgiving grain. And the ego as 'king' is also part of what defines this re-ality, coinciding with it in structure, while the giftgiving self remains outside it. Re-ality is a common ground, which originally comes from giftgiving, but is ruled by phallically-invested cap-italistic concept thinking.

²I would like to mention that the spiritual practices which promote gratitude upon awakening keep us partly in the gift mode for a few more moments, providing some continuity between our 'real' worlds and our dreams.

Basing thinking on concepts disqualifies differences--or at least makes them important mainly as signals of another concept. "What concept do you belong to?" appears to be the real question. We leave aside your needs and how peculiarly interesting and beautiful you are, the sparkle in your eye. Instead we ask if you look enough like the model or sample to belong to the concept of 'beautiful,' the concept of 'lovable,' of 'successful business person' or 'academic.'

Is the affirmation of masculated re-ality the recognition of an external given, or the imposition of a gift which we have to receive? Perhaps we feel obligated, because of the exchange principle, to 'give back' something to re-ality. Re-cognition perhaps? Re-ality satisfies our distorted common needs, but may leave aside our healthy un-realistic individual needs. What are the consequences of not receiving the present? Abandonment? Insanity? And of receiving it? Do we give up the truths of our subjective view for the masculated collective view, so we won't be left out of the concept of human and sane? If we refuse re-ality, are we being ungrateful, selfish, 'self-indulgent,' as one psychiatrist said about mental illness? If we go crazy, perhaps we are just displacing our reality judgment from a collectively mediated to a subjective stance. We do that because we are all the 'walking wounded.'

A Selfish Collective View

A common judgment of reality is, after all, a collective attribution of value which is probably more likely to be functional to each of us than a purely individual attribution would be. When we insist on kindness, or wish for a better world, and people say we're not being 'realistic,' they are appealing to a collective attribution of a quality or value which assures at least a certain degree of functionality--adaptiveness for the individual as well as the group. For our own best interest (our self-interest), they say, we should adapt to the collective judgment, not change anything or envision anything different.

But why does the collective view seem to be less selfish? There is a division between the self and the collective, and what is not collective seems to be egotistical. But the ego itself is a collective product, and there are many collective mechanisms and values that give it strength. It also fits into a sort of generalized ego-orientation of the particular collective of which it is a part--for example, the race, the class, the religion, the nation.

The ego also depends on a collective attribution of value and reality to the individual's internal configuration, which validates it for each of us, but especially for (successful) masculated men. The self-similar structures in the society perform this function. The privileged one, the process of exchange and the denial of giving, institutions based on masculation, money, and the phallically-invested concept are all social mechanisms by which value is collectively attributed to the individual ego.

The ego and egotism may be viewed as a collective stance, while the subjective stance really may be more giving and other-oriented. We can collectively be very egotistical. However, we could collectively put the dividing line somewhere else between individual and collective, and validate a different kind of ego and giving itself, creating a different kind of collectivity. In order to see that the split is in the wrong place, perhaps we need a three-dimensional view. If we see what we think of as our selves as made from and through the social gift that is language as well as through the gifts of life perhaps we would stop envisioning a polar opposition between individual and collective, the I and the other. This re-framing would allow the division between subjective and objective, subconscious and conscious, dreams and reality to be different.

Reality is affirmed and defined by the imposition of the masculated way upon the collective. The distorted community is constructed to carry out this imposition and its definition as 'real' is part of the construction. The judgment of reality is a meta message which serves to maintain the patriarchal status quo. Then reality seems to be just organized meanness based on the cruelty

of 'human nature.' Anything goes, because we believe the meta statement, "People are just that way."

The individual gives the value of reality to parts of her experience, creating an on-going attribution with a continuing gift effort of energy. But reality itself does not appear to be giftgiving or to include the gift paradigm. Giftgiving on the external is being continually misread, and the internal gift mode is unseen and unrecognized as such. Sometimes, if we are not burdened by scarcity and overwork, we can experience the giftgiving side of nature and each other, but for many people these happy moments do not come very often.

All of this has the effect of not allowing our internal giftgiving mode to have a co-respondent in reality, though perhaps our efforts to get others to give to us might be seen as mistaken attempts to make 'reality' reflect our giftgiver within. (Perhaps our giftgiver within appears to us as an 'other.') Since we have validated exchange and put the mother in an other category, it seems right or harmonious that others should give to us.

