Enemy in the mirror

Oh yeah I don't know what to call this wall of text, but I imagine a doomer might like it, or someone on the path to being one, we'll hopefully shine light over many features of the world that remain perilously obfuscated for some reason, this isn't a guide to solve a problem, but more of an explainer that shows light at the end of the tunnel, hope is the classic recipe for success after all.

Let’s start with my journey, how I got to these ideas.

As with most young people, I didn't think much of the economy, it seemed so alien and yet so close, seemingly impossible to grasp in its entirety, and yet such a basic thing, my dad once told me there were a few things he always skipped on the newspaper: sports & economy.

Why? Because neither field seems to have a true north to it, a ground truth, a common set of principles that everyone tacitly agrees on unless they're outright insane, it’s just "whatever is said loudest goes" and that sets the pseudo-rules that get replaced as soon as a louder more influential figure changes them.

Hard sciences are the polar opposite of this, Einstein's relativity didn't invalidate Newton's gravitation, it improved upon it, allowing us to understand more of the world, Newton's ideas remain just as valid up to a point, just as Einstein’s will when we find a new one, probably.

For much of my young years I just "went with it", thinking it was just a simple formula where you work for profit and spend your capital on whatever and that’s the end of it, enjoying the endless new stuff coming to improve life.

But…

Instead of that, for the vast majority of people, this path appears to only gets tougher, why is it that in this modern world despite everyone seemingly throwing 2/3 of their lives at work, the overall trend is for "things to get harder" i.e., more work, harder work, but most importantly, less relative benefit from said efforts.

Why is it that we accept that prices rise over time, that it is somehow normal and natural? isn't the price increase tacitly telling us that things are somehow getting harder to provide? Hence the increasing cost?

How does that reconcile with the fact that the whole point of working is to improve things? Are we naturally destined to fail at that? Perhaps there are people working against that? Waking up every day, going to work to make things worse? Or is it that we just can't reconcile population growth vs resources shrinking? even though population growth has mostly stagnated for decades, and tech is advancing so fast that tech illiteracy is gaining widespread acceptance?

So, you begin to question it all, isn’t there a better way to go about life?

And dear Marx's ideas inevitably come up, as a young person used to getting what they want -just because- this idea is very enticing, the idea that we all "deserve" the good in this world -cuz why not-, not understanding that such a concept or goal means nothing to the objective reality that constrains us all, that it only leads to violence as a means of submitting the world and others to such irrational wishes.

Anyway, I then basically became a communist, my interest in technology made me soon realize the purpose of tech is to progressively achieve more with less, just as medicine's is to prolong life, eventually that means living indefinitely, doing away with "natural" deaths, and for tech that means we eventually have no work to do. Weird how we basically work today so that we "don’t have to" work tomorrow, you build a chair so that you don’t have to stand up, and so on.

Still, objectively speaking, neither goal is quite feasible because our interests are infinite so there will always be "work" to do, one way or the other, and you could also say eternal life is unreachable because at some point a supernova might destroy you and all your mind backups stored throughout the local supercluster anyway, so, ultimately, “the goal might be the journey itself rather than a destination”, because the destination and its associated feeling is seemingly nothing more than a mental projection of a carrot forever hanging in front of us.

"The anticipation of happiness is happiness itself."

Knowing this, I imagined how a modern government could exploit this amazing situation we've created, where no one is required to work to live a "decent life", whatever that means, given how the government can "mishandle" funds and even print them at will, and even then, technology seems to mostly compensate for it so that hardly anyone dies due to an actual lack of resources, so why not share the free money with everyone?

Heck, a wise Chinese cyborg once tweeted;

"Poverty at this point is a particularly sadistic hobby a few individuals inflict upon countless millions, we're technically post-scarcity, we just got a few nutters who enjoy playing "keep away" with food and shelter, aided by everyone else in their infinite ignorance."

Naomi Wu

It’s a bit more nuanced than that, the few nutters you can call them cantillionaires, and the issue is practically inherent to the way we come together as civilizations since time immemorial, hardly anyone can see it for what it is, partly because these few nutters are also playing the game and want to win just like you, whether they realize they're cheating or not, whether they intend to cause pain or not, and you probably would like to become one of them.

A game you said…

Yes, a game, that is what capitalism and all other ism's ultimately are, as I've come to understand it; it’s a game of life we humans play to avoid killing each other over stuff, the score in this game is commonly known as money, and printing it IS CHEATING, the cheaters(cantillionaires) will end up squishing legit players out of the game and often towards violence(crime) until it’s only cantillionaires left playing, they might delay that outcome by throwing free lot boxes(stimmy checks? Welfare?) but the game is inherently doomed regardless, inflation(printer go brr) acts like a difficulty setting, increasing it a little can motivate certain players to try harder, which can often be good, but as it ends up happening time and again, it is a difficulty setting going up for most but going down for the few tugging on it, so there's incentive for it to go up indefinitely, eventually no one can keep up unless they cheat or are the literal Übermensch.

This "Inflation as the difficulty setting on the game of life" concept is a quick and potential answer to why life seems to only get tougher for most people over time, basically because they get poorer, another answer is the lack of a "frontier" where people can freely reach into and grow without crossing into one another, mostly, a la 1800's America, as The Network State explains. There's also the "hardship = strong men = good times = weak men = hardship" cycle that seems like an inevitable feature of nature.

I propose that the cheating allowed by good times spreads like a cancer, the cheaters are those who switch their skills from beating nature to beating their peers, so they grow incompetent and hence weak against the outside world surrounding their collective, and this means progressively expanding misery i.e. bad times, until new Übermensch or Darwinism itself knocks on the door, so if we remove the cheating, we can get rid of some parts of the natural cycles of civilizations, leaving us with only strong men perpetually creating better times, until even stronger men or an asteroid shows up.

Tl:dr Why things worsening:

Yes, we can argue quality of life has generally improved for most of the world up to this point, there's plenty of data to back that up and sweet articles like this, but also, living things are never satisfied, we can focus on the bad regardless, and it’s not just a matter of perspective, there's good data on either direction, and since you're reading this, we'll try and explain the bad.

By the way, I reckon what truly counts as "good life” is a continual improvement of one's quality of life, in some sense, going backwards as in worsening quality of life is perceptually not much worse than stagnating, the true way of happiness is to be on a bumpy ride upwards, which implies that even consistency beyond a certain threshold can be perceived as a form of stagnation. 

Power is life, life needs property

Violence is the most basic form of animal power, it’s how we settle who keeps what, and that is simply how it is in nature, of course we humans have a seemingly innate tendency towards not hurting each other, perhaps because in most scenarios we're better off collaborating against other entities, or just moving forward together, it would seem that evolution taught us that behavior.

Ignoring this reality or pretending it no longer applies to us is a mistake, however civilized we might seem, non-lethal collaboration requires communication to coordinate our actions and align our wills, to reach consensus, the more and better we can do that, the less violence we employ to pursue the same goals, this goes way beyond spoken language.

Dealing with power dynamics is just a fact of "living" because, as Dr Humberto Maturana explains, living things are  "autopoietic systems", meaning something that continually recreates itself, for which said living thing needs resources, which are always scarce in the time and space available to the living thing vs the thing's potentially infinite interests, inevitably this leads to a literal power struggle between living things to take and/or keep stuff from other living things, Jason Lowery's "SoftWar" thesis explains this further.

In essence, property is what we call resources that are known to be under someone's control, because property is that which one manages to keep others from, and doing that requires energy, this makes energy the currency of the universe, you either have it or you don't, and it is the literal laws of physics keeping that score, so energy itself is the truest representation of resources, and one that is uncheateable, cuz physics; you won't last long by tricking a bear into thinking you're stronger.

Since the nature of property is informational and thereby a mental construct, money is our mental representation of power, as far as humans are concerned, money is energy, stored human energy to be precise, or rather we expect it to ₿e, and unlike violence or the threat of its use, it works without the bloody/psychological mess.

