The final installment of the Bitcoin Is Not Democratic series explores how a society built on Bitcoin may function and how merit will supersede politics as a mode of social organization.
Thinking about the effect Bitcoin has and will have on the organization of human society sends one down many rabbit holes. We’ve been down a few already.
In the final part of this series, we’re going to explore the idea of a “meritocracy,” alongside some flavors of that model which I believe Bitcoin makes possible.
Once again, these are thought experiments. I do not have all of the answers and in fact, may not have any of the answers – the idea is that we begin thinking about these things seriously now. Projecting stupidity like dEmOcRaCy onto Bitcoin and more importantly onto a future Bitcoin standard is just a recipe for failure.
On our journey toward the “age of merit,” we must always remember the real struggle: The option to advance through economic means or political means.
We must remember that the real distinction between the state and anarchy can be boiled down to the contrast between the “given” (centralized/mandatory system) versus the “gathered” (decentralized/voluntary system).
Bitcoin is our opportunity to swing the pendulum away from the tyranny of the given and back to the possibility of the gathered.
I hope this series has served as a wake-up call, especially for those who’ve tied their identity to the idea of Bitcoin being democratic.
Now, before we kick in, let’s whet our appetites with this brilliant short video I was sent last week. It reminds us why the first three parts of this series, in particular, were written:
The video links off to another short video called “Sex & Taxes.” You should bookmark and watch them both.
Let’s begin.
Work
I don’t want to get into the “metaphysics of work” here, so I’ll simply point out that work is the basis of productivity and productivity the basis of progress. You can’t have a society without people working.
Work -> Productivity -> Progress -> Society
To show how broken the current world really is, contrast this basic progression with the fact that you cannot simply fly to any country and work for someone.
These democratic, politically driven institutions we call governments are not interested in economic reality or productivity, but in moronic protectionism so that the lemmings who voted to keep them in power are able to continue subsisting off welfare and handouts.
Cyberspace was the first realm to transcend the tentacles of the idiot state. It enabled people to work for others and add value, irrespective of their nationality or location.
But even with the ability to transcend space and place, the meddling of the state via its influence on the banking and payments system (as we’ve seen in the recent Russia-hysteria), has made that victory only partial. Your ability to get paid is dependent upon permission from your overlords, who want to tag you, brand you and file your details away so they can “legally” rob you of a portion of your money later.
Simply getting a bank account in a territory in which you’re not a “legal resident” is nigh on impossible. Working is another level of impossibility that requires mountains of paperwork and months of wasted man-hours in bureaucratic processing and begging.
Once again, Bitcoin fixes this. Try it yourself. Download a wallet, secure your keys, give someone an address to pay you for your work, or product, or service. Simple. Value for value. No middlemen, no permission, no wastage of anyone’s precious time.
Bitcoin inverts the madness of the status quo, where you have to beg for permission first. It enables people to work, build wealth and one day, when governance evolves into fee-for-service, you will pay for that which you want — like any normal customer would.
Want to live in the nicest city? No problem; it’s a higher membership fee. Want to live cheaper? By all means; there will be a “living product” for that too.
On a Bitcoin standard, this ability to live and work anywhere — for anyone, without permission — becomes the actual standard, both online and in meatspace.
The notion of a “social security number” or a “work permit” is thrown out the window because (a) it will be utterly unenforceable online, and (b) citadel operators are looking for more customers, and are incentivized to have productive and competent members to join the ranks of the businesses operating within their borders.
This is where we’re going; and where we’re going, we don’t need roads.
The Age Of Merit
Work and merit are inherently linked.
Bitcoin’s relationship with energy use at the network level, coupled with its cryptographic approach to preserving property rights at the meta level, result in a far deeper relationship to work than what many initially notice, and therefore also its relationship to merit.
As such, Bitcoin’s existence will tilt both individual human behavior and structural societal orientation more toward productivity, progress and most importantly, merit.
It’s funny coming full circle to this idea because it’s actually how part one of the series began. My argument was that “Bitcoin is meritocratic.” While I’ve come to realize that this statement is not entirely accurate in and of itself (Bitcoin is more complex, and not strictly meritocratic) what is accurate is that relationships and social coordination will have to adapt to more meritocratic “metas” in order to thrive. There is a powerful idea here. Bitcoin is almost like a specter, keeping us accountable (in all senses of the word), reminding us of the middle way.
With that in mind, what is a “meritocracy”?
Before we explore the answer to that question, it might be helpful to get clear on what it is not — because remember: where we’re going, we don’t need roads. If we get confused and build a bunch of metaphorical “roads” on metaphorical oceans, we’re only going to get in our own way.
Projecting the consciousness and frameworks of our current paradigm forward helps nobody.
Faux mEriToCrAcY
We’ve all heard the term, but does anyone really understand what it means? At the risk of giving yourself a mild aneurysm, I suggest you watch the video below, not because it will help you understand the concept of meritocracy, but that it will show you why it’s so goddamn important to have a foundation in Bitcoin, Austrian economics or anarcho-capitalism before espousing any sort of political ideas.
I know I’m being harsh, but I do it tongue-in-cheek. I actually reached out to the guy and since he made that video, he did find Bitcoin — which I am happy for. In fact, if I look back on my naivety from 2014, I too would’ve believed some of the things he said. Why? Because they sound nice.
This is why the first four parts of this series were written. We all know the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Some of us, those who can partially recognize the problem but completely misdiagnose it, are prone to slap a series of illogical, inconsistent ideas together and become a potentially greater threat than an ally. We must be sharp and consistent in our critiques in order to attract the most able and intelligent to our cause. The alternative is being followed by the long tail of lemmings whose opinion doesn’t matter in the first place.
Vague platitudes or impossible claims like “equality of opportunity for everyone” and “the best education is a right for every young child,” are signs that the necessary work has not been done yet.
Arbitrarily defining government actors as “experts in their field” who are “driven by reason and science” is not what makes something meritocratic. In fact, it is a pathway to hell — as evidenced in the past two years.
In the absence of studies of morality and ethics (much of what traditional religions explore), the secular state simply becomes the new god, and obedience the religion.
Lastly, the idea of a “government” being an institution that can competently deliver anything they’ve promised is nonsense. Government and merit are two incompatible ideas. Politics can only embody merit if it is economically accountable, and so long as politics is the realm of a government that can influence economies by virtue of issuing money, we are caught in the cyclical trap from which we’re now fighting our way out.
This is why even the most sound definition of a meritocracy (something akin to an anarcho-capitalist, voluntaryist society), while great in theory, is impossible without Bitcoin.
Bitcoin is what makes a real meritocratic mode of organization among humans possible. There is no alternative. A meritocracy requires private property, proof of work, economic consequence/calculation, free markets and prices.