If we look compassionately at exploiters, we can see that they are convinced of the reality and perhaps permanence of scarcity, and that they feel the challenge to overcome this individually by taking, i.e. making others give. Their very parasitism is almost an attempt, within the scarcity created by their way, to make reality nurture at least themselves when it doesn't nurture anyone else. Perhaps it is an attempt to make reality their own mother; is this the secret motivation of greed? Are they each sucking alone on the reali-titty?

If they believe they deserve more than others because they produced more or are stronger or more intelligent, exploiters are participating in the exchange mode and canceling the gift, which is, paradoxically, what they were seeking. No one can make reality her mother, unless we restore the gift paradigm for everyone. Reality is a collective construct, and if we collectively construct reality to nurture only one or a few at the expense of the many, we destroy the many--who are the collective. We must

make our giftgiver within correspond with real giftgiving on the outside--this will liberate both the individual and the collective. Meanwhile, restoring our contact with nature can help us find an ecological niche outside us for our giftgiver within. Nature needs to be cared for, restored to herself as the free giver; then we can align ourselves with her.

Exchange is actually a displacement of what would be the solution to our problem--giftgiving both internally and externally. Exchange requires that the 'other' take on the same ego-oriented motivation each exchanger enacts. Each gives, but for something beyond the present, something other than the satisfaction of other's needs. The giftgiving side of the 'other,' or nature or reality is misread and translated into the 'fair' or 'just' correspondence between giving more and getting more. Reality then does not seem to give freely, but only to respond to an exchange. Then because giftgiving is not modeled in reality, we reflect the distorted equation. The solution is collective giving, collective altruism. Money, as a collective product, can be used to begin this process.

Dreams-Come-True Inside and Outside

Maybe if dreaming is in the gift mode, Spider Woman really does dream the world as Paula Gunn Allen says.³ But masculated re-ality is a collective nightmare, a collective gift to end all gifts, which cuts off giftgiving because it assimilates it into exchange. Masculated reality is what much of humanity unconsciously gives energy to. We need to collectively dream something else, and to give our waking energy to making a different reality, making our dreams of a better world come true instead of our nightmares. With more giftgiving in reality, our giftgiver within would be empowered, as would our creativity and love.

Artistic creation is giftgiving in reality and a bridge into a better world because the medium or vehicle of the gift is itself a

³Paula Gunn Allen, The Sacred Hoop, Beacon Press, Boston, 1992.

free gift, which satisfies and creates aesthetic needs. For example, singing is free to the listener, and the vehicle, the voice, satisfies a need, a potential in ourselves for enjoying beautiful and pleasurable sounds, rhythms, harmonies, while the words satisfy communicative needs. Visual art is similar. The colors, forms and textures can create pleasurable sense givens, whatever the subject or topic of the work may be. Though many kinds of art can be bought and sold, they all maintain a free need-satisfying side, which is essentially their co-municative channel. There is no exchange between the ear and the music, the eye and the painting, though access to those experiences is often expensive. The work of art itself gives. The creative gift of the artist is the ability to make something that gives.⁴ (Earlier, in contrast to Levi-Strauss, we said that women are not commodities or messages exchanged among kinship groups, but gifts-who-give.) Numerous kinds of exchange-based activities become parasitic upon art, as they do upon other sources of giftgiving.

Even if art restores giftgiving to some extent in the outside world, it does not suffice to corroborate the cancelled model. For the present, giftgiving stays in dreams and the unconscious, and unrecognized as such in art, stories, myths. Stories can introduce children kindly to exchange through communication, satisfying that need. They show children the transitivity of one thing leading to another, the satisfaction of one need, which permits the satisfaction of another--an action resulting in something else. Action can be seen as giving; satisfying one need creates another--when the baby has eaten, she needs to go to sleep, or out to play. The mother needs to clean up, to rest, to go back to work.