Life is war, but it doesn't have to be wildly emotional and wasteful like animals do it, the better our tools are at providing incorruptible info so we can try and coordinate, the colder the war goes, thanks to our ability to communicate and reprogram ourselves, we can behave like a unified organism, a total sum that is, for now at least, greater than its individual parts.

That clever Nixon was onto something when he decided to "peg" the dollar to the energy we still rely on, but that system works backwards, energy is the currency of the universe, and so it must be required to make a genuine representation of resources, currency has to have a cost, not the other way around.

Others were suspiciously wise though…

"Money as a translation of energy cannot be separated from the energy it expresses."

Children of Dune

When money gets detached from reality, from objective power/costs, no matter how clever and elaborate the scheme, players will find exploits on it, as having no real-world cost makes it inherently flawed as a way to represent real world resources that we all want at once, adding layers upon layers of clever checks and balances only delays this outcome.

"You cannot design your way out of financial absurdity. No amount of complexity can cheat financial physics, &, in fact, in financial services specifically, complexity is a terrible thing, to be avoided at all costs."

Ethereum has now recreated one such scheme with their "PoS" system, and the similarities with the current global economy in terms of complexity and obfuscation are in a quantum state of both shocking and expected.

What money is

It varies, money can be an objective measuring tool for value if it’s bound by energy, the universe's currency.

Or, it can be a mere collective hallucination, if its set by decree i.e., fiat, and hence only bound to human psyche.

It can also be a mix of both, it’s a mental construct after all, but whether it leans more to one definition or the other has huge implications.

In either case, it's an emergent solution to a coordination problem, a fundamental protocol; the collectively run measuring tool for value, and as far as humans are concerned, money is treated as stored human energy, we're abstraction obsessed beings.

The collective hallucination situation is what leads to things like PoS “making sense” or vice-versa, it’s also what we have as world economy today because the previous means for objectivity(gold) couldn't keep up with tech improving around it, and so it gradually gave in to subjectivity, as tech progress drops the price of everything to near 0, gold shavings can't get thin enough, not to mention the frequency at which we can trade now.

We've come to a similar situation again, current money isn't adapting to new tech, but it's not a technical limitation this time but rather a political one, the price of a second or byte of online video, tweets, emails, etc., is probably fractions of a penny, and the inflate or die economy won't allow such fractionalization, it could accommodate it since the digital realm is infinitely divisible, but the sovereigns in control can't see the need for this adjustment, so people scheme around this limitation, leading to unnecessarily sad outcomes where trust tries and fails to compensate for the crippled system, as Jon Stokes explains here.

So, it’s all about money?

…Yes, think of it this way: everyone is poor now, and sure, money isn’t happiness, but no money IS sadness.

We can talk endlessly about factors, symptoms, trends, etc. but it all boils down to the natural cycles of organized civilizations trending towards centralization of resources faster than tech progress can ramp up yields to cheapen things down, the inflation tax/scam gets to the point where mayhem becomes not only an option but the path people get pushed into, and so we start over after reshuffling the cards and scaring everyone into not being a scammer.

You think a collective where this video goes “viral” and seemingly resonates with most people has a long way to go to reach that endgame?

Anyway

Up until 2009, there were no tools enabling proper value measurement over time & space at the scale and pace of current technology, so the inherently inaccurate collective hallucination alternative has enjoyed more than a century of dominance, thus making inflation look like a natural phenomenon, which continues to be the reason most people are getting stealthily cheated nonstop, leading to violence and sadness.

And there's precedent for this situation even where you least expect it, since it's such a defining feature of how power dynamics play out, our current fiat money purgatory is perhaps similar to how we can assume ancient bosses used to alter calendars to extend their rule and rob people of their work before we all had decent clocks on our wrists.

Imagine this, you're in the Middle Ages, if the ruler's term lasts 4 years, how will you know when it’s over? After four winters of course!, whenever enough people agree on it looking wintery enough that is…, -perhaps voluntarily, or not-, and as usual, violence will fill the void left by the inaccuracies of the means of time coordination back then, this also helps explain the faster development of societies in temperate climates compared to tropical ones where long term timekeeping was that much more difficult(or just unlikely? not encouraged?), leading to even more violence being used to compensate and settle things after the point where consensus gets cloudy; we'll see whose clock is rightest!

Look at this map, young me had this theory that the cold made people think and plan more, whereas the hot made people erratic and impulsive, hence why countries closer to the poles tend to be more developed.

Now my understanding of time, space and value as tools for human cooperation that displace violence makes for a clearer picture, temperate climates make longer term timekeeping a lot more reliable thanks to clearly defined stations, unlike the tropics.

But also, Darwinism seems to play a role here, upon further thought I’ve realized it is not precisely because of temperature but rather how generally unhospitable a place is, the tropics are simply easier to survive, whereas creatures that manage to survive more hellish places tend to do so thanks to extra brain power.

People don’t like the general idea of “warm = dumb” as seen here so I hope my more nuanced take is better received, the real factor is how variable the environment is, temperate climates are both hotter and colder than the tropics, and it is this changing situation that favors individuals with better longer term thinking.

Yes, this is overly exaggerated to make a point of comparison, we can't know for sure how things went down before everyone had a decent watch on their wrist, but that also relates well to how we can't confidently calculate prices over long periods within a fiat economy. Sure, the culprit, -ahem, authority- claims it’s around 2% a year, but, is it really? Our ancestors' accounts of timekeeping related chaos would be similarly cloudy for us to decipher, same for our future archeologists trying to understand why we were so crazy today.

Consistently agreed upon means of settlement are the bedrock for positive sum cooperation.

Spoken language is the most basic of these tools, people that learn more than a few along with their respective cultures often get enough perspective on the world to become incapable of falling into the tribal wild behavior that most monolingual people find irresistible, but you don't need that many languages to realize we're just wild beasts like the rest of animals fighting for supremacy, we just dress it up a lot, to the point that hardly anyone can tell it's a collective hallucination, let alone step out of it.

Or at least that's how fiat economies incentivize people to behave, like a self-consuming entity.

To any one individual within a collective, their particular hallucination is the real one, and understandably, if they lack the means to interact productively with outsiders, their interactions are limited to a violent fight for supremacy, the universal language we innately know, the one we can always fallback on: watts vs watts.

Because living is all about resource management and world physics determines that energy is how resource allocation i.e. property gets distributed & settled, violence and money serve just about the same purpose, but violence rewards the one whereas money rewards the whole, as it is a non-lethal alternative to violence, it can switch the often zero sum game of violence to a positive sum one of cooperation, it also brings more features and vastly improved efficiency thanks to it being a mental abstraction of energy that can be detached from time and space, or in other words, stored, and that’s probably because the three concepts are very much alike.

Time, space, money 

Those things work for us because we agree on what they are, otherwise, chaos -violence- ensues, they're all mental constructs, representations and measurements that feed our perceptions of the world, what matters most is that as we collaborate and align our wills based on these measuring tools, they shall remain consistent between us, otherwise their discrepancies get settled based on who can violently submit other disputants to their own point of reference.

I can't find history about disagreements in relation to space measurements but it’s easy to imagine hunter-gatherers going to endless war over it because team Magenta measures in Yards while team Indigo measures in Meters, and unit conversion wasn't a thing, now for time measurements there's plenty of history, back when clocks were rare, imagine your situation as a salaried worker with no wristwatch to accurately sell your 8 hours of labor, similar situation for the employer, it’s unlikely that both parties' clocks were accurate enough to remain in sync long term, leading to confusion and disagreements, which leaves room for violence to settle the seconds.

Since our positive sum non-lethal collaboration depends on mental constructs, when our shared perception of the world as observed through inaccurate means doesn’t add up, violence is the fallback that fills that void of confusion & disagreement, you can imagine the watch tower guy as today's central banker, the perpetual war between individuals with clocks that can’t remain in sync would inevitably lead to that outcome, a survival of the fittest event where the most powerful aggressor/deceiver manages to concentrate the use of violence to impose a single measurement of time, this leaves all others no option but peaceful cooperation and it often results in a much more productive -and peaceful- environment overall.