So long as mechanisms exist to acquire, accumulate and protect wealth by virtue of politics and the socialization of bad decision-making, society will always devolve into the tyranny of mindless masses.
Let’s dive into what the emergence of a meritocracy may look, feel and sound like.
Meritocracy
Despite the logical and economic consistencies of the various flavors of anarchism, they all seem to fall short in dealing with or utilizing the necessary emergence of hierarchies and power structures.
Having run businesses for over a decade, and been a focal point for group outings, I am keenly aware of the need for leadership and some level of influence (power?) over the participants in a group.
This form of power is not coercive, but it is directive and authoritative.
I’ve written about hierarchies of competence in the past, and I believe they are a cornerstone for the healthy functioning of any group.
The anarchic idea that there are no hierarchies is, in my opinion, misguided.
The nuance lies in the distinction between hierarchies of competence and hierarchies of decree. The former being economic and moral in nature, while the latter being political and immoral.
Authority, I believe, is necessary. But not just arbitrary authority; it must be earned. Think about the master and the apprentice. The master has power and influence over his apprentice by virtue of the authority he has earned over the years, honing his craft.
Earned authority is related to merit. In order to become the best version of yourself, you must work on yourself. You must expend time and energy toward building, creating and outcompeting entropy. This manifestation of life that you exhibit in your pursuit of becoming more is my definition of merit and at the macro level is how I believe humans organize within a society most naturally.
To a large degree, it’s the underlying theme of how we’ve organized ourselves over millennia, similar to how capitalism has and always will exist, no matter how much politics you obfuscate it with. Humans need to eat. Competence is the ultimate selector.
The problem is, as always, how much non-meritocratic, arbitrary decree is able to infect the system and cause it to decay by countering this organic self-organization and even reversing the momentum.
Entropy is a bitch, and she’s always there waiting for us to get in our own way. History is littered with stories of meritocratic empires brought down by the cancer of lies; the greatest and most dangerous lies being the economic ones we tell ourselves as we step ever-closer toward starvation and oblivion.
As shown in part three, when the political can influence the economic, you have a system that will diverge from reality inch by inch until it no longer maps onto any territory. It becomes worthless. The empire of meritocracy becomes the empire of lies.
Every great collapse is a function of the deviation from territory with false maps. And false maps are always the result of hubris and willful blindness, i.e., unbounded decrees and doctrines.
That’s where we are today. One big empire of fraud, collapsing in on itself, under the gravity of its own stupidity and falsity.
But…the night is darkest before dawn, so it’s also a time of great possibility. The fork in the road we see before us, with Bitcoin, promises to help us transcend this incessant degeneration into cancerous lies by making the prime economic laws immune to politics.
On a short leash, political ideologies must adapt to the territory and sharpen their approach, or simply cease to exist. There are no alternatives. There is no room for fantasy. There is only correction and adaptation; similar to what life experiences as it evolves. As a result, politics must become smaller and function like a local strategy, not a global doctrine or mandate.
This is how I think about “meritocracy,” and I believe energy money — in our case, Bitcoin — is the necessary prerequisite for moving onto this modality of coexistence.
Meritocratic Feudalism
If Bitcoin moves us more toward greater “meritocratic order,” what might the actual social strata or layering of such a future society look like?
I’ve discussed the idea of meritocratic feudalism on some podcasts in the past, so I will try to elaborate here.
First, let’s clear up some terms and confusions.
Feudalism is generally thought of as a brutish, corrupt, elitist and outdated structure from the medieval past.
But little do the people who brandish it as such realize that we’re living in a technocratic-feudalist world today. They look back upon the medieval ages with disdain and a holier-than-thou sneer, while they perform their role in a modern, more corrupt version of their supposed worst nightmare. It’s embarrassing.
Furthermore, because they’ve not spent a minute thinking about it, and instead just swallowed whatever manure their high school indoctrinators fed them, they’re oblivious to what the actual issues with feudalism were.
It’s not that there are classes in feudalism, but that these classes can become static and stale. That the constituents within each class remain there irrespective of the value they add, their productive capacity, their merit or lack thereof.
Newsflash: That’s the world we live in today!
We have literal zombie companies like IBM, Hertz and Boeing operating purely because the government bailed out their incompetent asses with money stolen from you and I. In doing so, they made classes of modern feudalism even more static and our relative positions on the hierarchy more unfair.
A functional society requires class mobility. In “The UnCommunist Manifesto,” Mark Moss and I discuss dynamic equilibrium as a necessary ingredient for thriving societies. The ability to climb by virtue of merit, and the possibility of falling as a result of mistakes and errors in judgment, are both absolutely critical. It’s what makes the game fair; and the only way a game continues to be played is if it is fair.
There must be an incentive/disincentive structure in social hierarchies that applies to all participants across all classes in order for the system to be structurally coherent and robust. If the rules are different for different players, the game begins to break down.
This is why I’ve proposed “meritocratic feudalism” as an idea. It embodies the organizing principles of hierarchies and classes, alongside the dynamic nature of status, effort, merit and value.
On a Bitcoin standard it seems as if this, and variations of it, are the kind of structures that will emerge.
Private Citadels
While meritocratic feudalism looks at what the internal structure of a particular society may be, each one is encapsulated in a “citadel” of sorts.
This does not necessarily mean a castle with a drawbridge…but, then again, it also does not negate that possibility.
The idea that we’ll have city states, citadels, gated communities and perhaps more broadly, an ephemeral “Bitcoin citadel” that transcends time, place and space (like the Jews have had for millennia) is not only compelling, but quite possible.
The more ephemeral version is in effect how we’ve started and places like Bitcoin Twitter are manifestations of these early citadels. Zones in which like-valued people come together and either agree or berate each other over small differences behind their keyboards may at times seem crazy, but they are integral to the formation of early alliances that may one day open the door to meatspace citadels.
These IRL extensions may start out as simple communities that are built with the intention to go off-grid, becoming ever more self-sufficient and self-reliant, or, they may be more commercial in nature such as the projects the Free Private Cities Foundation is involved in, in Honduras.
Either way, the central themes are:
Their emergent and more voluntary nature (especially in cyberspace).If in meatspace, their privately run nature and local scale.If the territories are small enough, they may operate through some form of committee led by the wisest and most competent.If large enough to be cities they may then be governed by their private owners or “CEO kings” in a way similar to how hotels or all-inclusive resorts are today.
And most importantly, the relationships between governor and governed evolves. If you’ve read my work in the past, you’ll be familiar with the following chart from part three of the Jordan Peterson series; “Bitcoin, Bitcoiners and Citadels.”
