Bitcoin Is Not Democratic Part Five

Thinking about the effect Bitcoin has and will have on the organization of human society sends one down many rabbit holes. We’ve been down a few already.

In the final part of this series, we’re going to explore the idea of a “meritocracy,” alongside some flavors of that model which I believe Bitcoin makes possible.

Once again, these are thought experiments. I do not have all of the answers and in fact, may not have any of the answers – the idea is that we begin thinking about these things seriously now. Projecting stupidity like dEmOcRaCy onto Bitcoin and more importantly onto a future Bitcoin standard is just a recipe for failure.

On our journey toward the “age of merit,” we must always remember the real struggle: The option to advance through economic means or political means.

We must remember that the real distinction between the state and anarchy can be boiled down to the contrast between the “given” (centralized/mandatory system) versus the “gathered” (decentralized/voluntary system).

Bitcoin is our opportunity to swing the pendulum away from the tyranny of the given and back to the possibility of the gathered.

I hope this series has served as a wake-up call, especially for those who’ve tied their identity to the idea of Bitcoin being democratic.

Now, before we kick in, let’s whet our appetites with this brilliant short video I was sent last week. It reminds us why the first three parts of this series, in particular, were written:

The video links off to another short video called “Sex & Taxes.” You should bookmark and watch them both.

Let’s begin.

Work

I don’t want to get into the “metaphysics of work” here, so I’ll simply point out that work is the basis of productivity and productivity the basis of progress. You can’t have a society without people working.

Work → Productivity → Progress → Society

To show how broken the current world really is, contrast this basic progression with the fact that you cannot simply fly to any country and work for someone.

These democratic, politically driven institutions we call governments are not interested in economic reality or productivity, but in moronic protectionism so that the lemmings who voted to keep them in power are able to continue subsisting off welfare and handouts.

Cyberspace was the first realm to transcend the tentacles of the idiot state. It enabled people to work for others and add value, irrespective of their nationality or location.

But even with the ability to transcend space and place, the meddling of the state via its influence on the banking and payments system (as we’ve seen in the recent Russia-hysteria), has made that victory only partial. Your ability to get paid is dependent upon permission from your overlords, who want to tag you, brand you and file your details away so they can “legally” rob you of a portion of your money later.

Simply getting a bank account in a territory in which you’re not a “legal resident” is nigh on impossible. Working is another level of impossibility that requires mountains of paperwork and months of wasted man-hours in bureaucratic processing and begging.

Once again, Bitcoin fixes this. Try it yourself. Download a wallet, secure your keys, give someone an address to pay you for your work, or product, or service. Simple. Value for value. No middlemen, no permission, no wastage of anyone’s precious time.

Bitcoin inverts the madness of the status quo, where you have to beg for permission first. It enables people to work, build wealth and one day, when governance evolves into fee-for-service, you will pay for that which you want — like any normal customer would.

Want to live in the nicest city? No problem; it’s a higher membership fee. Want to live cheaper? By all means; there will be a “living product” for that too.

On a Bitcoin standard, this ability to live and work anywhere — for anyone, without permission — becomes the actual standard, both online and in meatspace.

The notion of a “social security number” or a “work permit” is thrown out the window because (a) it will be utterly unenforceable online, and (b) citadel operators are looking for more customers, and are incentivized to have productive and competent members to join the ranks of the businesses operating within their borders.

This is where we’re going; and where we’re going, we don’t need roads.

The Age Of Merit

Work and merit are inherently linked.

Bitcoin’s relationship with energy use at the network level, coupled with its cryptographic approach to preserving property rights at the meta level, result in a far deeper relationship to work than what many initially notice, and therefore also its relationship to merit.

As such, Bitcoin’s existence will tilt both individual human behavior and structural societal orientation more toward productivity, progress and most importantly, merit.

It’s funny coming full circle to this idea because it’s actually how part one of the series began. My argument was that “Bitcoin is meritocratic.” While I’ve come to realize that this statement is not entirely accurate in and of itself (Bitcoin is more complex, and not strictly meritocratic) what is accurate is that relationships and social coordination will have to adapt to more meritocratic “metas” in order to thrive. There is a powerful idea here. Bitcoin is almost like a specter, keeping us accountable (in all senses of the word), reminding us of the middle way.

With that in mind, what is a “meritocracy”?

Before we explore the answer to that question, it might be helpful to get clear on what it is not — because remember: where we’re going, we don’t need roads. If we get confused and build a bunch of metaphorical “roads” on metaphorical oceans, we’re only going to get in our own way.

Projecting the consciousness and frameworks of our current paradigm forward helps nobody.

Faux mEriToCrAcY

We’ve all heard the term, but does anyone really understand what it means? At the risk of giving yourself a mild aneurysm, I suggest you watch the video below, not because it will help you understand the concept of meritocracy, but that it will show you why it’s so goddamn important to have a foundation in Bitcoin, Austrian economics or anarcho-capitalism before espousing any sort of political ideas.

