The Zero-Point of Capital: When Wealth Becomes Light

(Living Economy V)

I. The law of gravity and the law of grace

Matter, Steiner tells us, strives toward the center of the Earth. When it reaches that center, it disappears — and reappears in the Sun. What dies as substance is reborn as radiance.

This same law governs money.
When capital moves, it nourishes life; when it hoards, it hardens. At a certain density it crosses a threshold — a zero-point — where it ceases to serve and begins to weigh.

The modern world lives at that threshold. Vast fortunes sit inert, while the social body starves for movement. The Earth has swallowed too much gold; it must learn to shine again.

II. The zero-point in motion

Every living system alternates between concentration and radiation.

• Concentration brings form, focus, identity.
• Radiation brings warmth, relationship, growth.

In economics, we call these accumulation and circulation. The zero-point lies where the two meet — the moment when holding on becomes decay, and letting go becomes creation.

Mathematically it is simple:

Wliving = W × v

Wealth remains alive only as long as its velocity of circulation (v) stays above zero. When movement ceases, capital implodes into its own gravity well. What looks like abundance is actually mass without light.

III. The psychological passage

For the individual, this point of reversal is an inner experience.
The personality clings to possessions — mine, in case of…
The ‘I’ acts from purpose — so that…

To pass from the first to the second feels like loss, yet it is liberation. The “fear of loss” and the “fear of life” are the same emotion seen from opposite sides of the threshold.

When the will begins to radiate instead of contract, money ceases to be protection and becomes participation. The world itself becomes one’s affair.

IV. Civilizations at the zero-point

Cultures too alternate between gravity and grace.
Centralized empires — whether ancient or modern, religious or corporate — condense power until initiative suffocates. Decentralized cultures distribute initiative; they let the Sun principle work outward.

The West once carried that solar impulse: countless individuals creating freely within a shared horizon. But as soon as its imagination was captured by fear of loss, it reversed polarity. The radiant became gravitational. We now witness the implosion of that system — the black hole of unspent capital.

V. Ownership after the point

Private property is tied to the personality; stewardship belongs to the ‘I’. After the zero-point, the meaning of ownership changes. It becomes a vessel for intention, not an object of defense.

Money could reflect this transformation through new provisions:

• Dormant capital, unused for long periods, yields a small “circulatory dividend” to associative or regenerative funds — a kind of automatic respiration.
• Active capital, engaged in creation or renewal, keeps its full weight.

In this way, capital passes rhythmically through its zero-point — from holding to giving, from matter to light — without coercion, simply obeying the law of life.

VI. Evidence in feeling

The evidence is not only mathematical but emotional:

At the zero-point, fear becomes the teacher. Wealth realizes that its only security lies in movement.

VII. Toward a luminous economy

The formula of the future may be written like this:

Wealth = Capital × Consciousness of Circulation

When consciousness tends to zero, wealth becomes burden.
When consciousness tends to infinity, wealth becomes light.

The task before us — in Normandy, in Belgium, everywhere — is to build the seminaries of this new awareness: places where capital learns to breathe, and where social forms are designed according to this cosmic law of metamorphosis.