Bernard Lietaer was the first to create management tools for the new monetary regime two years before President Nixon detached the dollar from gold in 1971.

He also wrote the only book that predicted the Latin American monetary crisis of 1980s. Now he is listening hard as Paul Volcker, the former chief of the U.S. Federal Reserve, predicts a “hard landing” for the U.S. dollar within the next three years. Meanwhile, the chief economist at Morgan Stanley is expecting “a dollar Armageddon.”

Lietaer calls George W. Bush “an accelerator—he will be seen in the future as the liquidator of the U.S. dollar’s global role and thereby of the American empire itself. As the U.S. dollar is the linchpin of the world economy, this could cause a global crisis.” Lietaer would like to avoid this scenario, of course, and he also has a broader agenda—to enhance monetary systems as a way to create a better world. “Monetary change is the highest leverage point for large-scale system change on this planet,” he said during a presentation at the Shambhala Institute for Authentic Leadership in Halifax in June. He has nothing against the global currency system; it’s just not enough by itself, he argues. Even worse is that we don’t understand money, and we can’t examine the subject rationally because it is taboo.

Lietaer does understand money—not only technically but also historically. He has been a central banker in Belgium, one of the architects of the euro, a top currency trader, head of the world’s most efficient electronic-payment system, and a consultant to corporations and national governments. “It’s a blind spot in our society,” he says. “The same way fish don’t understand the nature of water, we live in the world of money but have no idea how it shapes everything we do.”

This is his argument. Modern society has three taboos: sex, death, and money. A taboo is a subject one cannot discuss or explore—and therefore it occupies a hidden and powerful place in our unconscious minds. “The Sexual Revolution brought sexuality out into the open, and the AIDS epidemic taught us to deal with death,” says Lietaer. “That leaves us with the last taboo: the elusive subject of money.” He wants to bring the subject into the light of day.

Money is nothing more than an agreement within a society to use something as a medium of exchange, yet we are not aware of how the current system works. “It virtually requires that

money be scarce,” says Lietaer. “The system, like it or not, requires that about one-third of the world’s population have less money than they need.”

Lietaer gets his perspective from the ancient Chinese philosophy of the Tao (the Way). “In Taoism there are the two principles of yin and yang. Our conventional currencies are all monopolies based on extreme yang constructs, as was the case historically in all patriarchies. These drive competition, hierarchy, and central authority. We have omitted the yin qualities of co-operation, community, and giving—qualities that are found in complementary currencies. We need both.”

Then he dives into the theory of archetypes, long-standing unconscious patterns of emotions and behaviour. The three taboos of sex, death, and money are all attributes of one key archetype: the Great Mother, whose origins go back into pre-history. The earliest currencies all relate to her. For example, the original Sumerian shekel carried the image of the goddess of life, death, and sexuality, as well as an image of the grain that backed the money of the time.

For centuries, Western society has repressed the Great Mother, Lietaer argues. When you repress an archetype, it manifests itself through its “shadows”: in this case, money that evokes the emotions of greed and fear of scarcity.

Now the deepest part: Civilization collapses through the archetype it represses. The global financial system is set up around competition and commercial transactions; it can be balanced by co-operation and community transactions in regional economies. But community transactions are being starved. Today many yang currencies are in trouble, while complementary yin currencies are emerging in many regions. Why now?

Historically, we live during a convergence of three waves that support a yang currency: the hyper-rationalist philosophy of the Greeks; the 500-year-old modernist view that emphasizes the role of the hero; and the industrial age of the last 250 years. Yet since World War II there has been a buildup of forces that is destabilizing this structure, including the aging population, climate change, and the potential crash of the dollar. “We will make a choice in the next five to seven years on the direction of our civilization,” says Lietaer. “We [must] create a new civilization that has yang and yin in balance.”