“People passed. Some laughed. Some spat. Some pissed on me.”
Pitch
Stureby, 1968. An eight-year-old stands outside the Konsum supermarket on Bastuhagsvägen trying to understand why the world is so badly run, when people really mean well towards each other. He is too small to do anything about it, but the question never leaves him.
Thirty-six years later he sits in a car on the way to Eskilstuna to pick up his daughter from handball practice. Beside him sits Chief Oren R. Lyons, Faithkeeper of the Onondaga Nation and one of the most respected Indigenous leaders in North America. In the middle of a conversation about sport the child's question has finally found its adult form.
"Does money have a soul?"
Lyons falls silent. Looks out of the window. Smiles faintly. His answer that evening is the same as everyone else's: no, money has no soul, it depends what you do with it.
"The hell it does," thinks the author.
Twenty years later Chief Lyons answers something quite different.
Between the 1968 supermarket and the 2004 car — thirty-six years later — lies a whole life. A father who sells his life's work and only charges for the paint cans. A boy who tears up his grades and throws them in a wastepaper basket, with no one there. A young man who lies dying by a gravel road in Tibet, and who then lives with the Mentawai people on the island of Siberut off Sumatra — a people who live without money, without a concept of time and without number words beyond five. That is where the question of money's soul is born, but he cannot ask it. They do not speak the same language. It stays with him and governs everything he thinks for eighteen years, before it can finally be said out loud.
Then he asks it of hundreds of people in different social classes and cultures, until he sits down to write this book.
Here too is a company founded together with the world's oldest living democracy and named one of the world's hundred most innovative. A council of chiefs that asks what a decision means for the seventh generation. A clan mother who holds her finger in front of his nose and demands a promise he cannot give.
In 1759 Adam Smith wrote that we admire wealth and power where admiration should fall to wisdom and virtue, and called it the corruption of our moral sentiments. Then he wrote another book, and the world chose that one. Hassle takes Smith at his word and follows the thread to the end: what follows if we replace the one assumption on which everything else rests?
The real question turns out not to be about systems at all. The power over what we admire is the only thing the twelve richest can never own. It lies with ten billion people, one morning at a time.
Read, listen and explore Background material: interviews, films and documents.
“When I ask them whether money has a soul, they do not smile indulgently as most of us do; they simply answer the question.”
The book
The opening. The drive to Eskilstuna in October 2004 where the question is asked, the conversation about spirits and little people, the choice at Långholmen in 1986 between idealism and money, and a meditation at the foot of Kanchenjunga.
His father's whole life: the painter's apprentice who built Sweden's largest privately owned painting firm and one day walked out of the entrance and never returned. Growing up in Stureby, the Cold War, the 1973 oil crisis — and 1968, outside the Konsum store, where the child's question was born.
Politics and journalism are tried and rejected. The year alone: Tibet, Sumatra, Siberut and the Mentawai people. Vision och Verklighet is founded in 1986 with a thirty-year strategy, the Globe is lit up, World Wide Live is built — and after fifteen years he leaves.
The Millennium Peace Summit in New York, Chief Oren Lyons and the Haudenosaunee. Consensus decisions in thirty seconds, and a way of counting time seven generations ahead.
The book goes below the surface: what is a soul, and what is money? What is a company, really? The articles of association, the governance model, breach of contract as strategy, the bank, interest, fear — and the political company.
Plantagon: a company founded together with the Onondaga Nation, with values grounded in wisdom and virtue rather than wealth and power — all the way into its governing documents. The brand, the struggle in the Longhouse, the state visits. It worked.
The real question. In a time machine the author travels to Adam Smith in Kirkcaldy in 1788, and out of the conversation the thought experiment Value Change for Survival is born: cordism — from the Latin cor, cordis, the heart — with socium instead of capital. The part ends with the answer.
From the book
Chapter 10
Stureby, 1968. Jag är åtta år gammal och står utanför Konsum på Bastuhagsvägen. Martin Luther King har mördats, Robert Kennedy några månader senare, Vietnamkriget rasar.
Jag känner för första gången att alla måste göra något åt hur världen fungerar. Men jag är ju så liten. Vad kan jag göra?
Sedan finns det ingen återvändo.
Chapter 2
Vi kan säga att vi inte tror på andar. Inte heller att ett berg har krafter som kan hjälpa mig genom livet, om jag bara pratar med det. Vilka är ”vi” förresten? När jag sitter med en människa som skrattar överseende åt att jag inte tror på allt det där, en som inte är ”vi”, ska jag då tänka på henne med ett eget överseende, ett som jag inte visar?
