US culture is an incubator of ‘extrinsic values’. Nobody embodies them like the Republican frontrunner
Many explanations are proposed for the continued rise of Donald Trump, and the steadfastness of his support, even as the outrages and criminal charges pile up. Some of these explanations are powerful. But there is one I have seen mentioned nowhere, which could, I believe, be the most important: Trump is king of the extrinsics.
Some psychologists believe our values tend to cluster around certain poles, described as “intrinsic” and “extrinsic”. People with a strong set of intrinsic values are inclined towards empathy, intimacy and self-acceptance. They tend to be open to challenge and change, interested in universal rights and equality, and protective of other people and the living world.
People at the extrinsic end of the spectrum are more attracted to prestige, status, image, fame, power and wealth. They are strongly motivated by the prospect of individual reward and praise. They are more likely to objectify and exploit other people, to behave rudely and aggressively and to dismiss social and environmental impacts. They have little interest in cooperation or community. People with a strong set of extrinsic values are more likely to suffer from frustration, dissatisfaction, stress, anxiety, anger and compulsive behaviour.
I’m getting saying to “move on” from that to say “I’m not proposing we scrap everything and start from fresh, I’m assuming the context we live in with our current government and political structure having some sense of legitimacy, now let’s explain why these parties behave the way they do within that context”. There are obviously wider discussions to be had, I was just trying to limit context.
Our method of voting has a lot to do with it, ranked choice, STAR, or other voting methods can solve a lot of problems with our governance and political system. Not all of them, but some. All the radical alternatives I’ve seen proposed to our current economic and political system are either untested or failed spectacularly in the past, often because they don’t have good ways to handle bad actors. Not that they can’t succeed in the future, just that I’m a little skeptical of trying them again without some major revisions. I’m all for experimentation though, our systems have to continue to grow and change, it is very unlikely that any system at any given point in time is the best system humanity could ever come up with. It’s easy to talk about “revolution” and critique the current system, but most proposals for how to do that involve a lot of blood and instability that could be avoided if we can intelligently use the levers of power available to us currently. Yes, there are incentives which prevent us from adequately using those levers of power (such as the way money influences elections), but they are not un-overcomeable. Most people don’t vote, if those non-voters voted, especially outside of a two party context but even within it, and particularly if they voted in the primaries, our political landscape would look a lot different. If people never participate in primaries, then yes, we will always get a choice between two candidates chosen by the party elite. But, if MAGA world can get their crazy sauce guy to be the nominee, certainly liberals and leftists can nominate somebody equally crazy. Right? They won’t though. Because the people who would nominate somebody who isn’t milquetoast mostly sit home during primaries and local elections. I’ve been one of those people, I get it, the whole game is rigged, why play right?
You are right to point out that the basic incentives of our political system produce bad outcomes, including the uselessness of the democrats. Changing the voting system is one way to fix that, that’s some that can be done within our current political structure. Another way to fix those kinds of base incentives is by adopting new economic systems that have rules which are not enforced by people or trusted parties. If we eliminate the need to trust people to implement rules, we can solve a lot of problems. This is, imo, one of the main failings of communism. It put the power of the government and the market in the hands of the state with few roadblocks for bad actors. We needed to trust somebody to manage the state and the market, which concentrated immense power in one place. At least capitalism splits the power between the two, kinda.
Regarding changing incentives, for example, there is a trend in capitalism for capital to aggregate into monopolies. We rely on government (a trusted party) to prevent that, but they are subject to regulatory capture and aren’t particularly effective. If the entire US economy used a blockchain instead of the government for this role, a rule could be enforced such as “once you have accumulated a billion dollars, congratulations, now you can’t accumulate any more” or things like universal income could be baked in at the protocol level. A 2% tax is levied on all transactions that goes into a pot, and once a year that tax is distributed evenly to all people who have the currency. No party needs to be trusted to do that, it just happens automatically. Just like every 10 minutes a new block is added to the Bitcoin blockchain and that’s gonna keep happening forever no matter what your national government has to say about it. Blockchain technology can be decentralized, trustless, and immune to nation-state level attacks. You may be a rich and powerful person who is used to getting their way in the legal or political system, but you are still bound by the same laws of physics and math as the rest of us. That’s a powerful thing.
