This is an opinion editorial by Paloma De la Hoz, a licensed psychotherapist and psychologist with a focus on sex and couples therapy.
“The government cares about you” is a fairytale that many people choose to believe nowadays.
When I started going down the Bitcoin rabbit hole, I learned about the evolution of money and I was surprised to find that the present is the first time in history that money has been purely controlled by the “state.”
I dare to say that most of the population is unaware of what the fiat standard is, let alone the often-fatal consequences it has on the family and the very evolution of human society.
I had always had the feeling that something was wrong with society. Everything is connected, of course, but to discover the cause of what is screwing everything up, just blew my mind.
Generations of people over the past century, especially the most recent, are plagued by what I personally call “fiat behaviors.” Most of them are immersed in an incongruity of life and the way out feels as complex as exiting a maze. Such a waste of human potential.
This article is the result of my personal experience as a psychologist for most of the last decade of my life, alongside my more recent discovery of Bitcoin, the fiat standard (thank you Saifedean) and all that it entails.
I will share my opinions on why I believe that the fiat standard affects the family, couples and sex from a personal, feminine and professional perspective.
1. Young Adults Are Less Motivated To Get Married And Build Families Due To Inflationary Pressures
I remember growing up listening to my parents talk about how everything was always expensive. This came not only from people with humble origins where I grew up, but wealthy people whom I had come across.
When I was just four years old and I was asked what I wanted to be as an adult I always answered, “I want to be a mother.” This thought changed as I got older and by virtue of modern culture I came to develop a “career.” I began to see firsthand the rat race that we’re all entrapped by.
I know a lot of you can relate. Nowadays in particular, it seems as though the cost of living goes up weekly. How can one be motivated to start a family? In fact, I see more young people opting to stay at home with their parents for increasingly long periods of time. This is not normal. Instead of becoming adults, they remain children — albeit overgrown ones.
Misguided Keynesian principles of economics state that postponing current consumption by saving will put workers out of work and cause economic production to stop.
Yet, a hundred years ago, most people paid for their housing, education or marriage with their work or accumulated savings — and the world did not stop. On the contrary, it flourished and formed the basis of the wealth and capital we are eroding today.
When compared to past generations, and in fact, millenia of evolution, we find that modern society is less likely to invest in family because it is decreasingly rational in an economic sense. Family is a low time-preference endeavor, which has little place in a high time-preference society. I would say that this is highly detrimental to everyone, because the family represents the center of society.
It is no coincidence that the dissolution of the family has come as a result of the implementation of the economic precepts of a man who never had any interest in the long term.
2. Due To High Time Preference People Don’t HODL Onto Relationships
I remember when I used to visit my grandfather in the countryside — we had good conversations and he would casually tell me about the situations he and my grandmother were going through as a couple.
He always emphasized how much he loved her and that despite the difficult times he would never trade her for anything.
This thought helped me in my adolescence when I was just beginning to walk the path of life and love.
A phenomenon I see in today’s couples is the ease with which people prefer to end a relationship rather than stay and fix it.
In fact there’s a MTV show “Next” that comes to mind which was basically a person dating and the moment they didn’t like something about that person they would say NEXT!
What a barbaric show.
Just as it is in relationships today — there is a huge tendency, as soon as problems arise, not to try to find a solution but rather to end the relationship. This is a high time-preference behavior.
Mises defines time preference more clearly in “Human Action”:
“The satisfaction of a need in the near future — all other circumstances remaining equal — is preferred to that which can be obtained in the more distant future. Present goods have greater value than future goods.”
To lower one’s time-preference means that you lower the discount you place on the future. That is the basis of all long-term thinking, and therefore behavior.
I believe these high time-preference tendencies are fundamentally caused upstream by broken money. It causes us to mis-value everything else.
If people were really aware of the value of money, they would be much more selective about their consumption and would save a higher portion of their income for the future.
“It is remarkable the culture of conspicuous consumption, of going out to buy as therapy, of having to exchange cheap plastic junk for newer ones…,this culture will have no place in a society with a currency whose value appreciates over time.” — Saifedean Ammous
It does not seem abnormal to me that in a world where money is controlled by the state, who are the official sponsors of “culture,” that the people within that culture seem to also engage in ever-increasingly promiscuous behavior.
