“The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error, if error seduce them. Whoever can supply them w/illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.”
— Gustave Le Bon
I never truly paid attention to the working of the world, macroeconomic events and geopolitics, till now. As a good little sovereign citizen, I woke up, went to work, consumed, pay my taxes and try to save for a better future. Something we should all be able to do without having to answer to the government.
2019 till now has been quite the eye-opener, and I am starting to question a lot more than I ever did; yes, I thought some things were stupid and dismissed them and moved on with my life, but now it seems like that stupidity has turned into a mass psychosis of sort.
If the past couple of years have taught us any lessons, then it’s the virality of a pandemic. While we can debate its effects and impact of the virus, none can deny how quickly the ideas accompanying the disease spread. As the viral infection entered bodies around the world, so too did many diseases of the mind.
Through this constant state of fear we find ourselves in, society has slipped into a mass psychosis of sorts, and in these times, delusionary beliefs spread far and wide without any critical thinking to stand in its way.
Armed with the weapon that is “the greater good” and “the safety of everyone”, governments and their fearful followers have promoted totalitarianism in a host of forms.
Whenever I read about things like apartheid and the world wars, I often thought, man, how stupid were these people to allow irrational behaviour to continue for so long.
Still, now I see it playing out in real-time, and it’s shocking to see how easy it is to slip into this zombie state of fear.
We’ve now seen what states are capable of; regardless of your level of democracy, we’ve seen how quickly that can be suspended, and totalitarian measures can be switched on.
“Totalitarianism is the modern phenomenon of total centralized state power coupled with the obliteration of individual human rights: in the totalized state, there are those in power, and there are the objectified masses, the victims.”
— Arthur Versluis, The New Inquisitions
Centralised power is a single point of failure.
Centralised power always corrupts because we humans are corruptable; I see so many people arguing for change, but no change of the system, but a change of personal, like there is an endless supply of people who are completely altruistic and willing to set aside their personal incentives for the greater good.
The deluded belief in our political, financial and social systems have seen us give up more and more power to the state as well as our freedoms.
We deify our politicians, celebrities and basically anyone with a platform that perpetuates that the status quo is the only way. I find it strange how we hero-worship people when we all accept that humans are flawed; how counterintuitive is this thinking?
You’ll see it in the shitcoin market, too; a project will gain more traction simply because someone of a certain statue talks about it or attaches their name to it as if that alone affects anything fundamentally.
Bitcoin fixes this
In Bitcoin, however, we are fond of attacking anyone who gets too big in the space; since every stakeholder has a vested interest in the security of the network, rigidity of the protocol and stability of the monetary policy, no one is going to convince all of us to opt for something that only benefits the few.
It’s the same rules for all of us.
A child of the state
The parent-child relationship is familiar to us; even if we never had the ideal relationship with our parents, the media and popular culture consistently enforce this message.
We see this in the way our centralised institutions use it to lull us into a false sense of safety. Trust the state, trust the banks, we know what’s best for you, you don’t need to think for yourself or decide for yourself, we have you all the answers.
In a totalitarian society, we have to feed constant messaging to enforce the delusions that trigger the feelings of childlike obedience and submissive subjects. While only a deluded ruling class would feel they possess the power and knowledge to govern to control society in a top-down manner completely.
This state of the autocratic rule provides a false sense of safety and control, but giving up your agency comes with far more sinister implications and suffering down the line IF history has taught us anything.
Bitcoin fixes this
Bitcoin actively fights against this mindset; we encourage you to distrust everyone, DO NOT TRUST, verify. We encourage you to take custody of your wealth and not trust it to third parties. We encourage you to run your own node, so you’re fully aware and in control of your transactions.
Bitcoin actively reprograms the mind against the views of totalitarianism and promotes individualism and sovereignism.
“Each wave of terrorizing . . . creates its effects more easily – after a breathing spell – than the one that preceded it because people are still disturbed by their previous experience. Morality becomes lower and lower, and the psychological effects of each new propaganda campaign become stronger; it reaches a public already softened up.”