The nice thing about using blockchain technology is that:
Blockchain is mostly talked about in popular culture as it relates to finance, investing, scams, etc but really what Satoshi did (the author of the Bitcoin whitepaper and software) was solve a problem humanity has had for millennia: how do you administer a system where you can’t trust the parties who participate in it and where you can’t select a single party or party(s) to administer it properly? Having an answer to that question has implications way beyond the minting of currency. Ultimately, the more systems we can build that are based on code instead of trusting individuals or groups of people to ‘do the right thing’, the less we will even need government as a structure.
So, personally, that’s where I am focusing my efforts these days. I believe this kind of technology has the capacity to change human society in profound and important ways and undo many of the injustices of our current economic and political systems. Much of it needs time to mature, but the framework has been put out there and now people just need to build on top of it.
Why do you think blockchain would be immune from regulatory capture? Hasn’t the general story of crypto-adjacent items thus far been one of immense gains for the few and immense losses for the many?
And isn’t the historical rule of statistics/maths such that it is clear that these “objective” measures are actually very easy for the powerful to manipulate for their own ends? Lying with statistics is very easy to do, for example.
What prevents Peter Thiel-types from framing and shaping the code that governs whatever blockchain-connected system emerges? And what prevents Cambridge Analytica type entities from manipulating public opinion such that only the “right” kind (the evil kind) of blockchain is the one that “spontaneously” becomes the natural choice of the grassroots?
The error of the Leninists was, among other things, thinking that because they had an exceptional understanding of how historical economic structures have been controlled and shaped by the powerful that they, therefore, would themselves be able to use this knowledge to create a new type of state that was exempt from these failings. That obviously did not occur. And I fear that the STEM types who understand blockchain, and who generally have sincerely good intentions, will similarly be blindsided by the realities and insurmountable corrosive strength of global capital
Which doesn’t mean that no better world is possible - it is. It just means that I don’t think we can trust a computer code to impartially distribute a truly moral justice throughout the country/world. Because the oligarchs will seize and corrode such a code and subvert it to serve their own ends; it doesn’t matter how isolated and untouchable such a blockchain is - if it can be made then it can be remade. And I don’t know how you stop them from doing that given that their wealth gives them practically unlimited power
Regulatory capture requires:
Decentralized blockchains don’t have the first requirement there. There is no trusted party to influence. Blockchains are trustless systems, in order to make them do something they are not designed to do, you have to influence not just one people or ten people, but at least half the people in that system, and even then, there are limits on what they can do because the people you didn’t influence are still running the old version of the software and will simply ignore whatever your influenced people are doing since it isn’t valid network activity. You can take your military and go around the world and hold guns to people’s head, but unless you hold a gun to all the people’s heads all the time, you can’t make the blockchain do anything it wasn’t designed to do. The term for this is a 51% attack and, at least in the Bitcoin ecosystem, the only thing you could achieve is a double-spend (spend the same BTC twice). You can’t spend money that isn’t yours, because that’s an invalid transaction and will just be rejected out of hand by the older non-malicious version of the software.
That is one way to look at it. There are certainly many grifts and scams in the crypto world, just like there are elsewhere outside of crypto. They’re bad. On the contrary, Bitcoin, for example, has faithfully kept to it monetary policy and all its promises now for 15 years running 24/7 365 without a single hack or hour of downtime. It has resisted attacks from nation-state actors. This is powerful stuff. Crypto doesn’t have to have a “rich get richer” outcome, it can also be a tool to lift people out of poverty and give them autonomy, particularly the billions of people, with a B, who lack access to stable banking infrastructure or who have national currencies so corrupt they are basically useless and as a result, they have no ability to save money outside of the day’s earnings. One other way this is true is that in a fiat economy the government prints money, right? The US aims for 2-3% inflation, this is its economic policy. Every time they print money, they devalue your dollar because those new dollars go to somewhere else. Your dollar is like a share in the US economy that went through a stock split, but instead of ending up with two dollars, you still have one and somebody got the other one. This is theft on a massive scale, not only from US citizens, but it’s how we tax the global south and enforce US imperialism abroad. Our system of debt, regulated through institutions like the world bank, is all based on the dollar. But the economy is also growing right? So your dollar is becoming more valuable even if it’s a smaller share of the total number of dollars? Even if those things even out (which they don’t, the inflation rate is deliberately set higher than this), you are still having the difference in that value stolen from you. With Bitcoin, if you own 1BTC, you will always have 1BTC, and your share that represents of ALL BTC will stay the same because Bitcoin has a fixed supply. So when Bitcoin’s economy grows, those benefits aren’t given to whoever is operating the money printer, they are given to whoever holds Bitcoin. Same as when the economy shrinks. That, out the gate, is a more equitable system than fiat currency.