For a while at least, after all, the bell ringer is not an impartial referee, he also plays the game, with his friends! cantillionaires of time were definitely a thing back in the Middle Ages, Nick Szabo alludes to this phenomenon here.

So, in essence, the degree to which our measuring tools for time, space and value reach consensus are the main factor in whether we cooperate or go to war, or the extent to which we do one or the other, the more accurate & consistent our measuring tools are, the least likely for violence to be used.

Now back to "games of life"

The types of relationships that we humans form exist on a spectrum between the extremes of what has been called capitalism and communism, going by what proportion of the total population in a group has more or less control over shared resources within a collective, when individuals of equal power come together, they tend to deal in capitalism, when their power is unequal, the scale swings to communism, the former is trustless whereas the later requires trust for less sad outcomes.

I'm not declaring the academic definitions of these social organization systems invalid, this is just a different way to think about them, as relationship types, and if a given relationship type becomes overwhelmingly common among a certain population, said population can then be said to be capitalist, communist, feudalist, etc. Which is the game of life within their collective.

Oh yes, I'm proposing yet another definition to add to these terms that have been rendered meaningless over the years given how everyone has their own idea of what they are, idealizing one or the other as the great savior we need, if only everyone else agreed with one's superior view and we all managed to do it "correctly", unlike our predecessors!

Some people might argue that capitalism requires trust, but that's because they've never been to the extreme end of the scale as true sovereigns doing raw capitalism, the consequences for breach of contract between entities of equal power absent a higher power over them is often mutually assured destruction, just ask pirates, drug lords and the like, mentions of trust between truly sovereign nations are mostly nonsense, foreign leaders seldom lie when talking to outsiders, but of course, your particular leader won't do anything but lie to you, as you're not as sovereign as they are within the territory you both live in, they can fool you without consequences, all you can do is trust and/or whine.

Sovereign is he who relies on no entity other than itself to live, to pursue its goals, if you're not the top one, you're probably bound to one, for those closer to communism within the scale, the sovereign is seen as he who can make exception to the rule, because he unilaterally makes the rule to begin with, Robert Breedlove will tell you all about it.

Crucially important, sovereignty is also a scale, you can be a sovereign that is equal to, above or below others' sovereignty, going by everyone's relative power as measured in watts (violence) or its widely acknowledged representation (money).

Capitalism, communism, and all in-between, these are just what we call the way we naturally come together according to our relative power over each other, relationships between closely equal sovereigns are capitalistic, whereas the relationship between a sovereign and weaker sovereigns is more like communism, which can be great if they have high trust, but trust has very poor scaling, you can’t really care about hundreds/thousands/millions of people, let alone trust them.

Now you see why capitalism trends towards democracy whereas communism brings dictatorship.

These "systems" emerge naturally even though today they might be known as artificial inventions that are carefully thought out and imposed by institutions ultimately backed by men with guns, but their implicit forms are just the results of our circumstances in relation to control over resources, centralization of resource management gets you communism, whereas their decentralization gets you capitalism.

Governments and the like can pretend to be capitalist or whatever else when referring to their collective, but what actually happens has more to do with whatever distribution of resources they're stuck with, case in point, Haiti being capitalist and China being communist, allegedly.

A certain level of "Capitalism" cannot be given to you as a right, not really, it is something you're either able to do or not based on how much of a relative threat you are to others, your sovereignty i.e. how much power you wield, is what determines whether you voluntarily trade with others or who submits to whom when it comes down to it, we're all subject to some level of coercion.

As a higher sovereign you can decide that those below you partake in free non-coercive trade, but for this to work you need to be a truly overwhelming force over your subjects, otherwise, this hardly ever works, as with ruling that your kids can trade toys, what actually ends up happening has more to do with how equal or unequal your kids are i.e. same age vs one being much older, than whatever you decided to impose on them, same for weak countries declaring themselves capitalist democracies when their citizens are extremely unequal, as with haiti, all you see is abuses & modern slavery anyway, going against the naturally occurring order is a messy business.

Take the traditional family, a single breadwinner in control of all the members presumably incapable of surviving on their own, basically a tiny communist group, this is how everyone on earth seems to live and we find it perfectly good, because it mostly is, with small communities comes a higher degree of trust.

With bigger communities, trust breaks down, communism then becomes a problem, the higher sovereign has no affection or empathy towards dependent, less sovereign members, because it’s simply unfeasible to develop trust with more and more people, when given this situation, a sovereign often switches to living off their dependents instead of sustaining them, since there are so many of them. Funny how that looks a lot like feudalism.

"Trust is what we have to settle for when we can't cope with or overcome someone else's power."

And that is why "Nordic countries socialism" is a thing, for relatively small and more homogenous groups, this sort of arrangement can work much better, but as soon as you insert an outsider too much, it all goes out the window, look at the UK's NHS drama after getting overrun by foreigners, Germany's potentially similar situation is attenuated due to its language barrier and objectively superior productivity. 

From this we can conclude that whether a collective leans capitalist or communist is a matter of how much power equality there is between its peers, and the path towards less violence is to shrink the gap between stronger and weaker sovereigns, as bitcoin does for people transacting on it, or for top sovereigns to become superhuman & benevolent, as AIs could do if they decide and manage to rule over us.

Oh, the Marxian irony, capitalism is actually the natural result of power equality within a collective, and the way towards higher equality and thus peace and prosperity, is for everyone to be equally capable of M.A.D. not just against their peers, but against the whole collective, perhaps this is how we break the Tytler cycle, which is another potential reason for our current predicament, besides gold not keeping up with technological progress.

Where are we going with this

A good portion of the population won’t bother talking about what’s wrong other than agreeing that something is wrong, and X should fix it, maybe a new leader, new rules, etc. Others will look further and blame what they know as capitalism itself -the academic definition of it- for all the evils of humanity, they demonize concepts like profit, or maybe "excessive profit" is what’s wrong, whatever they think that is, and corporations, and greediness, and all the things they themselves seemingly can’t put to use in their benefit, but some very evil very lucky few do, -ahem, cantillionaires- those sovereign over them.

And they're halfway right, but what they're doing is conflating the game and the score, and this is an overwhelmingly difficult thing to convey given how clueless almost everyone is about money and its circumstances such as the cheating we call inflation, people tend to think money is a force of nature that only almighty governments can sort of control, and they're not entirely wrong, so long as they think that way that is. Remember, relatively weaker/poorer sovereigns i.e. commies, can only whine and trust.

Again, money represents human energy, so it equals power, literally.

Because as we have explained, money that works for the betterment of a collective is not something to be controlled, it is something for the collective to agree on for effective & prosperous collaboration, same as with time & space standards today. When manipulated and weaponized by stronger sovereigns overwhelmed by too many weaker ones, these tools turn counterproductive for the collective.

You might not even notice this, but you're hardly playing capitalism at this point, creditism, neufeudalism or technofeudalism sound a lot more accurate to describe 21st century economies for most people, especially western ones, as stated before, these games of life can fit within a wide range of extremes, these later examples getting closer to communism.

Heck, there are countless whines to the sky by people that can't connect the dots on why things are the way they are today, they might even mention how for the past 50 years it’s been like this! Here's a few examples.

• What's Going Wrong in Particle Physics?  (This is why I lost faith in science.)

• Why is money not working!?

• This one is onto something.

• https://youtu.be/czjisEGe5Cw?t=148

Why fiat domination equals damnation

Ever heard of Charles Darwin? He figured out that it's mostly the life forms that could best adapt to their environment that go on living, and so the natural world acts like a filter that eliminates those that fall behind on their own and even those who try and fail dragging the laggards along with them.

It’s not a grand plan per se, it’s just that life cannot simply "be", like nothingness, instead, life is defiance, it goes against entropy, however futile that might seem, to exist rather than not, is to challenge that universal constant, and the continued process of doing so is riddled with failure, the universe seems to like the void of perfect equalization, which is contrary to the power fluctuations that we call energy, and we living things are a flash of light -energy- within that process, the perpetual march towards heat death as they call it.