I know it sounds like a stretch, but if you don’t think it’s possible, you’ve not yet spent the time to appreciate the implications that Bitcoin will have on human micro and macro behavior.
In fact, you may just be a slave to the dogma and propaganda of the current paradigm.
It would appear that the more liberty we lose, the less people are able to imagine how liberty might work. It’s a fascinating thing to behold. …
The idea of privatizing roads or water supplies sounds outlandish, even though we have a long history of both; People even wonder how anyone would be educated in the absence of public schools, as if markets themselves didn’t create in America the world’s most literate society in the 18th and 19th centuries.
This list could go on and on. But the problem is that the capacity to imagine freedom — the very source of life for civilization and humanity itself — is being eroded in our society and culture. The less freedom we have, the less people are able to imagine what freedom feels like, and therefore the less they are willing to fight for its restoration. — Lew Rockwell, 2010
The idea of citadels requires you imagine a world in which idiot governments no longer exist.
I know this can be hard for some of us, either because we’re lacking courage, lacking imagination, lacking intelligence or are just overwhelmed by the constant bombardment of stupidity being spewed out from every screen and speaker around us.
I get it. But it’s our responsibility to step up in spite of these facts. If we don’t rise above the madness and help ourselves, the morons in government are for damn sure not going to help us. That we can be certain of.
The status quo cannot continue. It’s falling apart. You have people barely fit for a nursing home pretending to “run countries” and megalomaniacs cosplaying Dr. Evil telling you to own nothing and be happy with your serving of bugs and lentils.
These citadels are more than just an idea. They are necessary.
Memberships And Clubs
How might these citadels work? What is their economic model? How will they pay for services, defense, security and infrastructure? Will their model be bare-bones or full service?
Again, impossible for one mere mind to know what all the variations will be, let alone the intricacies and nuances that will emerge as we learn and iterate. The only mechanism we know of that can possibly work this out is the free market.
I believe the world will run multiple experiments, side by side, and the best modalities will win. Furthermore, what is defined as “best” will vary from region to region, between people and across cultures. I can envision an entire array of “markets for living” where competition and economic accountability drive them toward the provision of more novel solutions at better prices.
Notwithstanding my inability to project a precise outcome of this experimentation, I do have an idea of what sort of general economic model might outperform others.
GAAS, or Governance as a Service.
We’ve used these models to revolutionize services in cyberspace, and through competition drive toward better features, more value and lower prices. Why would we not apply this sort of model to meatspace?
Think of an all-inclusive resort or hotel experience. Or membership to the Soho House. You pay a membership fee of some sort covering certain basics. You may choose to have some sort of add-ons or variations that make your contract with the service provider bespoke.
You may even have a series of memberships across multiple territories, and use them how you want. Perhaps you buy ownership, or lifetime membership in a territory early and you’re able to sublet part of your rights when you need to. We could even employ a “time-share”sort of model used today as an effective means of pooling resources for shared ownership of private property. Who knows? The options to scale up initial citadels, and later operate them, are not only endless, but superior.
Why would we find it strange that commercially oriented entities would somehow not be able to deliver anything an incompetent government can?
In fact, I find it absurd to think that any government, operating in an economic vacuum, could ever outcompete this kind of private-city GAAS provider. One lives by how much money they siphon out of the populace, while the other by how well they service their clients.
There is absolutely no possible argument “for” public government other than the fact that because they currently hold the largest “stick.” That does not defend their existence, but should if anything force us to think deeply about how to disempower them and bankrupt them from within, until they crumble and dissolve. Why? Because they are the ones we need to protect ourselves from most. They are the greatest possible aggressor.
CEO Kings
Next…Who might these territory operators actually be?
Let’s call them “CEO kings.”
By virtue of Bitcoin’s abolition of the state, I envision the rise of kings, lords and nobles.
A new age of economically accountable monarchs, operating their territories and servicing their customers in the same way that great, innovative companies would.
In their domain, they are the kings. They are the ultimate authority, because they are the apex property owner. And while that may come with risks, there is a natural balancing mechanism built into it because of the digital nature of wealth and the relationship between the governor and governed.
As mentioned earlier, Bitcoin enables mobility (not just up and down the social strata) but between jurisdictions and as such transforms the returns to violence. It increases the cost to attack and lowers the price of defense, of trade and of cooperation.
Future CEO kings will live and die by their bottom line, and that bottom line will come from serving their customers.
Sure, some of them may become tyrants, but in a world with more choice and mobility of wealth, the returns on tyranny diminish significantly.
In fact, the risk that you run your territory in the ground and be acquired for “sats on the Bitcoin” by a consortium of superior operators, means that you’ll want to think twice before shitting where you sleep.
We’re beginning to see early signs of this already.
I’ll go out on a limb and say that the most important thing Bukele has done, perhaps even more so than making Bitcoin legal tender, is the following:
What the world needs more than anything (in terms of leadership), is economically accountable territory operators. Think Steve Jobs blended with JFK: Charisma, foresight, creativity, business acumen and a focus on the product and serving the customer.
Bitcoin makes this kind of future possible.
Leadership
A quick note on leadership.
I was speaking to Tomer Strolight the other day and he mentioned a story from an old employee of his. Tomer had asked him if he wanted to be a leader and what that duty entailed. The response was that he could “be in charge.”
This is not out of the ordinary. Most people conflate leadership with control, dictates, ordering and with “being in charge.” I know I thought this when I was younger, but as I matured I came to the realization that true leadership is about responsibility and empowering the right people to take charge.
So while yes, to some degree the leader is in charge of finding those people, an effective leader is actually not in charge of the minutiae. They are not a micromanager or control freak, like modern statists. This is what made people like George Washington, Alexander the Great, Robert Noyce and the mature Steve Jobs incredible leaders.
These are the archetypes who will emerge to lead the new world.
“A Network Of Dictators”
Now…to piss a few people off.
How will these CEO kings interact at the macro scale? Will they form alliances? Are there economic advantages of partnering and aligning with other CEO kings and territories?
Think of “Star Alliance.” It is a global airline alliance formed by five “competitors” who realized that while they run separate businesses, there is value in creating a shared network for their clients to benefit from.
Mind you, this was all before flying was hijacked by the government and turned into one of the most degrading experiences on Earth. All of the joy has been sucked out of it since 2001, and especially since 2020. Another example of the sheer incompetence and bumbling buffoonery of the state.
Government intervention and destruction aside, we may see the same sort of thing happen with markets of living.
As each of these emergent citadels becomes a sort of meatspace node, they may form a network of citadels and territories who align around Bitcoin’s economic advantages, their complementary nature or by virtue of having shared goals and values.
The question I would then like to posit is the following:
Does Bitcoin make local, economically accountable “dictatorships” possible?
