The Gift
“A market exchange has an equilibrium or stasis: you pay to balance the scale.
But when you give a gift there is momentum, and the weight shifts from body to body.”
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“The gift moves in a circle, and two people do not make much of a circle. Two points establish a line, but a circle lies in a plane and needs at least three points.
Circular giving differs from reciprocal giving in several ways. First, when the gift moves in a circle no one ever receives it from the same person he gives it to.”
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“When the gift moves in a circle its motion is beyond the control of the personal ego, and so each bearer must be a part of the group and each donation is an act of social faith.”
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“The problem is that wealth ceases to move freely when all things are counted and priced. It may accumulate in great heaps, but fewer and fewer people can afford to enjoy it.
When we profit on exchange or convert ‘one man’s gift to another man’s capital’—we nourish that part of our being (or our group) which is distinct and separate from others.”
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“Negative reciprocity strengthens the spirits—constructive or destructive—of individualism and clannishness.”
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“Only when the increase of gifts moves with the gift may the accumulated wealth of our spirit continue to grow among us, so that each of us may enter, and be revived by, a vitality beyond his or her solitary powers.”
—from The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World, by Lewis Hyde (1979)