Anyway, we no longer live in nature but rather in artificial environments tasked with keeping us alive, this means nature's good old Darwinism is hardly working on civilized humans, this has a couple of implications, first is the obvious benefit of not losing a huge chunk of the population that while presumably unfit for lone wolfing, would be potentially beneficial to a collective, and second, that lost population can often have good reason to be gone, they're perhaps a danger to the collective either as counterproductive aggressors or simple incompetents, after all, the ideal collective is composed of equally threatening individuals, the sort of arraignment often dreamed by wise ancient Greeks.

And just like we evolved to survive and overcome nature, we've also evolved to exploit the artificial worlds shaped by us, under a sound money order that means civilization as a whole improves itself to win over nature, because a sound economy guides participants by adhering to objective reality, whereas fiat guides participants to win over one another by following their subjective perceptions of what they think is real, hence the misleading, impulsive, erratic and counterproductive fiat world economy.

"We have met the enemy and he is us"

Walt Kelly

Global fiat makes it possible for humans to exclusively focus on humans, in such profound ways that I dare say most discourse and drama today is because of it, because it incentivizes gaining from others rather than gaining together from outside the collective, it puts tribalism into overdrive.

That means people have learned to focus on hype rather than rationality, scams rather than research, currency rather than goods, betting rather than funding, today rather than tomorrow, all pervasive human vices.

Since money is how we manage property and living is all about property, money is the conductor of the civilizational orchestra, the fiat conductor is the supreme narcissist, the audience -outside world- hardly exists on his mind.

Fiat is separation of humanity and reality

We've been able to do this for the last century or so thanks to the work done by predecessors that evolved outside such a comfy environment, shielding us from reality in some sense, what happens when we outgrow this bouncy castle we've inherited? Will our collective hallucination have any luck in telling the outside world what to do? to act in our benefit?

"Our economy is so strong" Is the modern day "god is on our side" war cry.

In other words; what works to win over one's peers won't necessarily translate to the outside world, just like impressing one's parents won't necessarily equate to wowing bosses and clients.

On fiat you can cheat, uhmm, print, all you want, resources won't necessarily come into existence because of it, but from a cantillionaire's perspective, doing that often means that said resources, if they still exist within those susceptible to the fiat craze, can be siphoned away from other individuals and moved towards them, while from everyone else's perspective it’s all shortages and degraded quality of life, until there's no one left to cheat, (or useable resources).

Over time, you have a collective mostly made up of cheaters, sovereigns of all levels cheating each other, that's what they've evolved to be good at given they live within a collective guided by metrics that are self-reflecting on itself, a measurement of value based on human psyche.

When the last productive ones join their ranks or become harder to cheat, the game is over for said collective, it's a self-consuming system, and the universe’s opinion on “perpetual motion” machinery is well known.

The collective hallucination mode of operation has serious implications

As we switched from objective measurement of value (gold) to subjective (fiat) over the course of the last century, the population mostly kept the "common sense" incurred on it by the former, for a while at least, but inevitably certain individuals found out that they were no longer limited by what used to be common sense, that now instead of extracting wealth along with the collective, they can simply get their peers to give up theirs.

In the fiat ruled world you don't necessarily have to mine real world resources to gain wealth, actually, that’s a pretty low output activity compared to mining other humans that have inherited untold wealth, it's what we call social engineering.

In the fiat world, success can be achieved most effectively by convincing others that you're doing what they want, this is a non-issue when all the value being exchanged is an abstraction, but money is a general purpose utility, and humans ultimately have material needs, the supposed gain from this virtual activity can be used to affect material resources, and the growing inconsistency between such financial numbers and material resources shows up in the form of seemingly unexplained shortages and things falling apart for no obvious reason.

This sounds similar to inflation, but inflation by itself isn't as bad as misrepresenting existing resources in this way, miscalculation of resources is merely adding insult to injury when the incentive structure means that eventually no new resources are being added, we could decide to add a zero to our unit of account every other day, and as long as we account for this, resources can remain accurately represented, but if there are no new resources coming in, life will get sad regardless.

Here's an example of what fiat does when operating in a vacuum

These people she mentions are getting paid to do a job that the employer likely has no interest in, and he is able to pay for something he doesn't care about because he's essentially deciding on how to distribute money from others, he has no skin in the game, since it's all funds taken directly(taxed) or indirectly(printed), so what you get is little more than a show, they're all pretending, but their earnings against the collective are very real.

The hypothetical customer, the general citizenry, have no effective say in the matter, they're lesser sovereigns, but the one supposedly representing them can claim to be allocating their funds towards useful science, while the scientists can claim to be doing said science, they're all fooling each other.

And they're all pressured into doing so because an inflating currency means you have to keep trying harder to not starve, and since a fiat world makes cheating viable, what can be more effective than cheating? Pretending is then most efficient, and often all it takes.

So, people go after the money shuffling jobs, and pork, rather than wealth producing jobs.

This isn't to say that there's no effort in all the pretend work, in fact, there could be an arbitrary amount of effort put into it because the metrics guiding it are similarly arbitrary, this is actually a worsening factor, because when it comes down to it, there's usually no real gain from said activities, so the more arbitrary work put into it, the more real resources end up wasted.

Heck, think of the amount of waste heat around this whole boondoggle:

Puppies play, adults fight

They get especially playful if there's an adult around, this is a major difference in the relationships between equal vs unequal sovereigns, provided there is trust, actions of unequal sovereigns can be pure show since the weaker sovereign oftentimes can only offer to fulfill subjective needs of a stronger sovereign and so the goal is a mental fabrication, whereas for more equal sovereigns such actions can be seen as fraud that risks M.A.D.

"They pretend to pay us, we pretend to work"

On the other hand, if there's no trust between unequal sovereigns, weaker ones tend to get fleeced, notice how the number of medics in a hospital has barely gone up compared to the number of bureaucrats; there's more to gain from pretending than doing.

And one that I'm more familiar with, academics, where you only have to convince your teacher that you're trying your best, that'll take you farther than most anyone is willing to admit, after all, it's up to the teacher, and effort is all that matters! Lest he condemn you to be stuck in a lower wage slavery hell, or worse, crime! So, everyone else understands if the teacher does that, what a kind person indeed.

This sort of play has a natural origin to it, as a simulation to prepare young ones for the real world without much risk, but fiat largely removes the part where you're supposed to step into reality, it's an endless simulation, an endless show. 

This from the games of life perspective can be seen as a sort of generalized covert feudalism, a good chunk of lesser sovereigns in the form of bureaucrats being allowed by higher sovereigns to do small scale feudalism, they reinforce each other through voting and elections these days.

Here’s a brilliant take on this phenomenon that greatly resonates with me:

Doug Casey: All countries have a Deep State. The Deep State are people who control and profit from the State. In the US, its top-level might include several thousand individuals. Heads of agencies, top congressmen and senators, generals, top corporate people, bankers, top university presidents and professors, top state and big city officials, and the like. They equate to what were called the Nomenklatura in the Soviet Union. They pull all the strings, have immense power, and have huge amounts of money flowing into their personal pockets. We can call them “top dogs.”

Underneath them, in the Deep State, we have several million people that are equivalent to the apparatchiks of the old Soviet Union. They’re middle managers under the top dogs. They have good positions and get to give a lot of orders. They’re low-level big shots. I like to call them “running dogs.”

The many millions who accept these people, the masses who slavishly support the Deep State out of fear or habit, I call “whipped dogs.” They’re strictly pawns in the game. They’re thoughtless and delusional enough, thanks to schooling and propaganda, to believe they’re in control of a so-called “democracy.” Even though they’re 98% of the population, they don’t count unless they go wild due to a serious war, depression, or other catastrophe.

The people in the Deep State deny their own existence. And nobody has a membership card or an official decoder ring. But the Nomenklatura, and a lot of the apparatchiks, went to the same schools, belong to the same clubs, and have the same philosophy and worldview. They all live off the State, which in turn lives off the 98%, the whipped dogs.