It’s an interesting idea, and one that may work in a world where the returns to violence have changed, so the cost of attack is significantly higher than the cost of defense.
I know the word “dictator” only serves to trigger people. I do mean leaders, but these leaders will most certainly be called dictators, and to a large degree, in the early days they will likely need to operate with more authoritative zeal. There is both wartime and peacetime behavior.
Think about it this way.
One must be the dictator of their own lives and resources to begin with. As private property extends so too does one’s “dictatorship.” As the primary private property owner in a territory, will you not have the earned — or paid for — authority to dictate terms with those who choose to work with or for you?
I bring this up because people with views like Alex Gladstein always like to point out “flaws” in supposed “dictators” like Bukele, while turning a blind eye to the atrocities perpetrated by democratic governments such as Chinada, Auschtralia and New Xiland.
My retort is: “So what if Bukele is a dictator?” Better the devil you know, that is economically accountable and has some skin in the game by being on a Bitcoin standard, than some nameless, faceless, disembodied institution represented by representatives with no skin in the game. The former is more constrained than the latter who never pays the bill.
The following quote by C.S. Lewis is apt here:
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be ‘cured’ against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.” — C.S. Lewis
So I implore you to think beyond the labels (they’ve been so watered down now by a soft, ever-triggered and overly feminized society that they’re meaningless anyway).
This possible future in which a “network of dictators” operate a diverse set of territories is one that I would argue offers up far superior opportunities and living services than any modern government of today could ever hope to provide.
There are going to be many, many things to work out along the way, but the kicker is this tether to an unchanging economic order in the form of Bitcoin’s fixed money supply and uncensorable, transparent monetary and temporal network.
Someone or some few are going to have to be top dogs, but better that the top dogs have to work to stay there and risk falling because we’re all playing by the same economic rules.
That’s a fairer and more robust world, and one which I personally hope my descendants will inherit.
In Closing
Wow…We’re finally at the end of it all.
It’s been a blast writing this.
I set out to write one article about why Bitcoin is not democratic. I wanted to remind people that it is enforced by the individual, for the individual and their “votes” have no bearing on anyone else’s private property.
My goal was to show you that Bitcoin is true, voluntary, anarchic consensus.
In the process, and almost 30,000 words later, we’ve got a mini-treatise on the grand scam of democracy, and ideas for the future of human organization and coexistence.
I didn’t expect that, but I’m glad we’ve taken this journey.
A summation of the key ideas:
Bitcoin is in many ways the “Renaissance of Responsibility.” It is antithetical and incompatible with collectivist doctrines, including and especially democracy which are hinged on concepts like representation and voting, and prone to devolving into mob rule, tragedies of the commons, behavioral decay and the heightening of time preference.
Bitcoin is an economic, not political beast and as such makes the socialization of poor decisions via majority rule or representative decree impossible.
There are no representative rulers on a Bitcoin standard who can operate in an economic vacuum and thus a contractual void. As such it localizes any potential moral hazard, which is a central theme and, in fact, systemic to collectivist politics.
In part three we explained why human rights are a scam. They are merely an elaborate method of encroaching upon the property rights of those who bear the responsibility side of the ledger.
We also came to the realization that Bitcoin not only separates money and state, but it separates economy and politics. I’d argue the latter is a transformation that will have an impact of magnitude nobody alive today could possibly fathom.
Despite our inability to appreciate the full magnitude of the change, we can still begin to think about how to orient ourselves for alignment. We can think about the law and its limitations, we can do our best to draw clear lines between property and plunder, we can structure contracts and incentives in accordance with the changing returns on violence resultant of Bitcoin’s redefinition of the preservation of private property rights through the mathematical (not forceful) means.
With this, we can most definitely think more about a move toward anarchism, and in particular flavors such as localism and one day even the rise of modern monarchies and CEO kings.
There is so much change, for the better, ahead of us. And it’s happening. In fact, there’s nothing we can do to stop this change because the old guard is crumbling.
A friend of mine sent me an article by Arthur Hayes today (March 21). I didn’t have time to read it, so I asked him for the high-level overview. In short, he said:
“More or less an analysis of the repercussions of confiscating Russia’s savings. Distrust in the whole system causing nations to gravitate towards hard money – gold first and later Bitcoin.”
To which my response was:
“Accurate. I’ve said many times, Bitcoin wins less because of what we do, and more because of the cluster fuck the state creates for itself. Classic art of war. Do not get in the way of your enemy who is making a mistake.”
The petrodollar truly came to an end this year, 13 years after Bitcoin came to life. The clown-world globalists cut off their nose to spite their face. It is almost poetic.
The timeline we’re living in is full of more twists, turns and cliches than a run-of-the-mill series on Netflix and as much as it’s frustrating, if you step back a little, you know how it ends.
The bad guys, i.e., the bumbling fools whose own lives are such a mess and cannot practice self-restraint so need to project their lack of control on everyone else, end up losing. They lose because A=A, and 2 + 2 = 4. They will deny reality, they will gaslight us, and they will pretend with all their might that math is racist or that gravity does not exist; but soon enough, just like Icarus experienced, gravity is real, the sun melts wax and below their false map is no longer ground, but air.
It’s a long way down after that.
In any case, we have a way to go before we rise up from the tyranny of the majority. New hysterias will continue to emerge reminiscent of the constant state of tension and angst present in Orwell’s “1984.”
It’s not over until the abomination that is democracy dissolves and is replaced with an organic, emergent, economic standard.
A Bitcoin standard.
So to commemorate the inevitable death of democracy, I’d like to leave you with a quote and a video.
…but Remember, that the captain belongs to the most dangerous enemy to truth and freedom.
The solid and unmoving cattle of the majority.
…Oh god, the terrible tyranny of the majority…
— Faber to Montag, “Fahrenheit 451,” by Ray Bradbury
And…The Tiny Dot:
I look forward to an age where responsibility shapes society and consequence is once again the clear feedback mechanism that will make us better, smarter, stronger humans. An age where power is concentrated in distributed, competitive nodes, and democracy is but a memory. An age of competence and a period of human history where we transcend the cyclical stupidity that is unhinged politics.
I have faith that Bitcoin will accomplish that, and change the course of human development forever….Laura…forever.
Thank you for reading, and I sincerely hope you found value in trading your time for it. There will be loads more to come.
If you’d like to follow more of my work, you can see links to it below.
Blog on Bitcoin Magazine
Articles by Aleksandar Svetski
Twitter:
@GhostOfSvetski
@TimelessBitcoin
@Un-Communist
@WakeUpPod_
This is a guest post by Aleks Svetski, Author of “The UnCommunist Manifesto,” The Bitcoin Times and Host of anchor.fm/WakeUpPod. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.
