PEOPLE DO NOT SEEM TO REALIZE THAT THEIR OPINION OF THE WORLD IS ALSO A CONFESSION OF CHARACTER. -Emerson
They are going to try and kill us all. They think they are invincible. They own all the governments, all the politicians, all the banks, all the media, agricultural and energy corporations, and they own all the educational institutions. How could we possibly defeat them?!
Hold up, Tonto. First question — who is the "THEY" we are trying to defeat? Is it the Rothchild's, the Rockefeller's, the Vanderbilt's, the dark state, or perhaps some other ineffable group?
Or maybe, just maybe, perhaps, who we must defeat and take control of my well intentioned ride or die eternal Kings and Queens… is our egos?
Marinate on that for a spell.
And read that article on Emerson while you’re at it.
LIMITS WITHOUT BOUNDS
Recently Jeff Booth gave a master class in self awareness and critical internal introspection. His discussion with Robert Breedlove from episode 288, Ego Death Through Bitcoin is worth watching in its entirety, several times.
There is however, one clip in particular that demands our attention. The following is a transcription from 0:19:47 to 0:26:40.
Please note that we’ve taken the liberty to weave into our transcription a few words here and there, to facilitate the capture of the thought and ideas from this live dialogue, into written words. As with all live discussion, there are pauses and emphasis that by their very nature are lost when translated into the limits of words and punctuation, but we’ve done our best to fill in those moments, as well as embellish or emphasize for clarities sake, to flesh out this brief exchange between two thoughtful and highly sophisticated people exploring the bold new Bitcoin paradigm. Where we’ve added in a way that was not their intent, this is our error, though we are all exploring a bold new Bitcoin world, and as the great painter Bob Ross says, “We don’t make mistakes, we have happy accidents.”
Breedlove —
Did we get ourselves into this mess because it seems like it. I think it was the author Gary North where I originally heard this — humans like trying to get something for nothing. Now, this can be good or bad, right, it could be moral or immoral.
“Good” would be the entrepreneurial path, where, I’ve got a problem, I want to solve it, in a more efficient way, and then once I figure that out, that tool or that service that I figure out, I can sell that to other people and let them solve it further in an even more efficient way. So “moral” or “good” work is kind of like being cleverly lazy almost. Obviously you're working to solve the problem but you’re doing it to scratch your own itch so to speak, so you’re getting something for nothing, right. You’re getting productivity gains. For example, you can dig a lot more holes per hour by inventing a shovel than you can with your bare hands. The other path though, the “immoral” work, is getting something for nothing, just by “taking.”So is it this universal proclivity for humans to seek something for nothing that got us into this weird mess where we thought we could print money to solve economic crises?
We hear it all the time, like, oh there’s a problem let’s just print money because it doesn't require a lot of work, and then over time that becomes institutionalized. Now I think you see it in culture, in the people. Money and wealth is demonized now, because people have a zero sum mentality about work and earning money. For example they say, for me to get money I have to take money from someone, but that’s not how economics works, at least not “moral” economics. If the work is “moral” or “good” then the collaboration and coordination of your actions with others results in more wealth per person. “Good” or “moral” work is a positive sum game, not zero sum the way the “immoral” work of “taking” is.
So is money printing, and more specifically, is the proclivity for humans to seek something for nothing the cardinal economic sin that got us into this mess?Booth —
I don’t think so. What I think it is, is our ability to delude ourselves in the name of helping others.People on top of this system today could easily tell themselves a lie saying, if we don’t do this people are going to starve, we have to do it. Those people on top would say, I’m righteous to be able to do this and I’m the one that should be able to help.
So, I think it’s our collective ability to delude ourselves that gives rise to money printing. I don’t think it is because people are trying to get something for nothing, but rather a self delusional belief that the money printing is actually “moral” or “good” work that they are doing in those situations.
Breedlove —
So you think even all the way to the top, it’s like the pinnacle of self-deception?Booth —
Yes, the pinnacle of self deception.Even if you knew the root cause of the problem and there’s no way to solve it from your existing paradigm, and all of your wealth and power and influence comes from that paradigm, then you would more easily delude yourself to say, I have to be the one who solves this.
So it just reinforces, and it just reinforces because people want to matter to other people, ultimately. So I think it’s just that, the need for belonging, fueled by self deception.So if you kind of play this forward throughout time, and why Bitcoin changes this, you probably talked about this many times, probably with me too but, if you actually had some type of monetary system that had an unchangeable fixed policy, you could break these recurring self deception cycles that have caused every great society to rise to untenable power and inevitably crash and cause untold human harm, for at least the last 10,000 years. Obviously, the premise that a fixed unchangeable monetary policy solves for, and breaks, these cycles, is is a bold statement, so let me prove this out for you.
Money is superordinate to laws. This is our given. And people will argue, this point. They’ll say, no, government issues money. Well, wrong, history tells us otherwise. But let’s table that point and move forward from this given.
What then happens is we put laws in place — the Magna Carta, Constitution, Bill of Rights, etc. — to essentially protect us, the individuals, from the state. By doing that, the states that did that, had more productivity. The productivity increases in these states with strong laws for the individuals because now people can act as freely as they can, and conduct that “good” or “moral” work you just explained, the collaborative and coordinated trade, because of property rights, and the assurances those rights afford individuals giving them the confidence and capability with functioning money to take action, they can act and they can create more wealth that would then flow into these lawful societies, the positive sum results you mentioned earlier are then yielded.