This is the environment we've created, it incentivizes the shuffling around of resources we've already gained from nature rather than further gaining from nature, this is what people have adapted to, Darwin is often misunderstood by saying that the "best" would win, “best” is a relative quality, so, best at what, exactly?

What he probably meant to say is that the most adapted to their environment -hence best at X- would win and survive, the fiat environment adapts people to engage in zero sum, self-consuming activities, progressively ignoring the ground where such activities stand on, basically rewarding those best at burning down their own house.

And so they win, but this is winning against each other rather than along with, individuals might think they're killing it, not realizing the collective is stagnating and declining as a result, even technological improvement can't keep up with made up numbers.

Now then, how would these fiat adapted people fare when the bouncy castle leaks?

Inflation is theft!

Or just an exploit of a flawed system that can't/won't impose consistent accounting, resulting in normalized & incentivized cheating, thanks to the weaponization of money by a higher sovereign to control a group of lesser sovereign's productivity when there's too many of them for the higher sovereign to care, ahem, lets call it feudalism for short.

But also, that's just how it is with fiat currencies, their inherent inaccuracy often seen as inflation is just the result of lacking technology giving us imperfect tools, which for the game of life means potential for cheating, they allow participants to gain at the expense of the collective by exploiting the system itself to win over their peers, the system is constrained by human behavior & psyche rather than the outside world on which humans actually exist.

Whereas unlike fiat money, sound money is constrained by physics, and physics can't be cheated, in a fiat economy we're free to exploit each other as higher to lesser sovereigns, sadly the universe won't have any of that, the only behavior it'll accept to give resources in return is to do the work, no amount of arguing will ever suffice, it is the absolute sovereign and it only deals in capitalism, if you're up to it.

Money is supposed to be a representation of world resources, and that can't stay true for a fiat currency, which only represents whatever reflects back from the collective's psyche, continually drifting off course until hitting a brick of reality.

What I mean with this is that with fiat, for example, you'll often find that there are more dollars than there are goods and services, so it gives off the idea that we're wealthier than we really are, it's a lie, and ultimately what matters is the products and services we have, the real stuff we need.

As Milton Friedman best puts it:

“You're involved in a fallacy of looking at dollars, which is important sometimes, instead of looking at the real product; the goods and services, that people produce and consume!

Spending isn't good, what's good is producing! what we wanna have is more goods and services.”

This goes way beyond what we think of finance, since money is energy and energy is life, this misrepresentation of resources profoundly affects our lives, the numbers say we're better fed and educated today, but are we really? Just like your "inflation adjusted" hundred-dollar bill won't buy you the same land as your grandpa's hundred-dollar bill did in real terms, as there are countless ways to obfuscate this sad outcome, intentionally or not, like shrinkflation.

Now reflect on that while contemplating how the most successful economies today are "consumer driven", how is that not inferring that said economies are basically living off the rest of the world that works to feed them? they'll argue its intellectual property fairly balancing that out, and I agree information is the most valuable thing other than energy, but here's what I think about it in full;

“If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of everyone, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.”

    — Thomas Jefferson

They'll also argue it's the advanced financing they do, which is to say the money shuffling they require everyone to go through i.e., bureaucracy. In effect, they're a higher sovereign imposing feudalism on the rest of the world, yes, I'm talking about the United States of America and allies/hostages, the so called "international community."

Number go up & mindless consumption are the sort of narratives that a fiat economy incentivizes, the illusion of heaven behind a coin, which in late-stage fiat is where you often find a void.

As you can already tell, this growing failure to materialize means the narrative begins to fall on deaf ears for most people, as the proportion of feudal servants shrinks, at least going by their intentions.

Money printing leads to stealth communism

Or what's being called "corporate led government" by lesser sovereigns angry at what they think is so-called late-stage capitalism with its crazy profiteering destroying their lives, but I find "the fourth branch of government" more fitting, the civilizational cancer responsible for the cycles of good and bad times instead of good and better times.

"The need for a central bank, Das Kapital, Chapter V"

Heck, that crazy Marx was at least right about something, communism is indeed inevitable (if printer go brr), Here's how;

Imagine you have a company that sells stuff, the government comes to buy your stuff, the gov guy handling the transaction is happy to buy it all and even happier the more you jack up the price because that means his cut grows along with it, so you're happy too, and now you basically don't have to bother competing with other companies selling stuff, the gov guy will buy all your stuff, indefinitely.

Then the gov guy might ask you to hire a bunch of people that voted for him, and why not, he'll probably more than make up for it later on, if you deny the request, he might do a public solicitation so other companies can bid to get your position, but we're talking about relatively infinite budgets here, everyone will agree on a sweet deal eventually.

So, in a sense, companies in this situation are basically extensions of government, they behave in estrange ways, that one might say make no economic sense, often running unbalanced budgets and counterproductive bureaucracy that would bankrupt any truly private enterprise that presumably stands on its own merit and usefulness to others without relying on violence, the more they deal with gov, the more they can afford to behave this way, think the sort of business that will decline selling you a TV because your shoes aren't the right color, they let gov handle the violence for them to compensate for their lacking competitiveness i.e. you’re coerced into dealing with them.

Still, they can and often do retain some degree of competency here and there, in part because they tend to become a de-facto monopoly on their area, naturally sucking up all the talent, and also because they still have a private owner with private interests, they're not quite communist factories like in the USSR, but thinking of them as truly capitalistic enterprises bound by free market forces is completely wrong.

It looks bad and commie for the postal office to employ half the town, so they end up employing people indirectly through such companies.

Telecom operators, airlines, utilities and banks are common examples of such companies, they really can't escape it with current technology, and it’s a sweet trap anyway(until the leviathan itself begins to stumble) there are also less obvious ones like Boeing, since, well, they make leviathan weapons, but also compete outside their turf with airbus so they remain fairly competent, then you have ones like Microsoft, they could totally do without gov, but, again, sweet easy gov money!

And who exactly can outspend the literal money printer? The same entity bankrupting everyone through inflation and constraints on free trade is also the customer of last resort, in the form of bailouts and such, it is also the only employer capable of keeping up with a boiling economy, even if its worthless currency makes public job salaries a joke, the positions themselves can make up for it in the form of corruption(yet another word for cantillionaire or higher sovereign), whether they call it bribes or tipping

On bribes & tipping, two sides of the same coin, the former name mostly reserved for bureaucrats, and the later used for those employed by more private leaning enterprises that, one way or the other, have to keep pace with public incomes, after all, these two groups of salaried people are often neighbors.

And as the printing goes parabolic, the real productive work in a voluntary action market can’t possibly keep up with made up numbers, so you see the government having to employ more than half the population both directly and indirectly, destroying any and all productivity by displacing voluntary enterprise with people fooling each other into thinking they're winning, and the worst part; there are ways to delay this counterproductive collective from falling apart, such as the highest sovereign going to plunder outsiders to bring back wealth, i.e. war, or the more modern version; debt trap weaker nations to the fiat economy you control to make them feudal servants.

But also, we can always jump over formalities.

Don’t care how real this graph is, it is both funny and plausible in the here and now.

Heck, even absent the cantillion effect we can suffer a similar phenomenon, better known as bullshit jobs, oh yes, this is what can happen when technology improvement itself can emulate a money printer, by compensating enough that subjective interests can be fulfilled regardless of how objectively counterproductive they are, thanks to sheer efficiency brought on by new tech.

So, whether it's the bureaucratic or bullshit jobs version, for public and private businesses respectively, people just seem to like this sort of pointless activity, perhaps nothing more than a benign tumor when a sound money economy constrains it.

Collective mental fog

Inflation is a tricky thing, you'll often hear all sorts of explanations, which are usually at least partially true, but the general rule is that a price increase in a broad set of items that can’t be easily pinpointed to a particular incident -floods, fires, war- often means circulating money supply went up, in any case, the result is a shared cloud of uncertainty that makes people angry and erratic, watch Milton Friedman's "free to choose" for more on this.