The if-then structure, however, captures the gift with a consequence--if you put your finger in the fire, it will burn you. When the framework of social reward and punishment is introduced, the transitivity of the gift transforms into the logical consequentiality of exchange. If/then becomes 'do this, get that.' Thus, it may seem that when the child does something, what reality 'gives back' is what she 'deserves.' Did Cinderella deserve

⁴Lewis Hyde discusses the creative gift in a somewhat different sense in The Gift, op.cit..

to go to the ball and marry the prince because she worked so hard? Did Little Red Riding Hood deserve to be eaten by the wolf because she was not obedient to her mother? These stories are explorations into the exchange between 'reality' and the stories' protagonists for children who are just beginning to consider their behavior according to the exchange mode.

What are the prices we pay for not giving, the rewards we get for giving? An equilibrium rules these exchanges--at least in fairy tales. As children begin to learn how to exchange, their morality co-responds.⁵ Making children obey, instituting a system of rewards and punishments, brings them away from the gift mode they were participating in with their mothers and prepares them for the exchange mode rampant in 'reality.' Stories satisfy children's need to be introduced through kindly co-munication to a 'reality' rendered alien by exchange.

It is true; we do have a need, as children, to be taught to adapt to 'reality.' But that is because 'reality' is distorted. The need to adapt is imposed by an environment which is artificially and pervasively altered by the exchange paradigm. Socialization imposes an evolution towards functionality in the system and an adaptation to the roles of having or not-having at all the different levels. If we were functioning within the paradigm that works for human and planetary development, we would not have to be taught giftgiving and receiving from the outside, but we would learn from our experiences--just as we learn to make sense of our perceptions, to manage our bodies' activities and at least in large part, to speak.

Teaching children to obey imposes the dominance-submission pattern, including the reward and punishment components of exchange, upon warnings like: "If you put your finger in the fire, you will get burned." This phrase is purely informational, but it is used to prop up parental dictatorship like, "If you don't say, 'Yes, M'am,' you can't go out to play." These dictates function according to the exchange mode, even giving

⁵See Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice, Cambridge, Mass, Harvard University Press, 1982, for the moral perspective of care.

our actions a price in terms of consequences. "You disobeyed. You're grounded for three days." The author-itarianism of the parent is often not only a replay of her or his own childhood and relationship with her/his parents, but an attitude of oppressiveness against her/his own giftgiving and receiving 'child within.' Our schools, with their practice of grading, extend this reward and punishment process to quantitatively evaluatable amounts of 'knowledge' acquired.

The Iroquois and the White Man

When women support women, or nurturers nurture nurturers, a transitivity of giftgiving takes place, so that the good is passed on and on and the receivers receive from and give to many. When this is done on principle, people become conscious of it and then reality contains more actions determined in this way. If the gift paradigm were validated and consciously practiced, however, we would not need to think of it as a principle. We would be able to be more flexible, experiment, and act on a case-by-case basis. Perhaps, if we found it useful, we could even safely practice exchange in some instances--because the context as a whole would carry giftgiving. Native American woman-led tribes, like the Iroquois, created alternative giftgiving realities of this sort. The context carried the gift values even though exchange--at least symbolic exchange--was practiced to some extent, and wars were sometimes fought.

The values of the gift economy threaten the practicers of the exchange economy, and I believe that this is a reason for the ferocity of the White Man against the native people. The White Man had a mother, too. He learned to kill her in the slaughter of the witches. Yet, he could not do that without killing himself, his mother within. There is no gender. Humans are all formed according to giftgiving. By slaughtering and enslaving his European mother, the White Man deprived himself of the model of his human potential. By leaving the motherland and

penetrating the Americas, the White Man left his humanity to carry out his false masculated agenda of conquest. There he found mothering societies, exploited them and committed genocide upon them. What he considered civilized was the ego and exchange, with its empty logic coming from definition.

Yet, the White Man has a heart. He lived in his mother's womb; he was nurtured by her, received her gifts and gave her his own. What he did not realize is that all men and women share the same dream, the same way of dreaming and the same way of speaking. We already have a common language. The language is not just co-munication of material gifts--though this is important. It is the communication of verbal gifts. It does not matter what the specific sound-gifts are, but that we give them to each other. The Tower of Babel is just the phallic symbol of masculation, which does not let us see that all our languages and our lives come from the Mother and from Mothering. If we can give up masculation and return to the mother and child within each of us, we can restore the dream.

