False narratives
By: Knut Svanholm
Tags: Inflation, Christopher Hitchens, Zeitgeist, Bitcoin, False Narratives

Arguably, the scariest thing about us humans is how little we seem to question the narrative we happen to be born into. In hindsight we’re always baffled by our ancestors willingness to commit hideous crimes by following orders yet very few of us think about what moral implications the way we live our lives today will have on future generations. We suppose that since we live in relative peaceful times, all’s well and we’re making progress, it just takes time. In many ways, we are making progress as thinkers such as Steven Pinker and Hans Rosling has pointed out multiple times. But we might be missing something. A vicious force, hidden in plain sight, poised to drive us into desperation and despair in the long run, no matter how democratic, liberal or socially aware our societies claim to be. All democracies may be doomed to fail and there might be nothing we can do about it.

The force I’m talking about is inflation. Like religious beliefs in an afterlife enabled our psychopathic ruling class to send young men to war in the old days, inflation enables our psychopathic ruling class to leech upon the lifeblood of every citizen on earth, funneling wealth from the many to the few. Political debate across the globe is skewed towards cosmetic issues that are easily dwarfed by the gargantuan world wide problem that is inflation. We’re presented with infantile political solutions to non-problems that have little to do with the only real barrier we have to progress — inflation. Inflation has on average deprived every person on the globe of half of what is rightfully theirs through their labor in less than thirty years due to the effects of compound interest. It is distorting our markets abilities to adjust prices through the laws of supply and demand and it has relocated half of our planet’s wealth from the hands of the many into the hands of the few. Despite all this, inflation is almost never mentioned in traditional media. We’re so born into the idea that money is something that is, and should be, controlled by the state that we fail to see the imminent waterfall as we float downstream towards it at an ever accelerating pace.

Big corporations didn’t do this. Big governments didn’t do this. Not even big banks did this. We did this, by letting it happen right in front of our eyes. Just like religion poisons everything, as the late Christopher Hitchens used to say, inflation poisons everything and it makes us appreciate life less as we slave on in our ever spinning hamster wheels. It is time we separated not only church and state but also money and state and, ultimately, man and state as we find that the internet can empower us to do things in a decentralized rather than a hierarchical manner. This begins with freeing ourselves from the clutches of inflation by adopting Bitcoin, the only real alternative we have to inflating currencies. Later on we may apply decentralization to every conceivable aspect of our lives, from transportation to education to social security and health care. Our new, empowered selves will have more time to spend on our families, our passions and our well being in general. This paradigm shift began with the internet, it will rearrange the power structures of the world through Bitcoin and lay the foundation for a decentralized global society without leaders.

The Zeitgeist movies and the following Venus project that gained a bit of momentum about a decade ago opened a lot of eyes to the vast array of problems inherent in our traditional institutions and presented a vision of the future based on human cooperation. A leaderless, global society without money. What the movies failed to address was how the ruling classes were going to give up their power as people still need to work to put food on their tables. As the proponents of these visions of the future were mostly collectivists it is unlikely that they would have embraced the anarcho capitalist, libertarian ideals of the Bitcoin sphere but ironically, the only path to a decentralized future might be just that. Sound money. What we arguably never had and what we so desperately need, now more than ever.

Anyhow, Bitcoin exists regardless of what anyone thinks about it and there are only two ways to relate to it — you’re either onboard or not. Buying some won’t change your life overnight but learning more about the philosophy behind it will change how you see the world you live in. So which of the pills will you take, the blue or the red one?