Now imagine trying to build a house while some big important dude changes the definition of "meter" whenever, that's our economy today, oh and your handyman gets his meter definition from another dude, and you're both forced to use them at gun point, that’s why you can’t plan retirement, or if you do, it’s nice sounding gambling at best, aka trust us™

The lesser sovereigns will blame each other for it; "greedy big corp exploiting us with price hikes!" Oh yes there's a good chance that big evil corp is taking the opportunity to exploit you, but also, they're practically forced to hike prices or risk going bankrupt, so it’s true they might be ripping you off, but how much of the hike is pure greed vs the business survival response to the higher sovereign i.e. central bank debasing the currency, which creates the collective mental fog -inflation- that allows and incentivizes this behavior? And by the way, you never know how long it'll last or how bad it'll get, so better hike all you can, all the time, right?

Must be great being a central banker, as such a high rank sovereign one gets to profit off everyone else and watch them fight each other for it, here a few examples:

• https://www.reddit.com/r/shrinkflation/

• https://www.reddit.com/r/ABoringDystopia/comments/119kdi2/capitalism_is_coming_to_a_supermarket_near_you/

But then again, when the top sovereign i.e. government, can print and shuffle money freely & outbid anyone at whatever company, said company largely stops behaving like a company normally does in capitalism, its employees morph into bastardized gov bureaucrats, both CEO & the bureaucrat hiring his company are happy for price hikes, they form a symbiotic organism, and they don't care much if you boycott their products, heck they might just raise prices instead, other cantillionaires won't mind, worst case, the pennies you deny them will be compensated by further taxing you to help the struggling businesses affected by poor sales, with subsidies! We have to save those jobs!

See how this self-consuming nonsense goes nowhere but towards implosion?

So yeah, some greedy evil corps are basically extensions of gov as explained in the previous chapter, so the people are half-way right again!

Now, when asked whether the growing collective misery comes from the establishment, the oligarchy, corporate gov, idiocracy, fourth branch of gov, central planning, or the myriad other hypothesis, my answer is, all of the above, enabled by fiat domination.

These are all names for the same thing, cantillion effect cancer consuming a civilization from within, pushing individuals to self-destruction, a sound economy won't end fiat, but it'll prevent it from becoming cancerous.

Can you trust what they say? Are they lying, evil, or stupid?

Again, all of the above, and to what extend it is one or the other doesn't matter much, fact is, words can become as reliable as the fiat guiding metrics are at representing reality, garbage in, garbage out.

“Words are the money of fools”

Thomas Hobbs

And so, we get a war on language itself: Objectivity is bad, say journalists.

Why global fiat happens 

Because, pen is mightier than the sword they say, which is another way of saying fiat took over.

It is oh so convenient, after the sword goes dusty for a while, so hard to resist the temptation, things are great, no one doubts that dusty sword, it is dusty for a reason!

But they should add that this only holds as long as no challenging swords show up, the pen is backed by the threat of a great sword, but this gets forgotten and taken for granted over time until said sword gets rusty and suddenly a lot of lesser swords can match or beat it, and if it shows cracks, the usual strategy is to keep it stored, keep the illusion going, the threat alone can work wonders, often more so than the real thing.

Until we reach the limits of faith, spin and show can keep the game going for an arbitrarily long time, but damn if that pen isn't the most comfortable thing, so easy to make life comply with soft strokes, until it doesn't.

Don't be afraid of the WEF or whatever evil cabal conspiracy is supposedly trying to carbon tax your existence away, like Thanos snapping depopulation, Fiat stagnation is what makes these retarded arguments possible, but the universe will do that for us, and we can't stop it, so why do it ourselves?

Just realize that the incentive structure of a total fiat world naturally leads to these perceived planned evil outcomes, it's just a million ways of stealing from each other, sooner or later it's winner take all aka death match.

The bigger concern should be, what does personal responsibility look like if owning nothing gets normalized, this outcome is slowly but surely turning real because of general currency debasement of the masses, we know from history that feudalism is bad, and yet feudalism with Wi-Fi has faced little opposition so far.

Inflation need not be some universal constant… anymore

The lacking accuracy of last century tech that allows money manipulation is what makes things like UBI seem like a potential solution, but that's yet another band-aid to a self-inflicted wound i.e. printer go brr, since we had no fix for this normalized cheating, but we do now, it took millennia, but it’s finally here, since 2009!, and sadly, most of the world still treats it as some get-rich-quick scheme or dismisses it as a scam, perhaps they also dismissed the portable mechanical watch because it lacked the holy church built around it?

"Bitcoin isn't backed by anything!"

It doesn't need to be backed by anything, it IS the backing itself, because it merely adheres and follows physical, objective world constraints, can't be altered by unilateral decree, and hence behaves like a force of nature, Bitcoin is the soundest money to ever exist, plenty of good articles and books explaining this so I'll just give it a summary:

1. It requires energy for each coin and each transaction to happen, so it is bound by energy, the universe's currency, the uncheatable score that irrefutably says who keeps what, and hence can be a proper representation of it.

2. It basically pays people by its own unassailable means to keep it running.

3. It is informational in nature meaning your wealth can be what you know, not what you have, and that enables anyone to be largely immune to violence & coercion, raising the floor on relative sovereignty for all and hence shrinking the gap between stronger and weaker sovereigns, drastically reducing violence.

4. The 21 million supply cap means 21/∞ i.e., the value of everything else adapts to it, and so the relentless march of technology improving yields benefits all, but weaker sovereigns the most, damn, imagine that, a deflating currency is the real trickle-down economy.

If you'd rather believe more traditional reasoning, here you go:

https://twitter.com/JasonPLowery/status/1642595308935737345

Quite simple, why can't you debase a country's currency? Because they will beat you up for it, and why won't you do it with bitcoin's? because you're literally unable to do so.

Why 21 million?

Similar reason we decided one second is the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of a cesium 133 atom, and a meter is the length of the path travelled by light in a vacuum within 1⁄299792458 seconds, we base these metrics on universal constants that no individual can alter, we don't distort their proportions because far away stars mean too many zeroes to the right, and on the bitcoin standard we won't do that because of too many zeroes to the left either.

While inflation can work as an incentive to push people to do better, imposed as something that is forever good and should always keep "growing" turns it counterproductive, the game of life gets exponentially harder for most, whether players' skills improve or not, degrading to a self-consuming collective.

Bitcoin fixes that

In a BTC standard, a higher sovereign, someone with more coins, has no means of stealing lower sovereigns of their coins through the system itself, this leviathan is actually capable of truly and fully preventing that, unlike the threat of damnation or jail of previous leviathans.

Everyone, no matter how strong or weak, is forced into voluntary cooperation when it comes to currency exchanging hands, since no one can extract coins from others by virtue of having more coins, cantillion effect is rendered null.

As stated before; coins, power, energy, money, it's all the same in the realm of men.

 Gold was pretty good, but ultimately fragile

Thanks to money, we no longer need the threat of wild beasts and slippery surfaces, bankruptcy is scary enough it seems, reckless allocation of funds can result in hunger just like playing with pets instead of hunting them, money is such a perfect replacement of violence that it even teaches what is often good behavior for the collective, and it does so without killing you so you can keep trying new things!

This was going great, until some not-quite-smart individuals began wondering if they can do away with such harsh inhumane "teachings" like hunger, so they came up with regulations and social safety net schemes of all kinds and sizes, not realizing that removing risk also means removing individual responsibility and thus encouraging recklessness, but alas, this sounds great and like the right thing to do, why would you want anyone to suffer?

So, we have the aforementioned initiative by worried moms united, helped by the gangster cantillionaires that want to keep up with the Übermensch by using any and all excuses to print the money, hence conspiring to liberate money from its objective constraints as an aspirationally accurate representation of the world resources the living care so much about, culminating in wtf happened in 1971.

Now a new reality sets in, the loud impulsive thrill seeker will generally outdo the rational individual, those that sleep well at night regardless of how many times their cars get repoed still manage to live better than the guy saving to buy sneakers.