Thinking about the effect Bitcoin has and will have on the organization of human society sends one down many rabbit holes. We’ve been down a few already.
In the final part of this series, we’re going to explore the idea of a “meritocracy,” alongside some flavors of that model which I believe Bitcoin makes possible.
Once again, these are thought experiments. I do not have all of the answers and in fact, may not have any of the answers – the idea is that we begin thinking about these things seriously now. Projecting stupidity like dEmOcRaCy onto Bitcoin and more importantly onto a future Bitcoin standard is just a recipe for failure.
On our journey toward the “age of merit,” we must always remember the real struggle: The option to advance through economic means or political means.
We must remember that the real distinction between the state and anarchy can be boiled down to the contrast between the “given” (centralized/mandatory system) versus the “gathered” (decentralized/voluntary system).
Bitcoin is our opportunity to swing the pendulum away from the tyranny of the given and back to the possibility of the gathered.
I hope this series has served as a wake-up call, especially for those who’ve tied their identity to the idea of Bitcoin being democratic.
Now, before we kick in, let’s whet our appetites with this brilliant short video I was sent last week. It reminds us why the first three parts of this series, in particular, were written:
The video links off to another short video called “Sex & Taxes.” You should bookmark and watch them both.
Let’s begin.
Work
I don’t want to get into the “metaphysics of work” here, so I’ll simply point out that work is the basis of productivity and productivity the basis of progress. You can’t have a society without people working.
Work -> Productivity -> Progress -> Society
To show how broken the current world really is, contrast this basic progression with the fact that you cannot simply fly to any country and work for someone.
These democratic, politically driven institutions we call governments are not interested in economic reality or productivity, but in moronic protectionism so that the lemmings who voted to keep them in power are able to continue subsisting off welfare and handouts.
Cyberspace was the first realm to transcend the tentacles of the idiot state. It enabled people to work for others and add value, irrespective of their nationality or location.
But even with the ability to transcend space and place, the meddling of the state via its influence on the banking and payments system (as we’ve seen in the recent Russia-hysteria), has made that victory only partial. Your ability to get paid is dependent upon permission from your overlords, who want to tag you, brand you and file your details away so they can “legally” rob you of a portion of your money later.
Simply getting a bank account in a territory in which you’re not a “legal resident” is nigh on impossible. Working is another level of impossibility that requires mountains of paperwork and months of wasted man-hours in bureaucratic processing and begging.
Once again, Bitcoin fixes this. Try it yourself. Download a wallet, secure your keys, give someone an address to pay you for your work, or product, or service. Simple. Value for value. No middlemen, no permission, no wastage of anyone’s precious time.
Bitcoin inverts the madness of the status quo, where you have to beg for permission first. It enables people to work, build wealth and one day, when governance evolves into fee-for-service, you will pay for that which you want — like any normal customer would.
Want to live in the nicest city? No problem; it’s a higher membership fee. Want to live cheaper? By all means; there will be a “living product” for that too.
On a Bitcoin standard, this ability to live and work anywhere — for anyone, without permission — becomes the actual standard, both online and in meatspace.
The notion of a “social security number” or a “work permit” is thrown out the window because (a) it will be utterly unenforceable online, and (b) citadel operators are looking for more customers, and are incentivized to have productive and competent members to join the ranks of the businesses operating within their borders.
This is where we’re going; and where we’re going, we don’t need roads.
The Age Of Merit
Work and merit are inherently linked.
Bitcoin’s relationship with energy use at the network level, coupled with its cryptographic approach to preserving property rights at the meta level, result in a far deeper relationship to work than what many initially notice, and therefore also its relationship to merit.
As such, Bitcoin’s existence will tilt both individual human behavior and structural societal orientation more toward productivity, progress and most importantly, merit.
It’s funny coming full circle to this idea because it’s actually how part one of the series began. My argument was that “Bitcoin is meritocratic.” While I’ve come to realize that this statement is not entirely accurate in and of itself (Bitcoin is more complex, and not strictly meritocratic) what is accurate is that relationships and social coordination will have to adapt to more meritocratic “metas” in order to thrive. There is a powerful idea here. Bitcoin is almost like a specter, keeping us accountable (in all senses of the word), reminding us of the middle way.
With that in mind, what is a “meritocracy”?
Before we explore the answer to that question, it might be helpful to get clear on what it is not — because remember: where we’re going, we don’t need roads. If we get confused and build a bunch of metaphorical “roads” on metaphorical oceans, we’re only going to get in our own way.
Projecting the consciousness and frameworks of our current paradigm forward helps nobody.
Faux mEriToCrAcY
We’ve all heard the term, but does anyone really understand what it means? At the risk of giving yourself a mild aneurysm, I suggest you watch the video below, not because it will help you understand the concept of meritocracy, but that it will show you why it’s so goddamn important to have a foundation in Bitcoin, Austrian economics or anarcho-capitalism before espousing any sort of political ideas.
I know I’m being harsh, but I do it tongue-in-cheek. I actually reached out to the guy and since he made that video, he did find Bitcoin — which I am happy for. In fact, if I look back on my naivety from 2014, I too would’ve believed some of the things he said. Why? Because they sound nice.
This is why the first four parts of this series were written. We all know the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Some of us, those who can partially recognize the problem but completely misdiagnose it, are prone to slap a series of illogical, inconsistent ideas together and become a potentially greater threat than an ally. We must be sharp and consistent in our critiques in order to attract the most able and intelligent to our cause. The alternative is being followed by the long tail of lemmings whose opinion doesn’t matter in the first place.
Vague platitudes or impossible claims like “equality of opportunity for everyone” and “the best education is a right for every young child,” are signs that the necessary work has not been done yet.
Arbitrarily defining government actors as “experts in their field” who are “driven by reason and science” is not what makes something meritocratic. In fact, it is a pathway to hell — as evidenced in the past two years.
In the absence of studies of morality and ethics (much of what traditional religions explore), the secular state simply becomes the new god, and obedience the religion.
Lastly, the idea of a “government” being an institution that can competently deliver anything they’ve promised is nonsense. Government and merit are two incompatible ideas. Politics can only embody merit if it is economically accountable, and so long as politics is the realm of a government that can influence economies by virtue of issuing money, we are caught in the cyclical trap from which we’re now fighting our way out.
This is why even the most sound definition of a meritocracy (something akin to an anarcho-capitalist, voluntaryist society), while great in theory, is impossible without Bitcoin.
Bitcoin is what makes a real meritocratic mode of organization among humans possible. There is no alternative. A meritocracy requires private property, proof of work, economic consequence/calculation, free markets and prices.