From Re-ality to the Goddess⁶ Rhea-lity

Giftgiving and exchange are locked together on the level of economic re-ality, a fact which puts many obstacles in the path of doing effective social change work towards giftgiving. Moreover, the goal of social change is often mistakenly identified as the integration of everyone into the exchange economy. This goal is mistaken because it ignores the fact that, for the market to function, free gifts must come to it from somewhere.

There are many groups who are excluded from the capitalist market system whose products do not have access to the market or cannot compete there. Artisan work by indigenous people, for example, though it is of the highest quality, usually has no way into the market except through exploitative middlemen. Recently, projects which help artisans get their products on the

⁶Rhea was the original Aegean mother goddess, also Mother Time.

market have been begun by well-intentioned people, who seek funding from foundations or other entities. The problem is seen to be the presentation of the crafts on an equal footing with mainstream items. (There needs to be an 'equal exchange.')

The contradiction here is that the goal is seen to be an assimilation into the economy which has excluded and exploited those groups, and which continues to exclude and exploit others, taking from them large quantities of hidden gift labor. Only a few can become 'equal' to the mainstream few who are 'equal,' and all of the few are brought to this 'equality' through using the hidden gifts of others. The gift of the funding of these projects takes the place of the hidden gift labor for a time, but 'self-sufficiency' within the capitalist economy is usually an illusion, because capitalism needs hidden gifts in order to function. 'Self-sufficiency' often only means effective dependency on the capitalist market, just as it has for women who enter the labor market in order to be 'self-sufficient.'

The production of Native American beadwork in Hong Kong is a case in point. International exploitation produces cheaper, more competitive, 'more equal' products than social justice or self-sufficiency projects can. It factors in the gift-quotient that becomes available through the exploitative relation between nations (which produces the difference in their levels of life), together with the 'gift' of the exploited labor of the workers in the individual foreign enterprises. The illusion is that groups 'outside' of the mainstream could succeed if only their products were good enough to be competitive. What is not seen is that being 'good enough,' being equal, or even in the same 'ballpark' requires the addition of a comparatively large amount of hidden gifts.

Perhaps by producing a new product or cornering a market, people outside of the capitalist economy could enter it successfully, benefiting their communities. But this requires a knowledge of the market which individuals achieve through education and through experience in the market, which usually brings them into attempting success for their own profit, not for

the community--according to the capitalist values of 'every man for himself.' Even the attempt to enter the market, to produce competitive or equal products, validates the market and 'equal exchange' as the best (and even as the only) way to abundance. Alternatives are seen as impractical or non-existent. The gift economy, hidden and integrated into the exchange economy as exploited labor, is victimized and sacrificed--no value is given to it; it is invisible or discredited and despised.

At the individual psychological level, the subconscious is out of sight but serves as the source for the energy of our conscious minds. Many subconscious motivations and associations never reach the surface and are discounted. In the same vein, people outside the market support those inside the market. Similarly, women support men in their 'equal' relations with other men and in their competition to dominate, without recognizing the effort they themselves and other women have put into nurturing them. What we must do is to stop giving value to the kind of consciousness which is based on exchange and mutual exclusion, to equality in the market, to making our products or ourselves or our children 'competitive,' and try alternatives which are altogether different.

While it may appear difficult to create giftgiving projects in present reality, I suggest that many ways are actually possible that are not being recognized as such. Many women whom I know personally provide services, housing, training, and support free for other women, often believing that they themselves are 'crazy' because they are not requiring payment. There are many experiments with women's land trusts, movements for self-sufficiency and living lightly on the earth.

Movements against domestic violence and sexual violence involve the free satisfaction of needs, as do movements against addictions. People in these movements, as well as those working against racism, and for the liberation of peoples, against the destruction of the environment, against the puer-ile games played with radioactive waste and chemical time bombs, against war, militarism and military spending are all giving enormous time and

energy to satisfying important general needs for social change.

While a great deal of volunteer work is done by women, much is done by men, as well. It is not clear to those who are involved in mixed activities that, in doing unmonetized need-satisfying work, both males and females are following the gift paradigm based on mothering. Women's leadership according to giftgiving values is therefore not taken as the standard. Indeed, women often support men who are carrying out the masculated agenda, even volunteer in activities that have the goal of creating social change. In fact, in many cases, the masculated agenda is not even recognized as problematic.