Bitcoin isn’t just a graph somebody drew. It’s not located in a single place where somebody can just go in and draw a new line. It’s decentralized, all over the globe, running according to a set of rules that can’t be broken. Many have tried, the best hackers and brightest minds in the world have tried, it’s not doable. This is because Bitcoin’s protocol is based on cryptographic protocols which are as real as temperature or anything else physical. They are based on splitting things up into a mathematical space where trying every possible combination to break them would cost much more than the reward for doing so. As an example, in Bitcoin the way you spend it is by broadcasting a transaction to the network which is signed by your “private key” it looks like “I, Bob, want to send 1BTC to Alice - Signed, Bob”. The private key is a number, it gets plugged into a math equation. If you don’t have that number, you can’t sign the transaction, so your transaction won’t be valid, no nodes will relay it, and it never makes it into the blockchain. The money doesn’t move. This means if you have the private key, you can spend the money, if you don’t, you cant. But wait, couldn’t you just guess the number? No. The number space you would need to go through is so vast that it’s difficult to wrap your head around. If every computer on earth suddenly dedicated itself to guessing this number, they would all do so for tens of thousands of years before they ever got the correct one. That’s what people are talking about when they say Bitcoin is based on math and physics. It’s not just hyperbole.
If Peter or anybody else releases a new Bitcoin client, they have to convince everybody else in the world who uses Bitcoin to use it. That’s what prevents it. Thousands of eyes of some of the world’s smartest coders looking over it, and yes, investments banks who need the Bitcoin protocol to remain stable and usable. You yourself can look at the code if you want, it’s all public. In this way, blockchain technology is truly democratic. People can choose which blockchains to interact with, and even within those blockchains, which part of the protocol they want to follow. Is there some layer between the programmer and the user? Of course. Users have to understand what choice they are even making. Why should I use Litecoin instead of Bitcoin? Somebody has to communicate those differences for people to understand them. This is a problem in all political/legal/economic systems to some degree. Which gets us to your next question.
This is absolutely a threat, you are 100% spot on here. One key problem that blockchain can potentially solve, and I will skip over for now, is the centralization of social media platforms. Nobody should have the power to put the thumb on the scale that hard. But back to your question: Blockchain technology, just as it can be used for good, can be used for evil. CBDC (Central Bank Digital Currencies) are one of these kinds of threats. They would enable the government to see every transaction you to, in real time, and be able to block or intercept transactions at their whim. They also create a massive repository of everybody’s financial data, ripe for hackers. And unlike decentralized systems like Bitcoin, they have central points of failure, and hackers can exploit them.
I would argue many nation states and other actors are indeed doing these kinds of PR campaigns right now. There are some very powerful people, like banks, who benefit from their rent-seeking behaviour and ability to print money without consequence, they do not want to see Bitcoin become the dominant global currency. Convincing people not to use Bitcoin is dollar-for-dollar the most effective way to attack the Bitcoin network. Nonetheless, year after year, on average, if you draw a trend line, Bitcoin continues to grow despite these efforts. It doesn’t matter how you measure it: number of nodes, total market cap, liquidity locked in lightning, etc. I’m sure you have seen your share of headlines declaring that Bitcoin is finally dead, but nonetheless each year it is not. And while the value of a bitcoin, how much somebody will pay for it, will fluctuate with time, so long as the internet exists at at least a few computers are running the code, you will still always have 1 BTC and you will still be able to transfer it just as Bitcoin has promised you.
You may very well be right about this, only the future can tell.
Their wealth doesn’t give them power in the Bitcoin system because math and physics, I hope you can see that now that it’s been explained a bit more. We can’t trust computer code you are right, but we can trust networks of people who write, review, and run that code. At least, we can trust them in so far as we can trust anybody to do anything.
That’s all very thorough, thank you.
But isn’t the obvious “solution” to this (from a global elite perspective) to criminalize and aggressively prosecute any usage at all of non-governmentally approved bitcoin/blockchain? Including by criminalizing even visiting sites remotely related to it? Which would be successful given that the average person doesn’t even use a VPN
The way to prevent power from being lost to this new type of system seems to be to create a government approved option, with all of the obvious govt/billionaire approved backdoors within it. And then to legally, socially, and culturally stigmatize the “actual” blockchain networks to make them equivalent to child pornography in the minds of the public. Which has already started to some extent by arguing to the public that the only reason you’d need bitcoin is if you’re trying to buy heroin or child pornography - or products/services that are even worse. Just seems like the West etc could meaningfully kill this tomorrow if they devoted resources to it. The war on drugs didn’t work but the war on crypto seems like it could because of the knowledge required to even participate at an entry level.