Min verklighet. Jag försökte försiktigt förklara för en nordamerikansk hövding att det nog inte finns småfolk i skogarna kring Björnåsen. Hans ilsket upprörda reaktion och frågan om jag påstod att han ljög, gjorde att jag valde att aldrig fråga igen.
Chapter 3
September 1986. Jag sitter högst upp på berget på Långholmen. Nio år tidigare rev jag sönder mina betyg och kastade dem i en papperskorg. Ingen var där då. Ingen är här nu.
Sedan dess har jag ordervägrat mig igenom lumpen, byggt Sveriges största vindsurfingskola och gett bort den. Det går bra. Så bra att det ligger pengar i kassar i köksskåpet, för att jag inte hunnit till banken.
Så jag sätter mig ner och räknar ut vad min frihet kostar. 200 miljoner.
Chapter 97
Långt senare åkte jag nästan dit. Året var 2014 och Plantagon stod på sin topp, värderat till mer än en miljard. En mycket rik man ville göra mig till symbolen för ett annat sätt att driva affärer, med ett liv i helikoptrar och hotellrum i flera plan. Jag sade ja, tänkte svika alla som trott på mig. Och sedan, i sista stund, nej.
Jag har alltid haft en inre känsla, en rädsla faktiskt, för pengar. Det känns som om jag gav efter för viljan att maximera vinsten, då skulle jag bli värre än alla andra: girigare, mer hänsynslös och galen efter mer.
Chapter 71
Jag ligger i sängen i ett hus som jag inte vet vems det är. I rummet intill sover redan Åke, Olsson till efternamn, innovatören av det vertikala växthus som om några år ska belönas som en av världens 100 mest innovativa idéer. Vi är i Onondaga Nation, hjärtat i Irokesförbundet, världens äldsta levande demokrati byggd från en tusenårig konfederation av sex nationer: Onondaga, Oneida, Seneca, Mohawk, Cayuga och Tuscarora.
Jag vet att den plats där jag ska göra min presentation är samma plats där grundarna av den amerikanska konstitutionen hade sina samtal med Irokesförbundets hövdingar om hur ett demokratiskt styrelseskick skulle se ut. Jo, den amerikanska konstitutionen föddes på den plats där jag ska prata imorgon.
Chapter 48
Så, jag kom att spendera tre dagar i Geneve alldeles i närheten av Sovjetunionens siste president Michail Gorbachev. Det visade sig att han undrat om det var jag som skickat det där brevet och att han ville ha en pratstund med mig om mitt kärleksbudskap till den ryska maffian.
”Kommer ni ihåg när vi skickade den där kärnvapenmissilen över Atlanten?”. Frågan riktade sig till Akio Matsumura och Rabbi Soetendorp och ställdes plötsligt av mannen som satt till höger om mig. Jag sneglade på honom och undrade stillsamt vad han menade, eller om jag hade hört fel.
The rest is in the book.
The author
Hans Hassle built one of Sweden's most creative communications companies from 1986 to 2001. In 2012 he received the World Finance 100 Award and in 2013 he was named CEO of the Year by the magazine European CEO. His company Plantagon built tall greenhouses to feed the cities of the future, and was ranked among the world's hundred most innovative companies. Then he turned against the game he had just won.
Because Hans Hassle has always lived two lives at once. As a young journalist he lived with indigenous peoples on the Tibetan plateau and deep in the Indonesian jungle, among people who refused to have money in their house — the reportage reached all the way to People Magazine in Australia.
Decades later he made history when he founded Plantagon together with the Onondaga Nation and became the first European ever to lead a company owned by a North American indigenous nation.
He lives in the forest outside Katrineholm with his wife Karin, a glass artist. Does Money Have a Soul? It is the book that his life has led up to. So far.
hans.hassle@doesmoneyhaveasoul.com
“… in some indescribable way part of the infinite.”
Hans Hassle
Kanchenjunga
Deep dive
The conversations with Oren Lyons, the films, the documents and the 147 people in the book.
“While I am here I shall do the same. Talk to the mountain.”
Buy
The book is expected to be published in 2027. Register your interest here and we will let you know when it is available to order.
Contact
Press, rights, questions about the book or a request for a lecture.