Giftgiving has often acquired a bad name, and people have been discouraged from doing it, because patriarchal beneficent organizations have imposed their gifts upon the receivers, considering them passive and inferior, not listening to their assessment of their needs. Here, too, women as well as men have espoused paternalism to the detriment of everyone involved, and clouded the connection between women and the gift paradigm by not recognizing the difference between giftgiving and exchange. In fact, these organizations have often used giftgiving as a pretext for domination and profit-making of various sorts.

I have heard the old saw--that it is better not to give poor people fish but to teach them how to fishwith a twist that points at social change. We need to ask how the scarcity was created in the first place. Why have the people not had access to the lake so they could learn how to fish? Was it privately owned or controlled by a corporation or a government? Is it even possible that a group of hungry people could live by a lake to which they had access and not learn how to fish?

We need to give to change the causes of poverty, and one of the major causes of poverty is the system based on exchange. Creating projects to bring people into the market system will not change the causes of poverty. We need to create a change in consciousness, which will let everyone identify the causes and focus on changing them.

It is important to create alternatives to patriarchal capitalism, experiments based on the ways economies were organized by different groups of so-called 'primitive' peoples outside the market system. I suggest funding or otherwise promoting alternative projects--perhaps non-monetized local gift and sharing circles or projects to restore fertile land to dispossessed people to live on and farm. (Many women have already begun buying and sharing land with other women). These projects need to be made possible by monetary gift giving--funding--which in itself is a different economic way. Though funding may appear to be parasitic upon capitalism, it is then parasite upon the parasite--so it has a meta view (parasight) and can put a different way into practice.

Funding gift economies (even in an experimental way) carries its own confirmation at the meta level. It is giving for giving. By asserting the existence of alternatives, we can affirm the value of difference and dis-invest from capitalistic equality. From within the classes privileged by the domination of the equal = sign, women at least can hear the resounding call of the First Commandment of Altruistic Reason: "Try something different. This isn't working!"

Mater-Mother

Matter-spirit, mater (mother)-breath are probably false oppositions. The illusion is that mater doesn't mind because she is attributing importance to the other and not taking credit--but that really means she minds more. What we have to do, instead, is make mind mater. Atmospheric pressure moves the air, and as we develop a need for it by expanding our lungs, it is inspired, satisfies the need. Things in nature satisfy needs--from the chlorophyll in the leaf providing sugar for the root, to plankton at the bottom of the sea, where whales feed, loll and take their ease--from ancient rocks with which we build our houses, to the potter's wheel.

That is because needs, which are also a part of nature, are creative. Creatures, including humans, adapt to what is given, as

well as change it. Mat(t)er is already mind; parts of it attend to one another, needs arise and are filled. But the human mind has been interpreting itself according to the exchange paradigm and so has detached itself from its matrix, reflecting upon itself. In allowing itself to be taken care of by giftgivers, women, the mother and child within, the many--the mind is not minding about them. Occupied by its ego-orientation, it philosophically tries to track what it alone is doing.

Perhaps the mind (and the brain, as well) can be better understood if we look at them from the viewpoint of the gift paradigm. If we put the mater back into matter, we can see how she minds, how mind is mothering, and how we must now satisfy our own need and that of humanity and the earth, to recognize that mater as a given. Spirit hardly matters in reflection; it is breath upon the mirror, something belonging to a different concept. But actually, the mother and the wind work according to similar principles. They go where there is a lack, a void, a need for them. And they bring the words we need to hear to form our communities again.

Mother Nurture

I go for a walk in the country--there are so many creatures, insects, plants, wildflowers, so specific and different from each other in the places and ways they grow. A variety, a magnificent wild, slow dance of plant and animal life is in each square foot of terrain. Each kind is related to a word as its name, but they are rhea-lly far from equal. Now the combination of the concept, the definition and the exchange has produced an environment where things are actually identical to each other. We no longer pick berries in the woods; we pick up identical cans of berries at the supermarket.

The goddess has not been completely destroyed. Preparing, cooking and eating the food we cook--feeling, moving, many types of enjoyment from sex to poetry to watching a storm--are still ways of embracing her gifts. But forcing reality to give has to

do with male violence: mining, drilling, bombing. If you force someone to give, you get security that they will give, and perhaps this security provides needed comfort to the artificial exchange ego.