I know I’m being harsh, but I do it tongue-in-cheek. I actually reached out to the guy and since he made that video, he did find Bitcoin — which I am happy for. In fact, if I look back on my naivety from 2014, I too would’ve believed some of the things he said. Why? Because they sound nice.

This is why the first four parts of this series were written. We all know the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Some of us, those who can partially recognize the problem but completely misdiagnose it, are prone to slap a series of illogical, inconsistent ideas together and become a potentially greater threat than an ally. We must be sharp and consistent in our critiques in order to attract the most able and intelligent to our cause. The alternative is being followed by the long tail of lemmings whose opinion doesn’t matter in the first place.

Vague platitudes or impossible claims like “equality of opportunity for everyone” and “the best education is a right for every young child,” are signs that the necessary work has not been done yet.

Arbitrarily defining government actors as “experts in their field” who are “driven by reason and science” is not what makes something meritocratic. In fact, it is a pathway to hell — as evidenced in the past two years.

In the absence of studies of morality and ethics (much of what traditional religions explore), the secular state simply becomes the new god, and obedience the religion.

Lastly, the idea of a “government” being an institution that can competently deliver anything they’ve promised is nonsense. Government and merit are two incompatible ideas. Politics can only embody merit if it is economically accountable, and so long as politics is the realm of a government that can influence economies by virtue of issuing money, we are caught in the cyclical trap from which we’re now fighting our way out .

This is why even the most sound definition of a meritocracy (something akin to an anarcho-capitalist, voluntaryist society), while great in theory, is impossible without Bitcoin.

Bitcoin is what makes a real meritocratic mode of organization among humans possible. There is no alternative. A meritocracy requires private property, proof of work, economic consequence/calculation, free markets and prices.

So long as mechanisms exist to acquire, accumulate and protect wealth by virtue of politics and the socialization of bad decision-making, society will always devolve into the tyranny of mindless masses.

Let’s dive into what the emergence of a meritocracy may look, feel and sound like.

Meritocracy

Despite the logical and economic consistencies of the various flavors of anarchism, they all seem to fall short in dealing with or utilizing the necessary emergence of hierarchies and power structures.

Having run businesses for over a decade, and been a focal point for group outings, I am keenly aware of the need for leadership and some level of influence (power?) over the participants in a group.

This form of power is not coercive, but it is directive and authoritative.

I’ve written about hierarchies of competence in the past, and I believe they are a cornerstone for the healthy functioning of any group.

The anarchic idea that there are no hierarchies is, in my opinion, misguided.

The nuance lies in the distinction between hierarchies of competence and hierarchies of decree. The former being economic and moral in nature, while the latter being political and immoral.

Authority, I believe, is necessary. But not just arbitrary authority; it must be earned. Think about the master and the apprentice. The master has power and influence over his apprentice by virtue of the authority he has earned over the years, honing his craft.

Earned authority is related to merit. In order to become the best version of yourself, you must work on yourself. You must expend time and energy toward building, creating and outcompeting entropy. This manifestation of life that you exhibit in your pursuit of becoming more is my definition of merit and at the macro level is how I believe humans organize within a society most naturally.

To a large degree, it’s the underlying theme of how we’ve organized ourselves over millennia, similar to how capitalism has and always will exist, no matter how much politics you obfuscate it with. Humans need to eat. Competence is the ultimate selector.

The problem is, as always, how much non-meritocratic, arbitrary decree is able to infect the system and cause it to decay by countering this organic self-organization and even reversing the momentum.

Entropy is a bitch, and she’s always there waiting for us to get in our own way. History is littered with stories of meritocratic empires brought down by the cancer of lies; the greatest and most dangerous lies being the economic ones we tell ourselves as we step ever-closer toward starvation and oblivion.

As shown in part three, when the political can influence the economic, you have a system that will diverge from reality inch by inch until it no longer maps onto any territory. It becomes worthless. The empire of meritocracy becomes the empire of lies.

Every great collapse is a function of the deviation from territory with false maps. And false maps are always the result of hubris and willful blindness, i.e., unbounded decrees and doctrines.

That’s where we are today. One big empire of fraud, collapsing in on itself, under the gravity of its own stupidity and falsity.

But…the night is darkest before dawn, so it’s also a time of great possibility. The fork in the road we see before us, with Bitcoin, promises to help us transcend this incessant degeneration into cancerous lies by making the prime economic laws immune to politics.

On a short leash, political ideologies must adapt to the territory and sharpen their approach, or simply cease to exist. There are no alternatives. There is no room for fantasy. There is only correction and adaptation; similar to what life experiences as it evolves. As a result, politics must become smaller and function like a local strategy, not a global doctrine or mandate.