Conversely, authoritarian governments collect all the wealth and don’t allow for strong property rights, and those societies suffer because of this lack of property rights that afforded individuals the assurances of self interested cooperative and collaborative human action. So they live in zero sum societies.So when you had rule of law and rights to individuals, you had faster growth economies, but over time, because money is superordinate to that process, people with money change the laws, and so over time you lose the laws that protected those people, because the only way that you can fight the law is to have enough money to lobby and everything else, so those laws get whittled away over time, and the laws no longer protect the people at the bottom, those that are generating the positive sum growth, the laws then instead protect the people at the top, those that reinforce the zero sum society.
And so what that says, or to sort of prove this point out empirically, is that if it didn't look like that, then the areas with the most broken money would have the strongest laws protecting people. But you can see the opposite in the world. Ergo, the least broken money, affording the strongest property rights creates the greatest abundance within human societies.
So now whether we look to the US or wherever, where are we on that axis of broken money, and we know that it has to be more and more broken over time, and that means we know that laws have to be eroded and we have to remove individual rights and freedoms over time, it has to get worse, out of that system, what would that look like.Now if you go back in time through all of these cycles of rising and falling societies, we had to do that, we had to go through that process of self deception and money printing. If you could control money, if you control the gold, if you could control money, if you could centralize money through gold or anything else, if you could control money, then you had a win at societies loss, and it was such a power that you went to war to control money. Then in the new money, we reset it and we promise we won’t abuse money again and it just repeats over time.
But this is why we keep missing this nuance because remember it is the winners that write the history books. So if what we’re saying is true, if our givens are correct, that (1) money is superordinate to man made law, and that (2) self deception leads to money printing, then all of the books you and I read, and all of the history throughout time within these books on all of these different standards around money, must fundamentally carry errors within them, because they were designed with that error code in them, since winners write the history books. So we must be looking through that error of what happened here, what happened there, what we didn’t see, because winners write the history books, what we didn’t see in that whole thing, that whole rise and fall of each of those societies was this self destructive money printing.
So what does this all mean in the context of Bitcoin?
Bitcoin removes that error, the self deception and the money printing, through decentralization and trust, so we don’t need the institutions that deceived themselves and the public into money printing, we place in our hands, every one of us individuals, our own self interested monetary policy where we would only harm ourselves if we changed our policy, and so for the first time in history, that can actually break these deceptive destructive cycles, and change the future path of human society, forever.Breedlove —
Bitcoin is a brilliant solution. It’s an unalterable history that can’t be rewritten, and can’t be printed, by the political winners, right?Booth —
Through proof of work and the longest chain, you have a forward from 2009 unalterable that gets stronger and stronger and more decentralized, more secure over time. The rails of future civilization will rely on something that’s based on truth, that’s based on Bitcoin.
LEAD US NOT INTO TEMPTATION, BUT DELIVER US FROM EVIL -Matthew 6:13
Often times we find ourselves calling those in power like Janet Yellen, Jerome Powell, Christine Lagarde, Agustin Carstens, and their ilk, the scourge of humanity, or the carriers of the fiat plague. And we often find ourselves salivating over the inevitability of their reign of power coming to an untimely end with their fiat bags full, their corn bags empty, and their ownership of nothing a delight, so that we may ridicule them in their sorry state of affairs, telling them to have fun staying poor, those stupid credentialed monetary demons, as if they were conducting their work knowingly stealing from us poor peasants. At least, that is the premise that Breedlove offers.
But Booth suggests a new possibility that at once is more likely and at the same time, offers those monetary demons a graceful exit from their current destructive path. Booth sees these people in powerful positions not as intentioned thieves but rather as tragic fools, deceived by their own powers of rationalization, fueled by the same human desires we all feed on, that need to feel loved and belonging, to want to do good and be good, and be heralded for that good, just, and righteous work.
Booths take is both profound and immensely useful. Imagine what might happen if instead of beginning our conversations with theses folks with a dagger pressing into their jugular, we instead started our conversations with a compassionate hand shake, knowing they too are humans and want nothing more than to be loved at the end of the day, just the same as every other person on the planet.
Yes, of course some of these people are convicted criminals. Does the thief stealing for his family to avoid starvation deserve the dagger or a compassioned hand shake? The same abstraction powers of the human brain that allow us to develop an entire fantasy world where we understand strange scribblings and utterances as writing and speech is the same super computer that allows us to believe anything we rationalize for ourselves, including the beliefs that printing money and locking down society is for the greater good.
Yes, of course there are psycopaths that enjoy the pain of others, but aside from that very small percentage, the vast majority of people working at the Federal Reserve, the Treasury Department, the European Central Bank, the Bank of International Settlement, or any number of positions at central banks and governments around the world, are there because they actually believe they are making a positive impact on the world.
If Booths’ givens are correct, that self deception fueled by the need to belong and to be loved, coupled with the notion that money is superordinate to man made laws, and after careful analysis, history shows this to be the case, then Bitcoin, with it’s unchangeable self interested decentralized proof of work timechain, may very well be the beginning of a new monetary policy that will for once, and for all, set humanities course to a future of continued and ever growing human abundance and prosperity.
Perhaps now, with the fiat banking world crumbling all around us, we have an opportune time to share with friends, family, and enemies alike, a compassioned new approach on the story of what Bitcoin is, on coaxing the delusioned from their nightmarish perspectives and attain, on Money and Power: A Fresh Perspective.
Jeff Booth is right on point.
That interview with Jeff is one of my favorites of all time.