So long as mechanisms exist to acquire, accumulate and protect wealth by virtue of politics and the socialization of bad decision-making, society will always devolve into the tyranny of mindless masses.
Let’s dive into what the emergence of a meritocracy may look, feel and sound like.
Meritocracy
Despite the logical and economic consistencies of the various flavors of anarchism, they all seem to fall short in dealing with or utilizing the necessary emergence of hierarchies and power structures.
Having run businesses for over a decade, and been a focal point for group outings, I am keenly aware of the need for leadership and some level of influence (power?) over the participants in a group.
This form of power is not coercive, but it is directive and authoritative.
I’ve written about hierarchies of competence in the past, and I believe they are a cornerstone for the healthy functioning of any group.
The anarchic idea that there are no hierarchies is, in my opinion, misguided.
The nuance lies in the distinction between hierarchies of competence and hierarchies of decree. The former being economic and moral in nature, while the latter being political and immoral.
Authority, I believe, is necessary. But not just arbitrary authority; it must be earned. Think about the master and the apprentice. The master has power and influence over his apprentice by virtue of the authority he has earned over the years, honing his craft.
Earned authority is related to merit. In order to become the best version of yourself, you must work on yourself. You must expend time and energy toward building, creating and outcompeting entropy. This manifestation of life that you exhibit in your pursuit of becoming more is my definition of merit and at the macro level is how I believe humans organize within a society most naturally.
To a large degree, it’s the underlying theme of how we’ve organized ourselves over millennia, similar to how capitalism has and always will exist, no matter how much politics you obfuscate it with. Humans need to eat. Competence is the ultimate selector.
The problem is, as always, how much non-meritocratic, arbitrary decree is able to infect the system and cause it to decay by countering this organic self-organization and even reversing the momentum.
Entropy is a bitch, and she’s always there waiting for us to get in our own way. History is littered with stories of meritocratic empires brought down by the cancer of lies; the greatest and most dangerous lies being the economic ones we tell ourselves as we step ever-closer toward starvation and oblivion.
As shown in part three, when the political can influence the economic, you have a system that will diverge from reality inch by inch until it no longer maps onto any territory. It becomes worthless. The empire of meritocracy becomes the empire of lies.
Every great collapse is a function of the deviation from territory with false maps. And false maps are always the result of hubris and willful blindness, i.e., unbounded decrees and doctrines.
That’s where we are today. One big empire of fraud, collapsing in on itself, under the gravity of its own stupidity and falsity.
But…the night is darkest before dawn, so it’s also a time of great possibility. The fork in the road we see before us, with Bitcoin, promises to help us transcend this incessant degeneration into cancerous lies by making the prime economic laws immune to politics.
On a short leash, political ideologies must adapt to the territory and sharpen their approach, or simply cease to exist. There are no alternatives. There is no room for fantasy. There is only correction and adaptation; similar to what life experiences as it evolves. As a result, politics must become smaller and function like a local strategy, not a global doctrine or mandate.
This is how I think about “meritocracy,” and I believe energy money — in our case, Bitcoin — is the necessary prerequisite for moving onto this modality of coexistence.
Meritocratic Feudalism
If Bitcoin moves us more toward greater “meritocratic order,” what might the actual social strata or layering of such a future society look like?
I’ve discussed the idea of meritocratic feudalism on some podcasts in the past, so I will try to elaborate here.
First, let’s clear up some terms and confusions.
Feudalism is generally thought of as a brutish, corrupt, elitist and outdated structure from the medieval past.
But little do the people who brandish it as such realize that we’re living in a technocratic-feudalist world today. They look back upon the medieval ages with disdain and a holier-than-thou sneer, while they perform their role in a modern, more corrupt version of their supposed worst nightmare. It’s embarrassing.
Furthermore, because they’ve not spent a minute thinking about it, and instead just swallowed whatever manure their high school indoctrinators fed them, they’re oblivious to what the actual issues with feudalism were.
It’s not that there are classes in feudalism, but that these classes can become static and stale. That the constituents within each class remain there irrespective of the value they add, their productive capacity, their merit or lack thereof.
Newsflash: That’s the world we live in today!
We have literal zombie companies like IBM, Hertz and Boeing operating purely because the government bailed out their incompetent asses with money stolen from you and I. In doing so, they made classes of modern feudalism even more static and our relative positions on the hierarchy more unfair.
A functional society requires class mobility. In “The UnCommunist Manifesto,” Mark Moss and I discuss dynamic equilibrium as a necessary ingredient for thriving societies. The ability to climb by virtue of merit, and the possibility of falling as a result of mistakes and errors in judgment, are both absolutely critical. It’s what makes the game fair; and the only way a game continues to be played is if it is fair.
There must be an incentive/disincentive structure in social hierarchies that applies to all participants across all classes in order for the system to be structurally coherent and robust. If the rules are different for different players, the game begins to break down.
This is why I’ve proposed “meritocratic feudalism” as an idea. It embodies the organizing principles of hierarchies and classes, alongside the dynamic nature of status, effort, merit and value.
On a Bitcoin standard it seems as if this, and variations of it, are the kind of structures that will emerge.
Private Citadels
While meritocratic feudalism looks at what the internal structure of a particular society may be, each one is encapsulated in a “citadel” of sorts.
This does not necessarily mean a castle with a drawbridge…but, then again, it also does not negate that possibility.
The idea that we’ll have city states, citadels, gated communities and perhaps more broadly, an ephemeral “Bitcoin citadel” that transcends time, place and space (like the Jews have had for millennia) is not only compelling, but quite possible.
The more ephemeral version is in effect how we’ve started and places like Bitcoin Twitter are manifestations of these early citadels. Zones in which like-valued people come together and either agree or berate each other over small differences behind their keyboards may at times seem crazy, but they are integral to the formation of early alliances that may one day open the door to meatspace citadels.
These IRL extensions may start out as simple communities that are built with the intention to go off-grid, becoming ever more self-sufficient and self-reliant, or, they may be more commercial in nature such as the projects the Free Private Cities Foundation is involved in, in Honduras.
Either way, the central themes are:
Their emergent and more voluntary nature (especially in cyberspace).If in meatspace, their privately run nature and local scale.If the territories are small enough, they may operate through some form of committee led by the wisest and most competent.If large enough to be cities they may then be governed by their private owners or “CEO kings” in a way similar to how hotels or all-inclusive resorts are today.
And most importantly, the relationships between governor and governed evolves. If you’ve read my work in the past, you’ll be familiar with the following chart from part three of the Jordan Peterson series; “Bitcoin, Bitcoiners and Citadels.”
I know it sounds like a stretch, but if you don’t think it’s possible, you’ve not yet spent the time to appreciate the implications that Bitcoin will have on human micro and macro behavior.