I don't advocate for either type of individual as superior to the other, but the imposition of either way of living on everyone is a disaster, and a bitcoin standard won’t prevent the reckless from doing their thing, it'll simply mean their likely failures won't take anyone but them down the drain, usually, and we still get to benefit from the occasional winner retropropulsively landing rockets on a boat!

It'd be quite the shock if gold makes a comeback in this timeline, its most ardent fans will suggest that the so-called digital gold is just a toy or a fad, and that we'll revert to gold as currency soon enough, it'll only take an internet blackout they say, not realizing their perception of the digital as finicky unreliable tools has more to do with their lack of adaptation skills rather than the technology itself.

When it comes down to it, dealing with a satellite phone that runs on a solar charger is still less hassle than dealing with gold for current and upcoming generations, and whatever clever paper gold solution goldbugs imagine that supposedly won't lead us back to fiat won't change that either.

Is fiat all bad?

But wait, extremes tend to be bad, right? proponents of bitcoin propose a world where sound money rules and that could be just as disastrous as the current fiat nightmare, the problem might be the imposition of either system, the more radical and enterprising folks might do better in a fiat system whereas the steady & rational do better in a sound money system, and the universe is perhaps equally pleased with either, actually, I bet it likes both.

“Early America’s religious colonies succeeded at a higher rate than its for-profit colonies, because the former had a purpose.”

The Network State

As early america shows, we need both rational and faithful individuals to lean on each other for success.

It’s quite amusing how the most ardent bitcoin "maxis" want to rid the world of so-called shitcoins, which are basically tiny fiat camps where people voluntarily go to most likely die, even calling on the good old estate leviathan to do something about them, that said gullible people should be protected from the irrational schemes behind these other coins, when bitcoin itself is the leviathan that will guarantee this nonsense is able to proliferate regardless of what anyone thinks about it, it’s a necessary evil.

But here’s the key part; fiat should be voluntary, and bitcoin makes it so.

Fiat can actually shape some people into the literal Übermensch, there's a truly titanic fight at the top positions within a fiat economy, contrary to popular belief, the "top percenters" aren't a bunch of forever kings that inherit and keep their place, there's huge mobility within that group, nobody can sit around because there's no solid ground in fiat, it’s all quicksand, euphoria and ballsy moves, but mostly dumb moves.

oh, and it also brings us these fine folks more often than not

As fiat pits men against men, it can produce some amazing stuff, but more often than not, the results of winning against other humans is just a show, a reshuffling of resources at best, of little or no value when used outside the realm of men.

Some people find it more or less rewarding whether their gains come from their peers or the outside.

And crazy as it might sound to you, some people prefer that fiat craze, we've had sound money economies before, the late 1800's US is a good example, workers protested over wage cuts because tech improvements with a literal gold currency meant prices were mostly stagnant or dropping, which meant the average salary man could save(!) and plan ahead with relative certainty that their money would only afford more stuff over time, infuriating the thrill seekers.

Imagine being happy to see tech improving because it means more wealth for almost everyone, unlike these days where new tech is often seen as evil job killing witchcraft, a world where the currency is sound means the price of most stuff goes down over time, and the people are rewarded for working & saving rather than owning & borrowing.

As long as violence stays away, competition will show up, the increased margins thanks to new tech are a clear incentive for others to try and compete and thus lower prices, which makes everyone else -the collective as a whole- relatively richer.

The liquidity crisis caused by the limited divisibility of gold (can only shave it so thin) is no longer a problem with digital money, and as you can see today, the savers will hoard whatever is valuable if the currency itself tries to shake them off via inflation, see the perpetual housing crises.

But who knows, maybe there are better arguments where a deflationary currency makes people lazy hoarders that will kill the economy, maybe that’s why we shouldn’t force everyone into either system, otherwise we merely have switched the grenade from left to right hand, in some sense, fiat is a way to produce the most competent individuals at outdoing other humans in relation to abstract valuables, we definitely like that too, but the purely abstract can't be the all-encompassing metrics on which we measure and plot against the outside world, the universe is never sleeping on us.

Even spacetime can bend, warp and expand, which is useful for some things, but being able to step out of that crazy dance and back to "normal" physics is just as useful, so thankfully we have things like Ethereum already in place, heck it only took it 6 years to reach its own wtf1971 moment.

In conclusion, forcing everyone to either be spenders or savers is a mistake, and we can argue that some people's character favors one or the other, neither is better, so let people choose, now that there's finally a truly uncheatable, non-inflationary & objective measuring tool for value, we can have the reckless spenders on top of it, at their own individual & voluntary risk, we can all make that choice.

Extremes in this sense aren't necessarily good or bad, what is bad for a collective is the perceived and often desired stability becoming stagnation. Change is life, and that's what we should aim for, the bumpy ride!

 —————————————————————————————————————————————Further ramblings

Sound money is natural selection 2.0

Since sound money is a form of non-lethal representation of power, it inherits the uncheatable nature of energy so it can accurately represent resources and settle who keeps what, and in doing so it weeds out the "unfit" individuals that behave in counterproductive ways towards their civilization by constraining them to objective reality rather than the collective hallucination, and instead of outright injuring or killing them, it puts economic hardship on them for irresponsible management of resources, we no longer have to lose half the population on this process, nature's way was a hugely wasteful and inefficient system, but absolutely necessary.

Those against sound money often claim that a deflating currency means people become lazy hoarders that profit off doing nothing, but they fail to realize that this behavior simply gets reshaped as so-called passive income, the perpetual thirst for yield.

With a deflating currency we instead free the relatively poor from the constant search for yield on passive-income nonsense that the money shuffling hype bubbles keep propping up, which is overwhelmingly a counterproductive malinvestment as it's simply reshuffling already mined resources within a collective.

Fiat ruled world leads to infantilized society

Money as a collective hallucination means money's ability to do natural selection for the collective to win over the universe goes out the window thanks to its inherent inaccuracy manifested as money printing, enabling cantillionaires to face almost no ill effects from malinvestment,

The premise of fiat domination is that of perpetual motion machines.

This cheating population tends to only grow over time via the fourth branch of government, shielding more and more people from the consequences of their counterproductive behavior, instead having inflation punish rational individuals for saving and funding "boring" activities that enrich their collective rather than each other.

• This is how you end up with:

  • The not-quite-communist companies taking over the place

  • Bureaucrats everywhere

  • Mutual plunder echo chamber

  • Devolution of everything to tribal us vs them behavior

  • Idiocracy

  • Stagnation & subsequent implosion

• This is why the modern world runs on hype and faith, if your money is eternally sinking into worthlessness, everything else might look like a sound investment compared to it.

When a truly private enterprise fails, it goes bankrupt, learns a lesson and hopefully tries something different, when the money printer is around, this isn’t allowed, because of course we can’t possibly let the poor people suffer for trying their best! And so, we "bail them out" or whatever, and that’s not enough, the money printer will look to further incentivize all sorts of backfiring enterprises in the hopes(supposedly) that if 1 out of 10 turns out good, it was all worth it, according to cantillionaires who control the leviathan and benefit from it regardless, of course, and at your expense.

This grows to the point where bad self-consuming behavior is normalized, most individuals no longer capable or even allowed to freely take risks outside the realm of men in the hopes of bringing back wealth to their collective, because all such risk is inacceptable compared to the totally safe plunder thy neighbor strategy, and so we're left with a population of eternal bickering toddlers, in a world that runs on hype and faith, capitalism is largely gone at that point.

Record sales! Record profits! Record this and that, number go up! Everywhere! All mostly because "A rising tide lifts all boats" i.e., printer go brr.

I call this creditism for the lesser sovereigns; eternal repayment for whatever diminishing joy remains to be plundered from within, it sounds cooler than feudalism. 

In conclusion, fiat, the collective illusion enabled by central banking, leads to idiocracy, by guiding the collective's behavior by its own reflection, it devolves into a closed loop echo chamber that eats itself and equalizes into nothingness, like heat death, the real death, because the living is all about fluctuations, imbalances, uncertainty, the fiat collective eventually evaporates if it can't drag wealthy outsiders in or plunder the world outside it.

it also looks quite sad and hopeless for a while before the final stumble.

