Bitcoin is Hope (Part 3)
Why saving in honest money is the only way to restore hope for a fallen world.
The Way of Hope
Hope — the ultimate motivational emotion — propels each of us forward, and indicates when we veer off of the optimal path to our value-mapped destination. All action is future-oriented and therefore speculative by nature, requiring faith in a perceptual model of an unknowable future. When we take action, and the results play out in a way consistent with our intentions, then we experience positive emotions, and are motivated to move further forward by the hope of experiencing more good feelings. In this way, goal achievement reinforces our patterns of action. Contrarily, when our actions cause consequences divorced from our goals, we experience negative emotions, and are motivated to change course by the hope of avoiding more bad feelings. Failure gives us pause to reconsider our trajectory through lived experience, and the systems of value mapping us through life. In human action: pleasure is our preacher, and pain is our teacher. Or, to cite the stellar lyrics of Muse:
“Our hopes and expectations. Black holes and revelations.”
Values determine not only where we focus our attention, but also how we filter our perceptions. Goals, by definition, are the valued ends of games we play. In the Selective Attention Experiment, scientists proved that focused attention can blind us to most other aspects of being when engaged in goal-directed action. This means that our values not only tell us where to look, but also partially determine what we see. In any given situation, if you’re feeling hopeless or lost, you could be the victim of bad circumstances, or you may just be blind to the pathway forward due to a disvaluation of goals, since goal-setting in part determines your perceptions. Attention is directed and refracted through the circuity of our values, an intersubjective reality which we communicate with humanity’s most important tool—money.
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Money is a tool of value expression: it is used to denominate market exchange values (prices) and is a medium by which we communicate interpersonal values. When you decide a good or service is sufficiently valuable relative to its current price, you buy it, and the market responds by producing more of what you purchase or causing its price to rise (or both). Through buying, the interpersonal values and action patterns of producers you buy from are energized, since your actions help achieve their goal of revenue generation. Selling, of course, causes the reverse: declining prices, less production, or a general devitalization of producer values and action patterns (or all three). In this way, trade reshapes the relevance of elements in the world around us.
Reality: A Realm of Relevance
Most members of Western Civilization conceive the world from a materialist viewpoint, yet the reality of human experience is perhaps best understood as a realm of relevance. Although our surroundings are composed of matter, we perceive them as what matters in the sequences of our goal-directed actions. When we press the accelerator on an automobile and it moves forward, knowledge of its inner-workings are irrelevant to our goal of transportation. But when the vehicle has a mechanical failure, its inner-workings become quite relevant, since they now impede our goal of forward motion. The goal of innovation and civilization, then, is to make the operations critical to want-satisfaction less relevant to our active awareness, thereby freeing up our limited attention spans to focus on ever-more valuable aims. As Alfred North Whitehead poetically elaborated this pathway toward civilization:
“It is a profoundly erroneous truism repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they’re making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking about what we’re doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.”
Civilization, to be sustainable, must be maximally free from compulsion. Control over the primary economic frame of reference — money — means central banks can compulsively reshape the relevance of objects for players in the socioeconomic landscape. As a medium through which mankind conveys value, money is a motivational and perceptual tool penultimate to our own five senses.
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When someone rests their drink on a table, it is a tool to them. At the same time, that same table can be an obstacle to someone being paid to jump over it. Objects only matter in context of our goal-directed actions. Therefore, a compulsory command over money is the power to (at least somewhat) reconfigure relevance within the minds of human beings and rewrite history. As Mises explains in his Magnum Opus Human Action:
“The course of history is determined by the actions of individuals and by the effects of these actions. The actions are determined by value judgements of the acting individuals, i.e., the ends which they were eager to attain, and by the means which they applied for the attainment of these ends.”
Since attainment of money is such a major goal in life (private property rights are a territorial imperative), control over money means central banks possess the power to twist our valuations, perceptions, and goal orientations. Monopolized money mutilates our sense of meaning. Cowering to centralized control over money forfeits all hope of humanity forming a free civilization.
In Part 4, we move into The Destabilization of Civilization by fiat…
Thank you for reading Bitcoin is Hope (Part 3).
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Bitcoin is Hope (Part 3)
Excellent essay series. thank you !
"... requiring faith in a perceptual model of an unknowable future" -
I would say also including faith in a perceptual model of a future self that has actually attained the goal we set. This might be the primary objective, to become the person who has achieved the goal, instead of the person we are now, who has not. This presupposes a permanent change in our state of being, - "getting to a better state" as the State Farm commercial goes... In the words of Shakespeare - "It hath been taught us from the primal state, That he which is was wish'd until he were..." Maxwell Maltz addressed this phenomenon in his work with plastic surgery patients, commenting substantively in Psycho Cybernetics that even a change for the better in physical characteristics did not necessarily create a change in the patients state of being. In the words of Bashar, "circumstances don't matter, only state of being matters, what state of being do I prefer?"