I agree that this hasn’t been done yet, and maybe it won’t ever be. But it seems plausible enough to prevent me from seeing this as remotely an inevitability. It all does make me think that perhaps I should really meaningfully invest in BTC or its equivalents though
You are right again! Yes and no. Yes because this is something they can try, no because other nation states have tried (like China) to ban bitcoin with not much success. They may reduce the bitcoin activity in their country, but they can’t eliminate it, and Bitcoin will continue to grow. At some point in Bitcoin’s growth, cutting your country off from it is like putting your own country under sanctions. The Bitcoin Economy is already larger than many countries. Mass censorship in general works for a while but is not successful long-term. The knowledge to fully understand the Bitcoin protocol does take some time to learn, the knowledge to use Bitcoin is no more than the knowledge to use Venmo or our existing banking system.
Let’s imagine for a moment that the US government decides to totally ban all citizens from participating in Bitcoin and all VPNs and all ways of accessing it. Somehow, they have gotten all of congress, many of whom own Bitcoin, to buy into this plan. They are talking about not just infringing on people’s freedom, they are talking about essentially seizing or blocking millions of Americans from accessing something they own. Could they do it? Perhaps. But it’s going to get difficult and contentious quickly. To be effective at any level, a national firewall is going to end up blocking more than just Bitcoin. That’s collateral damage that impact the ability to engage with international markets. Plus, nationalizing and seizing assets is not a good look on the international market, ask Russia. And even assuming the US can implement the great firewall of China on its own soil, it doesn’t stop Bitcoin from working. It doesn’t stop the network from making new blocks and including transactions. It doesn’t stop the rest of the world from using it. All you need to continue to access your BTC is a single working connection to the unfiltered internet. Where there is supply and demand to be met, the market will find a way, even in states with insanely controlled markets. Plus, many major crypto exchanges are located in the US. That’s a huge potential money maker, just like a stock exchange. And will the US want to miss out on all that, plus whatever global trade which is denominated in Bitcoin? We will still be using some slow legacy system like SWIFT or our new CBDC which other countries may or may not want to use? They already don’t want to use the dollar, the BRICS countries are really trying (unsuccessfully) to make something else the globally dominant currency. The problem is none of them can trust each other. Awkward part is that this is the exact problem Bitcoin solves, they just don’t realize it, outside of a small handful of small countries.
The US unveiled the biggest package of sanctions it ever made against Russia. The EU did too. And yet it can’t even get people to stop buying Russian oil. Could the US throw a tantrum and fight Bitcoin? Sure. But in the long run, I think they’d lose, and their markets and politicians are already pretty invested in it. And their regulatory agencies have cleared the way for Bitcoin specifically over other cryptos saying it’s definitely not classified as a security. The US was probably going to lose their status as currency hegemon eventually, we really only gained that position because everybody else was blown up after the world wars. We have people in the presidential primaries, at least on the republican side, saying they will defend people’s right to use cryptocurrency and fight CBDCs, some states have even passed laws to that effect. We have multi-million dollar bipartisan PACs funding pro-bitcoin candidates. Hell, you can pay your taxes in some states with Bitcoin. The horse is out of the barn. Bitcoin’s market cap is $85 billion, it has passed the 1 trillion mark before. 85 billion puts it in the top 25 countries by GDP, right next to Switzerland. And remember that with Bitcoin’s market cap we are talking about just the value of the currency itself, whereas GDP is the value of all trade in and out of a country. That’s a higher market cap than the GDP of Sweden, Norway, Ireland, Israel, Vietnam you get the picture. And every year BTCs position gets stronger and the total transaction volume grows. And remember, this is just Bitcoin’s market cap, the other coins have significant market pull, use case, and potential as well, though most are bullshit :).
But that’s just speculation and opinion, who really knows what would happen. You are right that the future is not guaranteed. It’s not guaranteed for Bitcoin, it’s not guaranteed for the environment, it’s not guaranteed for the dollar. Bitcoin’s guarantees that the math it is based on stay true are essentially infallible. The question mark for BTC is “will people continue to adopt and use this?”. The guarantees made by central banks and governments? They basically boil down to “trust me bro”.