We should look at Rhea-lity as Mother Nature, Mother Nurture. The same thing is being done to her that is done to us, depleting her so as to force her to give, showing that men do it the right or only way, that they have control of Rhea-lity as well as re-ality. They do this by not attributing or giving nurture to nature or value to giving. Canceling the mother makes it appear that mechanical cause and effect, if-then, objective exchange processes, are the basis of life. This blots out a whole spectrum of nurturing intentionality from the least 'human,' the wind, or the chance of the amoeba's finding a juicy morsel in its path, to the most 'human,' a feminist revolution or a lullaby. In the beginning, ontogenetically and phylogenetically, mothers feed their babies.⁷

Emotion

The work of maintenance of the world still attributes value materially though 'menially.' Despite monetization and exchange, needs continue to be recognized by women (and some men) both emotionally and intellectually. In fact, I believe it is the human connection with the needs of others and our own that is the basis of human emotional life. Masculated egos, immersed in exchange, are notoriously (and unhappily) detached from needs, 'insensitive.' Attention to needs appears to be irrational, because what we consider rational is based on exchange. Since we have allowed exchange to pervade our world, blocking out giving, we have set all our values askew, making them more abstract than they would have been if they had been grounded in giving. Then value has been given to abstraction itself.

⁷Archeologists, like Richard Leakey, think a major part of human evolution came about through 'altruism,' food sharing, among hominids coupled with competition. But don't forget, we are looking back at pre-history through modern competitive eyes.

Emotions continue to flicker around unsatisfied needs, drawing attention to them, giving them value so they can be satisfied. Those emotions are often ignored, discounted, disqualified and otherwise superseded by the logic of self-interest. Giving value to abstract reasoning draws our attention away from needs. While it is true that abstract reasoning may sometimes be useful for understanding how to satisfy complicated needs, it can become an end in itself and an excuse to disregard needs and the emotions that lead us to them, forever.

Patriarchy has re(x)-ified re-ality. It has extended its network of self-similar images--phallically invested conceptsseizing the gifts of the collective, like an OBN of businessmen seizing new markets. Overlaying these concepts onto 'reality' diminishes its nurturing side, makes needs invisible, discounts the emotions that respond to them, and reality then becomes mechanical and objectified. What is a given is taken for granted, important only because it has been organized into concepts, made relative to privileged ones. We are always in receivership, however, though we don't recognize it. Reality is always nurturing, even though abstract concepts hide it and deceive us. The network of concepts, the self-similar system, is an invisible web, abstractly shared, deviating our attention away from the real gifts of the goddess Rhea and onto phallic Rex and Res.

Chapter 20

Giving and Love

I think the phrase 'carnal knowledge' is well-taken. Much of our interpersonal experience of love and sex is involved with knowing and perceiving the other person physically, as well as spiritually, according to the giving and receiving 'grain.' This knowledge requires or invites an other-orientation, which is partly the basis for the experience of 'losing one's self,' well-known in the literature of love. In a society which is made in the image of the exchange paradigm, many of us have learned not to be other-oriented so love can be an overwhelming experience, an excursion into the gift economy, a concentration on the other, a chance to re-perceive the world, re-create a human society of two.

We bond, forming our relations to each other, in regard to our new gift perceptions. Like Adam naming the creatures of Eden and talking about them with Eve, we become conscious of each other's particularities and universalities, and we become conscious of each other's consciousness of them. Love alters our individual attitudes towards other-orientation, at least for the time being. We begin to need each other and to want to give to each other. We even begin to need the other's need for us, our giving of ourselves becoming linked to the other's desire. Perhaps it is this other-oriented aspect of love that makes us sing about it, talk about it, long for it so much in this society. "Love is the way," say preachers and peace activists. The only ones that don't say it are economists (and therapists worried about co-dependency).

There is a part of our true minds that is telling us what to do, using our relationships to tell us. I guess it is hard for that part to generalize. It did not know that its context was really economic. It tells us, "Give, change the ego, nurture the other person abundantly." Freud (and women writers like Nancy Friday) who found that we look for relationships with our

mothers in the men we marry have hit on a glimmering of the gift economy which is usually nipped in the bud.

