Interest and self-interest is a section of 📝Money and Property, the fourth chapter of 📝The Ascent of Humanity, in which 📝Charles Eisenstein links two ideas usually kept apart: the interest charged on money and the self-interest assumed by economics.
Both, Eisenstein argues, depend on the 📝separate self. Interest-bearing money compels endless growth — more must always be repaid than was lent — which drives the steady conversion of relationships and the commons into property and money. "Rational self-interest," meanwhile, only coheres if the self is genuinely separate from others and the world; it treats the gain of one as unrelated to the gain of the whole.
Dissolve the premise of separation and the logic unravels. If the self is understood as continuous with other people and with nature, then self-interest and the interest of the larger whole are no longer opposed — they converge. What looked like enlightened selfishness becomes, simply, care.