But sir, we have more old people than ever!

An adult is what we call someone physically & mentally developed enough that it makes nonviolent cooperation most viable, how we measure this has changed given our unpredictable world, but for the longest time we could've safely assumed that a physically mature looking person was also mentally mature, the two were almost necessarily correlated, harsh conditions of life in nature, i.e. Darwinism, meant that you not only had to be strong but wise enough to survive and if by late teens you were still behaving like a child, in all likelihood, your strong adult body alone wouldn't keep you alive.

But far from the wild forests and endless dangers of the world, people in artificial settlements are not only free from natural threats but actively prevented from engaging in dangerous behavior or reacting to it, incentives are the command line inputs for living things, remove the incentives for self-preservation and self-destruction is on the table.

Seriously, go watch idiocracy

This means a physically mature individual is no longer necessarily a mentally mature one, but we keep treating them as if they were when past a certain biological age, the law says so!, and just like kids need providers, the less sovereign need at least the illusion of such a figure, as institutions or role models even, this becomes a self-reinforcing situation, people in such state tend to fare poorly when faced with a sound money environment, where consequences mean pain, not just arbitrary social feedback like shame, especially considering "old dogs can’t learn new tricks"

Then comes the fiat standard to finish the job, with mental maturity no longer needed, all you have to do to succeed in a modern & relatively wealthy fiat collective is to convince higher sovereigns that you're trying your best at fulfilling their mostly arbitrary demands, just like kids with their parents.

Being a perpetual toddler also means lowering your sovereignty, and what results from an infantilized collective is obviously a very communist leaning society, these effects are self-reinforcing, in some sense, the herd needs a shepherd, and the shepherd would like a herd.

When a society devolves into such low sovereignty, the world around it begins to resemble a stadium, every issue becomes tribal us vs them, as they all cheer and defend their respective sovereigns, not realizing equal sovereigns seldom fight each other but rather plot to exploit all herds in unison.

• Before money: dumb people should be dead

• After money: dumb people should be bankrupt

• Today: dumb people should be president

 I don't propose we let people fall into uncovered manholes, but that the extent to which we try and keep people safe should go no further than providing warnings and guidance, so called "idiot-proof design" takes things too far, in reality it should be named idiot-making design, because it incentivizes and normalizes ignorance and recklessness.

True role of governments

Other than pretending to allow more or less individual sovereignty among its subjects, today's constitutional governments have three main functions.

1. Prevent violence from outsiders = military

2. Prevent violence between insiders = police

3. Resolve disagreements between insiders = courts

And they can all be summed up with one ideal prime directive; prevent all violence, foreign or local, by threatening and/or using… violence.

The need for these measures is how governments form naturally, people come together with the realization that pacific cooperation is objectively better for the group as a whole and quite simply more desirable and consistently successful than employing force for most, and so they pool their forces into an abstract entity capable of unified action which prevents everyone else from using violence; the leviathan, but here comes the dilemma, this same entity that provides safety is also the most capable of doing harm, and it needs a human at the reins, which means someone who is both player and arbiter.

This creates the market of markets, there are leviathans of all sizes, let’s call them gangs for short, whether it’s a government, monarchy, etc. they all do the same thing, they impose a monopoly on violence on a territory so that individuals living within it can interact in peace between them, the gangs might start out as the most noble endeavor but it'll inevitably end up being a parasitic cancer, the more successful it is, the more people it attracts, the more said people prosper, the more the gang tries to prosper along, and what’s their means of doing so? Parasitic behavior that they can easily enforce since they're, well, the monopoly on violence.

Ideally the gangs would get funded voluntarily by the people within their territory, and people would be expelled from it if they refuse, but in reality, they have a clear incentive to end up trapping people inside to live off them, as we've alluded to already, when the sovereign is overwhelmed by weaker sovereigns it'll often switch to feudalism.

The US' founding fathers were painfully aware of this, and their brilliant but partial solution lies on a balance, that the leviathan must be made forever vulnerable to the collective, or so the 2nd amendment says.

Of course this isn't enough today, never was really, thanks to the 2nd amendment, the leviathan might be incapable of suddenly abusing the whole collective at once, but it can certainly do that little by little, and as the almighty entity that it is, it can and will eventually get involved in more than the three main functions described above, at the direction of those that take the reins, and because all its actions are ultimately backed by overwhelming violence, free market productivity coming from voluntary collaboration goes out the window when faced against it, here comes the endless red tape, and as we've already stated, use of force while potentially beneficial for an individual, is counterproductive for the collective it is a part of.

This situation implicitly spawns an additional main "function" for the gang, some call it the fourth branch of government, the almighty bureaucracy made up of unelected perpetual employees that can impose public policy by decree using and extracting seemingly infinite funds i.e., inflation for you. It's like a cancer, it'll grow until there's nothing productive left for it to plunder, it's how civilizations die.

"When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion - when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing - when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors - when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don't protect you against them, but protect them against you - when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice - you may know that your society is doomed."

Yes, there's definitely a case to be made for violently imposed rules that seemingly have no free market solution, take noise pollution for example, but that same door clears the way for things like bureaucracy, monopolies, shortages, and endless sources of human misery, no matter how many complicated checks and balances, it’s ultimately a game to be gamed by the most ambitious among the collective, they'll figure it out and achieve their individual wins, thus dooming the whole collective.

How bitcoin fixes this

Yesteryear's constitutions were made with the purpose and wisdom of limiting government's power, the leviathan, in order to preserve the freedom of the individual, as made clear by now, the more sovereign each individual is, the better for the collective.

Still, as much as we could try to limit government on what it can and cannot do, the passage of time allows it to slowly break free and eventually lower everyone's sovereignty, what we have now is unlimited government, which threatens to destroy us by self-implosion.

Bitcoin is the fusion bomb equivalent to a shield, one that can't even be shoot at if one knows how to handle it, the ideal civilization would be made up of equal sovereigns each of which is capable of singlehandedly destroying the whole collective, we're still waiting for such an offensive tool, in the meantime, bitcoin provides the next best thing; the defensive tool that can withstand it all.

Today we have better tools that go further than the 2nd amendment, in the 21st century, information itself is the most valuable resource, and cryptography is godlike defense for it, bitcoin takes the 2nd amendment to the next level, it provides truly inalienable rights, to everyone, anywhere, at any time, with enough power to keep any and all leviathans at bay.

 "There's no amount of violence that can solve a math problem."

And by doing this, it lifts everyone's sovereignty to a new standard while also bringing down the most overpowered sovereigns, -as the idealized modern government is supposed to do, making bitcoin the new leviathan- creating a more equal world that significantly shrinks the proportion of violence we have to deal with, thanks both to its absolute precision on value measurement, that we desperately need to manage resources without violence, and its unassailable defense for when that is not enough.

Infantilized society is the beginning of idiocracy

It might seem like a contradiction to state that the inflate or die fiat economy induces dangerous toddler behavior while at the same time allowing worried moms united to work as argument for money printing, resulting in restrictions to freedom in the name of safety, and pork.

Wouldn’t that balance out? Nope, it exacerbates the issue, similar to helicopter moms trying so hard to keep their kids safe that the poor things never fully develop, so they either stay scared of their own shadow or go on scaring everyone else, as any rational human can attest to, overprotective parenting is almost guaranteed to backfire, badly.

This is often my cheeky answer to people wondering why God allows so much awfulness in the world; well, in his defense, if he became an overprotective guardian, is he all that wise?

Now imagine a whole society behaving this way

"Don't drink battery fluid!"

I can see the resemblances between our historic accounts of late-stage church states and today's ultra politicized clown world societies, as I said before, infantile societies will turn everything into sport.

Roman law history tells us how the late republic's law considered a 25-year-old man to be an oversized child, a clear danger to society, imagine how long they must've endured this situation that by the time they adopted this thinking the republic was still standing. Things move much faster these days.

 “The dividing line in America is no longer between right or left. The choice is between normal and crazy.” say both sides.

Enough doom talk though, this time might be different, medieval people didn't have nukes and AI

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