— Joost Meerloo, The Rape of the Mind
The delusion of the power-hungry
As the fiat Ponzi scheme continues to unravel, the financial and political elite take greater and greater measures to plug the holes created by a fundamentally flawed system. What was once solved with lowering interest rates, then quantitative easing now needs something stronger. For people themselves to fall for measures that act against their self-interest, this is achieved through menticide systematic brainwashing of the population.
For menticide to be effective, fear needs to be sewn into peoples minds; when people are fearful, they are more prone to accepting narratives that are against their best interests.
Bitcoin is one of the only free markets, if not the only free-market left in the world, it is a beacon of truth, and why it looks so strange to us is because we’ve been living in a world of manipulated markets for years, we cannot recognise what a functional market is supposed to act like under different conditions.
We are told to stay away, that Bitcoin is volatile, Bitcoin is bad for the environment, only criminals use Bitcoin, and the list of FUD grows with each day Bitcoin absorbs more of the world’s savings. If Bitcoin is a failed Ponzi scheme, as they claim, why would you need to campaign so hard for it to be shut down?
Surely if something is fundamentally flawed, it would collapse in on itself without intervention.
If we take a look at the news we receive from politicians and the mainstream media, it’s a barrage of fear with spaces of calm to lull us and reprogram us over time. They will provide us with contradictory reporting, outright lies, all to promote confusion.
The more they confuse, the more the population remains at odds with one another. To drive chaos, so people actively seek solace in the centralised power as the only way to find a solution.
Bitcoin fixes this
Bitcoin has no political views; it’s apolitical money; all it knows how to do is secure the blockchain, mint new Bitcoin and keep Bitcoin balances immutable. A simple and boring system that is yet to be overthrown, if it continues the way it has for the past 12 years, it not only brings a beacon of financial truth and a barometer we can use to measure the failure of other stores of wealth, like fiat money.
Bitcoin is an attack on centralised power; it offers users the ability to bypass systems they disagree with and fund ideas and rhetoric that may be subdued in the current system.
““….what else are parallel structures than an area where a different life can be lived, a life that is in harmony with its own aims and which in turn structures itself in harmony with those aims? . . .What else are those initial attempts at social self-organization than the efforts of a certain part of society…to rid itself of the self-sustaining aspects of totalitarianism and, thus, to extricate itself radically from its involvement in the…totalitarian system?”
— Vaclav Havel, The Power of the Powerless
4 Responses
Oomph! This one is deeper than the Mariana Trench mate but on point as always!
I do think that, ironically, it’s the self-interest that keeps people actually believing in the current centralised systems we have – “I’m alright so I don’t need to worry about it”… except they’re not alright, don’t realise it but they don’t worry about it and just carry on without any critical thinking. Like you alluded to, critical thinking does require effort and it seems those who have been most critical of how the status quo was prior to Bitcoin, especially with the 2008 crash, moved to Bitcoin due to it’s apolitical nature and chance to opt-out.
That’s the beauty of Bitcoin – it separates state and money. We’ve experienced it ourselves when using Lightning for cross-border but I feel what people need is to actually experience Bitcoin and not just read about it in some FUD – we can but share the knowledge on TBM and do our bit!
Lol someone had to say it, we’ve been acquiescing for so long and using the greater good to allow so called “strong men” to take over and tell us how to live our lives. I think we are so afraid of pain, yet we causing so much already by avoiding it.
I think Bitcoin was inevitable, its nature trying to rebalance itself
Dude, what the hell … awesome site, awesome content … i was checking out the Raoul Pal realvision.com/crypto website, pretty awesome … https://www.realvision.com/shows/the-interview-crypto/videos/the-future-of-crypto-is-community?source_topic=crypto … him and Michael Saylor are basically my crypto gurus (you #3, (-: ) , hey, BTC and ETH up, nice … somewhere over 42K on BTC i might go yolo… again … or maybe ETH, who knows … fyi reminder my son is still on hive still, @schubes … ok, peace, great website … keep rocking it up !
Lol Thanks, yeah I told you we’re busy moving away from shitcoining and starting to take our content creation seriously, I used to like real vision but its become a home shopping network for crypto projects lately and they’ve sold themselves out so I would take what they say with a pinch of salt. We’re a bit slow with the content as we build out the site and the eBook but once that’s done we’ll be generating regular pieces and our monthly newsletter so stay tuned