In fact, you may just be a slave to the dogma and propaganda of the current paradigm.
It would appear that the more liberty we lose, the less people are able to imagine how liberty might work. It’s a fascinating thing to behold. …
The idea of privatizing roads or water supplies sounds outlandish, even though we have a long history of both; People even wonder how anyone would be educated in the absence of public schools, as if markets themselves didn’t create in America the world’s most literate society in the 18th and 19th centuries.
This list could go on and on. But the problem is that the capacity to imagine freedom — the very source of life for civilization and humanity itself — is being eroded in our society and culture. The less freedom we have, the less people are able to imagine what freedom feels like, and therefore the less they are willing to fight for its restoration. — Lew Rockwell, 2010
The idea of citadels requires you imagine a world in which idiot governments no longer exist.
I know this can be hard for some of us, either because we’re lacking courage, lacking imagination, lacking intelligence or are just overwhelmed by the constant bombardment of stupidity being spewed out from every screen and speaker around us.
I get it. But it’s our responsibility to step up in spite of these facts. If we don’t rise above the madness and help ourselves, the morons in government are for damn sure not going to help us. That we can be certain of.
The status quo cannot continue. It’s falling apart. You have people barely fit for a nursing home pretending to “run countries” and megalomaniacs cosplaying Dr. Evil telling you to own nothing and be happy with your serving of bugs and lentils.
These citadels are more than just an idea. They are necessary.
Memberships And Clubs
How might these citadels work? What is their economic model? How will they pay for services, defense, security and infrastructure? Will their model be bare-bones or full service?
Again, impossible for one mere mind to know what all the variations will be, let alone the intricacies and nuances that will emerge as we learn and iterate. The only mechanism we know of that can possibly work this out is the free market.
I believe the world will run multiple experiments, side by side, and the best modalities will win. Furthermore, what is defined as “best” will vary from region to region, between people and across cultures. I can envision an entire array of “markets for living” where competition and economic accountability drive them toward the provision of more novel solutions at better prices.
Notwithstanding my inability to project a precise outcome of this experimentation, I do have an idea of what sort of general economic model might outperform others.
GAAS, or Governance as a Service.
We’ve used these models to revolutionize services in cyberspace, and through competition drive toward better features, more value and lower prices. Why would we not apply this sort of model to meatspace?
Think of an all-inclusive resort or hotel experience. Or membership to the Soho House. You pay a membership fee of some sort covering certain basics. You may choose to have some sort of add-ons or variations that make your contract with the service provider bespoke.
You may even have a series of memberships across multiple territories, and use them how you want. Perhaps you buy ownership, or lifetime membership in a territory early and you’re able to sublet part of your rights when you need to. We could even employ a “time-share”sort of model used today as an effective means of pooling resources for shared ownership of private property. Who knows? The options to scale up initial citadels, and later operate them, are not only endless, but superior.
Why would we find it strange that commercially oriented entities would somehow not be able to deliver anything an incompetent government can?
In fact, I find it absurd to think that any government, operating in an economic vacuum, could ever outcompete this kind of private-city GAAS provider. One lives by how much money they siphon out of the populace, while the other by how well they service their clients.
There is absolutely no possible argument “for” public government other than the fact that because they currently hold the largest “stick.” That does not defend their existence, but should if anything force us to think deeply about how to disempower them and bankrupt them from within, until they crumble and dissolve. Why? Because they are the ones we need to protect ourselves from most. They are the greatest possible aggressor.
CEO Kings
Next…Who might these territory operators actually be?
Let’s call them “CEO kings.”
By virtue of Bitcoin’s abolition of the state, I envision the rise of kings, lords and nobles.
A new age of economically accountable monarchs, operating their territories and servicing their customers in the same way that great, innovative companies would.
In their domain, they are the kings. They are the ultimate authority, because they are the apex property owner. And while that may come with risks, there is a natural balancing mechanism built into it because of the digital nature of wealth and the relationship between the governor and governed.
As mentioned earlier, Bitcoin enables mobility (not just up and down the social strata) but between jurisdictions and as such transforms the returns to violence. It increases the cost to attack and lowers the price of defense, of trade and of cooperation.
Future CEO kings will live and die by their bottom line, and that bottom line will come from serving their customers.
Sure, some of them may become tyrants, but in a world with more choice and mobility of wealth, the returns on tyranny diminish significantly.
In fact, the risk that you run your territory in the ground and be acquired for “sats on the Bitcoin” by a consortium of superior operators, means that you’ll want to think twice before shitting where you sleep.
We’re beginning to see early signs of this already.
I’ll go out on a limb and say that the most important thing Bukele has done, perhaps even more so than making Bitcoin legal tender, is the following:
What the world needs more than anything (in terms of leadership), is economically accountable territory operators. Think Steve Jobs blended with JFK: Charisma, foresight, creativity, business acumen and a focus on the product and serving the customer.
Bitcoin makes this kind of future possible.
Leadership
A quick note on leadership.
I was speaking to Tomer Strolight the other day and he mentioned a story from an old employee of his. Tomer had asked him if he wanted to be a leader and what that duty entailed. The response was that he could “be in charge.”
This is not out of the ordinary. Most people conflate leadership with control, dictates, ordering and with “being in charge.” I know I thought this when I was younger, but as I matured I came to the realization that true leadership is about responsibility and empowering the right people to take charge.
So while yes, to some degree the leader is in charge of finding those people, an effective leader is actually not in charge of the minutiae. They are not a micromanager or control freak, like modern statists. This is what made people like George Washington, Alexander the Great, Robert Noyce and the mature Steve Jobs incredible leaders.
These are the archetypes who will emerge to lead the new world.
“A Network Of Dictators”
Now…to piss a few people off.
How will these CEO kings interact at the macro scale? Will they form alliances? Are there economic advantages of partnering and aligning with other CEO kings and territories?
Think of “Star Alliance.” It is a global airline alliance formed by five “competitors” who realized that while they run separate businesses, there is value in creating a shared network for their clients to benefit from.
Mind you, this was all before flying was hijacked by the government and turned into one of the most degrading experiences on Earth. All of the joy has been sucked out of it since 2001, and especially since 2020. Another example of the sheer incompetence and bumbling buffoonery of the state.
Government intervention and destruction aside, we may see the same sort of thing happen with markets of living.
As each of these emergent citadels becomes a sort of meatspace node, they may form a network of citadels and territories who align around Bitcoin’s economic advantages, their complementary nature or by virtue of having shared goals and values.
The question I would then like to posit is the following:
Does Bitcoin make local, economically accountable “dictatorships” possible?