In fact, the love relationship, by causing 'other-orientation,' may make a man behave in a more nurturing way than he ever has before, putting his ego aside, acting like a mother would with her child (love ya, Baby!), especially if the mother were also used to living in the exchange economy and had taken on its values. The feeling of bliss that comes from reciprocal nurturing (turn-taking--not exchange--because each is other-oriented) is the experience of the gift economy between adults, highlighted by the fact that they are a society of two, since nurturing is not the economic way chosen by the world they live in. Indeed, their relationship may seem to be, and is, a pocket of blessedness in a world gone mad.

Like other instances of the gift economy, the society of two is soon altered in its nature and chance for survival by the alien character of its surroundings. Like a tropical flower growing in a northern climate, it needs special circumstances, hard work, attentiveness, protection--all of which make the feeling of warmth and abundance drain away, so that the tender plant feels (correctly) that it is in the wrong environment. But again, this is not the 'fault' of love, but of the scarcity of love and the scarcity of goods created by masculation and exchange in the world at large. The more cruel acts that take place in the world, the more hostile is the environment for the nurturing relationship between two adults.

In order to survive in a situation of scarcity, the lovers adapt. They typically divide the labor heterosexually; one enters fully into the exchange paradigm, while the other remains nurturing, even when she also works in the exchange economy. Their egos alter accordingly. Women give our greatest gift; we give birth to our children, and then we practice the gift paradigm with them because they impose it. We are forced by their real dependence to adapt to an other-oriented way. Male partners enter into the hierarchy of competition for scarce goods but do not usually have the psycho-economic saving grace of having to nurture the

children. Participation in the exchange economy becomes the only technique for survival and women, therefore, begin to reinforce psychologically in their partners (and sometimes in themselves) those characteristics which help to succeed there. They postpone their love, put aside their nurturing of each other, until some more convenient time. Finally, they may think the experience of love was childish, an illusion. It rightly reminded them of their childhood because the relation between mother and child is the only other major experience of the gift economy most of us know.

Giving Embedded in Exchange

With the system of the double burden, many women perform both gift and exchange roles. They are paid less for comparable work--not only to demonstrate their inferiority and the inferiority of the gift paradigm, but to keep them needing the money which men provide for them with the results of their exchange economy activity. This support seems to slip into being a sort of payment for services. In other words, a woman's free nurturing, both of her mate and of her children, is 'compensated' by the money given to her by her husband. The free nurturing is thus corralled into the exchange paradigm, captured by it, almost re-framed as exchange. However, the money that women receive is usually barely enough to buy the means of nurturing for the family. In a situation of scarcity, women's free labor seems (and sometimes is) a kind of slavery. The opposite of slavery seems to be working for pay, while instead it would be liberation to freely give in a situation of abundance.

Giving in abundance is an option for wealthy people--where the husband works in the exchange economy to make abundant money, and the wife (who does not work in that economy) has time to practice nurturing on a wider scale, doing volunteer work or providing charity, something which her husband may also do. Unfortunately, charity of this kind maintains the status quo by alleviating problems, while allowing their causes to remain the

same. Moreover, volunteerism which depends upon patriarchal capitalism makes it seem as if the exchange mode were necessary to support giftgiving.

Charity validates the exchange mode by considering it as its pre-requisite. Even the successful examples of cause-related marketing have this defect. Instead, we need to change the whole context by shifting to the gift paradigm for all, and we need to use our gifts to make that happen.

While it is good for us psychologically to nurture others from a situation of abundance, in the present situation of generalized scarcity giftgiving can seem unusual, even saintly. This can lend itself to ego trips of various kinds by the givers, as well as to a lack of respect for the recipients. Considering the exchange paradigm and its logic as the root of the problem depersonalizes the actions of the givers and of the receivers. Need satisfaction should not replay the scenario of having and not-having, better and worse. Instead it is part of a more workable and human way, good for the personality and material well-being of the giver and the receiver, freed from the humiliation and egomania of the defense of the exchange paradigm. It is the logical and co-munitary thing to do.

The kinds of jobs which are available in our society do not allow for the development of the free giving mode and mentality. The whole society validates the production of goods and services for exchange, together with the evaluation of human beings according to the monetary standard. Within our personal relationships, in our hands-on experience, we can experiment with the social currents that are flowing through us. We may do a lot of 'giving' of ourselves to each other, because we are not doing it socially on a material plane. Those who have some material wealth must at least unconsciously feel the pull of the needs of others. Starving people look at us from the TV screen. We watch the homeless, drunk and cold, lying in doors of buildings.

