Among the multiple banes that church, Christian theology and bible hermeneuts have passed on to people is the mantra, supposed to be from Jesus (that kick-ass Rabbi) that “it is more blessed to give than to receive”. How well such an ingrained mantra has served the colonial brain-washing (past and its continuing avatars) that our best end, purpose and intention is to give, give and give more! The colonial agenda of wealth-extraction, which the Church’s theology endorsed I would locate in this mantra. For whom it is ‘better to give than to receive’! is it Church that continue to administer millions and billions? Is it governments and the corp-o-crats, the overwhelmingly rich 1%. Perhaps, another scriptural mantra may offer a clue: ‘the more you give, the more you will receive’. What a lie! And please do not offer me that nonsense about ‘great will be the reward in the other life’.

The problem is that one set of people/the world seem to be doing the giving while a particular class is doing the receiving!  And when the exploitative overfed (the gluttons – think G7,8 or more) do attempt to grudgingly release their economic grip or to go through any motion of giving, it’s the poor and their unborn progeny who continue end up with chains around their lives for generations to come. If the mantra of ‘the more you give the more you will receive’ is true, then every woman in the Caribbean, and Africa would be a millionaire!

The mantra that it is more ‘blessed to give than to receive’ endorses an extractive economic system with a specific orientation: ‘make yourselves cheap – for the redistribution of the world’s wealth depends on growth and debt. So give, give and give. Your souls may belong to some divine, but your body/ass belongs to us. The bottom line is that the giving or redistribution is from the poor to the rich. For the rich [within and between nations] – the poor, exploited and exploitable must always be there for them to stay rich – to keep the wealth flow in their direction. If the mantra of ‘the more you give the more you will receive’ is true then those whose life have been one of continuous giving should be swimming in wealth in this life!

Do you think that even the welcomed confronting and attempting to repair a past shaped by violent taking away (the costly giving by the enslaved) would do anything to change the mantra at the heart of extractive capitalism? For the white exploitative saviours, past and present – it is never more ‘blessed to give than to receive’! And even in their late realisation and giving (or more correctly returning) they continue to benefit from the act. The progeny of the enslaved continue to give even in that process of repairing and what may now look like ‘receiving’. Whiteness continue to be the orientation – to dictate the terms of engagement.

To remain hopeful, I wonder if the challenge in a largely uneven world (with so much repair to still happen) to find ways to make giving and receiving an experience of mutuality for a new kind of economy to be at work.

jagessar@caribleaper Feb 2023