This is how I think about “meritocracy,” and I believe energy money — in our case, Bitcoin — is the necessary prerequisite for moving onto this modality of coexistence.

Meritocratic Feudalism

If Bitcoin moves us more toward greater “meritocratic order,” what might the actual social strata or layering of such a future society look like?

I’ve discussed the idea of meritocratic feudalism on some podcasts in the past, so I will try to elaborate here.

First, let’s clear up some terms and confusions.

Feudalism is generally thought of as a brutish, corrupt, elitist and outdated structure from the medieval past.

But little do the people who brandish it as such realize that we’re living in a technocratic-feudalist world today. They look back upon the medieval ages with disdain and a holier-than-thou sneer, while they perform their role in a modern, more corrupt version of their supposed worst nightmare. It’s embarrassing.

Furthermore, because they’ve not spent a minute thinking about it, and instead just swallowed whatever manure their high school indoctrinators fed them, they’re oblivious to what the actual issues with feudalism were.

It’s not that there are classes in feudalism, but that these classes can become static and stale. That the constituents within each class remain there irrespective of the value they add, their productive capacity, their merit or lack thereof.

Newsflash: That’s the world we live in today!

We have literal zombie companies like IBM, Hertz and Boeing operating purely because the government bailed out their incompetent asses with money stolen from you and I. In doing so, they made classes of modern feudalism even more static and our relative positions on the hierarchy more unfair.

A functional society requires class mobility. In “The UnCommunist Manifesto,” Mark Moss and I discuss dynamic equilibrium as a necessary ingredient for thriving societies. The ability to climb by virtue of merit, and the possibility of falling as a result of mistakes and errors in judgment, are both absolutely critical. It’s what makes the game fair; and the only way a game continues to be played is if it is fair.

There must be an incentive/disincentive structure in social hierarchies that applies to all participants across all classes in order for the system to be structurally coherent and robust. If the rules are different for different players, the game begins to break down.

This is why I’ve proposed “meritocratic feudalism” as an idea. It embodies the organizing principles of hierarchies and classes, alongside the dynamic nature of status, effort, merit and value.

On a Bitcoin standard it seems as if this, and variations of it, are the kind of structures that will emerge.

Private Citadels

While meritocratic feudalism looks at what the internal structure of a particular society may be, each one is encapsulated in a “citadel” of sorts.

This does not necessarily mean a castle with a drawbridge…but, then again, it also does not negate that possibility.

The idea that we’ll have city states, citadels, gated communities and perhaps more broadly, an ephemeral “Bitcoin citadel” that transcends time, place and space (like the Jews have had for millennia) is not only compelling, but quite possible.

The more ephemeral version is in effect how we’ve started and places like Bitcoin Twitter are manifestations of these early citadels. Zones in which like-valued people come together and either agree or berate each other over small differences behind their keyboards may at times seem crazy, but they are integral to the formation of early alliances that may one day open the door to meatspace citadels.

These IRL extensions may start out as simple communities that are built with the intention to go off-grid, becoming ever more self-sufficient and self-reliant, or, they may be more commercial in nature such as the projects the free private cities foundation is involved in, in Honduras.

Either way, the central themes are:

Their emergent and more voluntary nature (especially in cyberspace).
If in meatspace, their privately run nature and local scale.
If the territories are small enough, they may operate through some form of committee led by the wisest and most competent.
If large enough to be cities they may then be governed by their private owners or “CEO kings” in a way similar to how hotels or all-inclusive resorts are today.

And most importantly, the relationships between governor and governed evolves. If you’ve read my work in the past, you’ll be familiar with the following chart from part three of the Jordan Peterson series; “Bitcoin, Bitcoiners and Citadels.”

I know it sounds like a stretch, but if you don’t think it’s possible, you’ve not yet spent the time to appreciate the implications that Bitcoin will have on human micro and macro behavior.

In fact, you may just be a slave to the dogma and propaganda of the current paradigm.

It would appear that the more liberty we lose, the less people are able to imagine how liberty might work. It’s a fascinating thing to behold. …

The idea of privatizing roads or water supplies sounds outlandish, even though we have a long history of both; People even wonder how anyone would be educated in the absence of public schools, as if markets themselves didn’t create in America the world’s most literate society in the 18th and 19th centuries.

This list could go on and on. But the problem is that the capacity to imagine freedom — the very source of life for civilization and humanity itself — is being eroded in our society and culture. The less freedom we have, the less people are able to imagine what freedom feels like, and therefore the less they are willing to fight for its restoration. — Lew Rockwell, 2010

The idea of citadels requires you imagine a world in which idiot governments no longer exist.

I know this can be hard for some of us, either because we’re lacking courage, lacking imagination, lacking intelligence or are just overwhelmed by the constant bombardment of stupidity being spewed out from every screen and speaker around us.

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