There is a true, if cynical, point of view about giving which says, "If I give everything I have to someone else, s/he will just be as ego-oriented as I have been." If the exchange paradigm

continues to be validated, the 'haves' will continue to oppress the 'have-nots.' If a slightly more other-oriented person gives her money to someone else, that person may very likely become more ego-oriented. The secret is to give in order to validate the gift paradigm. Any need-satisfying behavior, if it is done with consciousness of the paradigm of which it is a part, does help in that validation.

Sexual Giving

I think that we may be trying to practice co-municative giftgiving in our love relationships, perhaps even through promiscuity. We give ourselves sexually to those who seem to need us, because we are pushed by our subconscious to give while, at the same time, we are either living in material scarcity or have been convinced that giving materially is not a viable thing to do. Giving ourselves sexually allows us to feel the emotions of giving and receiving 'on our own skin.' It allows us to do something for somebody else, satisfy a need without actually transferring goods from one to the other. In fact, it can seem very embarrassing to give and receive goods while sexual giving and receiving is validated as a 'normal' desire. Promiscuous sex allows us to be other-oriented towards a number of people, giving to them on that plane, while society does not allow us to give to them on the plane of material need.

We live the problems of our society through our interpersonal relations. For example, women over-give to our children or continue to give to abusive husbands. I think we realize unconsciously that giving is the way. What we don't see is that we are often giving in the wrong places, and on the wrong levels, and that we cannot do it effectively until it is validated socially as the Way to behave instead of exchange. In fact, I think there is a confusion between material nurturing and love--which makes us think that we are loving people any time we are being other-oriented towards them. Any need we satisfy seems to be giftgiving, even if that is a batterer's need to hurt us.

But perhaps the reason for this is the confusion between the other-orientation that takes place in sex and love and the material other-orientation that would be present in the right practice of the gift paradigm. Even now, we could begin to practice it in giving our time, money and energy to change the structures of oppression. If we were to shift to the gift paradigm, the whole society would be other-oriented and needs would be satisfied by others, so we would continually hear the call of the needs of others.

But in that case, many other people would be satisfying needs, so even the needs of our mates might be very different from what they are now. Being able to practice material other-orientation outside our immediate families and for the good of all would allow us to practice better psychological orientation towards our loved ones, as well. Receiving from others-in-general as well as giving to them would allow more bonding with them, and we would not be dependent on sex for meaningful 'co-munication.' The quest for a 'meaningful' life is well-named, since it may be seen as a life which attributes value by giving and receiving, and value is, therefore, bestowed on it, as well.

As it is, we are particularly dependent on each other in our relationships, because this is the only place most of us can do giving and receiving, practicing the gift paradigm, even if imperfectly. It is, therefore, the most 'human' of our behaviors, and we become very attached to it. Abandonment seems to be a threat to our humanity. The giving and receiving that we do sexually, in which different needs spring up in our bodies as we proceed and as we satisfy them for each other, creates a common ground for the community of two, which is hard to renounce.

Our selves grow through this community, much as our selves grow in our original families where we become differentiated as individuals on the basis of our common ground with others. The masculated or exchange-based ego is more likely to be abandoning, adversarial, denying connection and intimacy, and using the other for her nurturing reinforcement of its sense of

importance. Unfortunately, the socialization of men away from nurturing allows this kind of destructiveness of the sexual co-munity. Seduce and abandon ("love 'em and leave 'em") is the macho disease, sometimes even when it is women who are doing the leaving. A desire to dominate, which functions well in the competitive exchange economy, can be carried out in personal relations by force, abandonment or mental cruelties, such as disparagement and non-participation.

The Nurturing of Competition

The gift and the exchange paradigms function like two environments of nature existing side by side, and what is adaptive behavior in one is destructive in the other. Moreover, the environment of 'survival of the fittest' is seen as the support of the nurturing family environment. The families of the fittest in the exchange economy survive. This is an illusion because it is the existence of the competitive environment which threatens the nurturing way and burdens it to extenuation. In fact, nurturing is sustaining the competitive environment, not vice versa. It cannot be abolished without destroying the competitive environment also, because the way