It’s an interesting idea, and one that may work in a world where the returns to violence have changed, so the cost of attack is significantly higher than the cost of defense.
I know the word “dictator” only serves to trigger people. I do mean leaders, but these leaders will most certainly be called dictators, and to a large degree, in the early days they will likely need to operate with more authoritative zeal. There is both wartime and peacetime behavior.
Think about it this way.
One must be the dictator of their own lives and resources to begin with. As private property extends so too does one’s “dictatorship.” As the primary private property owner in a territory, will you not have the earned — or paid for — authority to dictate terms with those who choose to work with or for you?
I bring this up because people with views like Alex Gladstein always like to point out “flaws” in supposed “dictators” like Bukele, while turning a blind eye to the atrocities perpetrated by democratic governments such as Chinada, Auschtralia and New Xiland.
My retort is: “So what if Bukele is a dictator?” Better the devil you know, that is economically accountable and has some skin in the game by being on a Bitcoin standard, than some nameless, faceless, disembodied institution represented by representatives with no skin in the game. The former is more constrained than the latter who never pays the bill.
The following quote by C.S. Lewis is apt here:
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be ‘cured’ against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.” — C.S. Lewis
So I implore you to think beyond the labels (they’ve been so watered down now by a soft, ever-triggered and overly feminized society that they’re meaningless anyway).
This possible future in which a “network of dictators” operate a diverse set of territories is one that I would argue offers up far superior opportunities and living services than any modern government of today could ever hope to provide.
There are going to be many, many things to work out along the way, but the kicker is this tether to an unchanging economic order in the form of Bitcoin’s fixed money supply and uncensorable, transparent monetary and temporal network.
Someone or some few are going to have to be top dogs, but better that the top dogs have to work to stay there and risk falling because we’re all playing by the same economic rules.
That’s a fairer and more robust world, and one which I personally hope my descendants will inherit.
In Closing
Wow…We’re finally at the end of it all.
It’s been a blast writing this.
I set out to write one article about why Bitcoin is not democratic. I wanted to remind people that it is enforced by the individual, for the individual and their “votes” have no bearing on anyone else’s private property.
My goal was to show you that Bitcoin is true, voluntary, anarchic consensus.
In the process, and almost 30,000 words later, we’ve got a mini-treatise on the grand scam of democracy, and ideas for the future of human organization and coexistence.
I didn’t expect that, but I’m glad we’ve taken this journey.
A summation of the key ideas:
Bitcoin is in many ways the “Renaissance of Responsibility.” It is antithetical and incompatible with collectivist doctrines, including and especially democracy which are hinged on concepts like representation and voting, and prone to devolving into mob rule, tragedies of the commons, behavioral decay and the heightening of time preference.
Bitcoin is an economic, not political beast and as such makes the socialization of poor decisions via majority rule or representative decree impossible.
There are no representative rulers on a Bitcoin standard who can operate in an economic vacuum and thus a contractual void. As such it localizes any potential moral hazard, which is a central theme and, in fact, systemic to collectivist politics.
In part three we explained why human rights are a scam. They are merely an elaborate method of encroaching upon the property rights of those who bear the responsibility side of the ledger.
We also came to the realization that Bitcoin not only separates money and state, but it separates economy and politics. I’d argue the latter is a transformation that will have an impact of magnitude nobody alive today could possibly fathom.
Despite our inability to appreciate the full magnitude of the change, we can still begin to think about how to orient ourselves for alignment. We can think about the law and its limitations, we can do our best to draw clear lines between property and plunder, we can structure contracts and incentives in accordance with the changing returns on violence resultant of Bitcoin’s redefinition of the preservation of private property rights through the mathematical (not forceful) means.
With this, we can most definitely think more about a move toward anarchism, and in particular flavors such as localism and one day even the rise of modern monarchies and CEO kings.
There is so much change, for the better, ahead of us. And it’s happening. In fact, there’s nothing we can do to stop this change because the old guard is crumbling.
A friend of mine sent me an article by Arthur Hayes today (March 21). I didn’t have time to read it, so I asked him for the high-level overview. In short, he said:
“More or less an analysis of the repercussions of confiscating Russia’s savings. Distrust in the whole system causing nations to gravitate towards hard money – gold first and later Bitcoin.”
To which my response was:
“Accurate. I’ve said many times, Bitcoin wins less because of what we do, and more because of the cluster fuck the state creates for itself. Classic art of war. Do not get in the way of your enemy who is making a mistake.”
The petrodollar truly came to an end this year, 13 years after Bitcoin came to life. The clown-world globalists cut off their nose to spite their face. It is almost poetic.
The timeline we’re living in is full of more twists, turns and cliches than a run-of-the-mill series on Netflix and as much as it’s frustrating, if you step back a little, you know how it ends.
The bad guys, i.e., the bumbling fools whose own lives are such a mess and cannot practice self-restraint so need to project their lack of control on everyone else, end up losing. They lose because A=A, and 2 + 2 = 4. They will deny reality, they will gaslight us, and they will pretend with all their might that math is racist or that gravity does not exist; but soon enough, just like Icarus experienced, gravity is real, the sun melts wax and below their false map is no longer ground, but air.
It’s a long way down after that.
In any case, we have a way to go before we rise up from the tyranny of the majority. New hysterias will continue to emerge reminiscent of the constant state of tension and angst present in Orwell’s “1984.”
It’s not over until the abomination that is democracy dissolves and is replaced with an organic, emergent, economic standard.
A Bitcoin standard.
So to commemorate the inevitable death of democracy, I’d like to leave you with a quote and a video.
…but Remember, that the captain belongs to the most dangerous enemy to truth and freedom.
The solid and unmoving cattle of the majority.
…Oh god, the terrible tyranny of the majority…
— Faber to Montag, “Fahrenheit 451,” by Ray Bradbury
And…The Tiny Dot:
I look forward to an age where responsibility shapes society and consequence is once again the clear feedback mechanism that will make us better, smarter, stronger humans. An age where power is concentrated in distributed, competitive nodes, and democracy is but a memory. An age of competence and a period of human history where we transcend the cyclical stupidity that is unhinged politics.
I have faith that Bitcoin will accomplish that, and change the course of human development forever….Laura…forever.
Thank you for reading, and I sincerely hope you found value in trading your time for it. There will be loads more to come.
If you’d like to follow more of my work, you can see links to it below.
Blog on Bitcoin Magazine
Articles by Aleksandar Svetski
@GhostOfSvetski
@TimelessBitcoin
@Un-Communist
@WakeUpPod_
This is a guest post by Aleks Svetski, Author of “The UnCommunist Manifesto,” The Bitcoin Times and Host of anchor.fm/WakeUpPod. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.
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