Sex and money rule the world but people are living under an illusion about both. I believe this directly affects the way people behave in their intimate relationships. Perhaps today’s hookup culture is something that emerged under the fiat standard?
Since fiat is the worst kind of money we have had in history I am not surprised that under this state of falsehood people also engage in dishonest behavior such as extramarital affairs and infidelity.
It’s a domino effect. Dishonesty starts with what we touch and move with. Dirty money leads to dirty value judgments, which leads to erroneous behavior, bad actors, dishonest people and fake relationships.
The result of having put money and state together is a whole generation of unprincipled people, living double lives because they prefer not to be honest enough with themselves and with the person they have decided to spend the rest of their lives with.
Of course, there are many other factors, but once again I cannot help but wonder if they are all linked.
Nowadays we glorify casual sex — without discussing the energetic consequences — in the same way we promote materialism.
Something is obviously wrong, but most people aren’t ready for this conversation. It requires a lot of inner work to develop a state of self-awareness that allows you to understand and realize this.
If we look at things through an energetic lens, the result of the absence of women at home is the outgrowth of an entire generation of feminine men who have lost their pride and masculinity.
Raised under the shadow of often tyrannically feminist women, they unconsciously drop their masculine frame and develop shadow feminine tendencies. This, by the way, is the primary cause of unhappy, sexless marriages that end in divorce.
From my perspective, this can all be traced back to how inflation has forced women to replace home with work in order to support their families.
In prior centuries, before the advent of the fiat standard, women stayed at home to care for the children and nurture the family. What an incredible gift to the world. Men maintained their dignity and pride by going out to build, create and provide. What a team they were!
“This is where the disconnect lies in the world today.
We have deprioritized the creation of HEALTHY married family units because we view men and women as separate competing entities in an inherently oppressive system instead of two forces working together for a common cause – the raising of children.” — J.Malik
I believe forcing women to leave the house and be absent in the day-to-day raising of children has unleashed generations of unframed men with weak character.
The modern woman is everyday less and less interested in being a mother — she is more focused on being a “career woman.” We highlight the burnt out superboss chick mom as an ideal that women should be striving for. I think women have convinced themselves that all this so-called “female empowerment” is in their favor, but it is the opposite.
In their unfortunate ignorance and blindness they are unaware of their true gifts. They’ve become a product of the parasites and lemmings (as Aleks Svetski would say) running the state. These people care not about women or the family.
Women would be better off if they did not have to worry about making money to support their families. They would have the time and space to flourish. If I were a man I would be accused of being a misogynist, but since I am a woman, a psychologist and sex therapist, I base this opinion on my own experience.
I am a woman and I recognize that my life would be less complicated if I did not have to dedicate a significant portion of it trying to “compete” in the marketplace. I would much rather spend my time raising a family and nurturing my man, my children and if I have the time, my community.
I’m not sure a greater purpose exists, as a woman on this earth.
“We live in a feminist establishment because generations of weak men dropped frame which caused them to lose power in their relationships and over their children. We live in a feminist establishment because women are collectivist and gain power through their coordinated voting bloc. We live in a feminist establishment because fathers have been disempowered by governments who have robbed them of authority over their children by letting women have total psychological control over their upbringing. We live in a feminist establishment because our societies have become promiscuous which has created a large group of both celibates and eternal bachelors who have little positive influence over the women in their society.” — Jerr rreJ
If the state cared about you, or the preservation of the family they would not be devaluing our savings or making it impossible to live by printing money out of thin air, and playing god with our cultures and ways of life.
In Closing
I dream of a society in which we can go back to being closer to our unique, individual essence. My hope is that Bitcoin creates this opportunity.
Svetski has called Bitcoin “Responsibility go up technology” because it is fundamentally a kind of money in which responsibility must be borne by the user. Not your keys, not your coins. This is not only present at the level of the individual, but all the way up through larger organizations (no bailouts).
By upgrading to responsible, sound money, I think we change the behaviors of people so that they’re once more in line with their core nature.
Masculine framed men may once again lead, and women in their feminine will nurture and bring forth color and life to the world.
This is a guest post by Paloma De la Hoz. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc. or Bitcoin Magazine.