*In this multi-part special edition of The Freedom Analects, we will be featuring the excellent written work of author John Vallis titled “Money Messiah: God, Bitcoin, and The Evolution of Consciousness.” This essay beautifully depicts the deeper aspects of value and money, their indispensability to human action, and demonstrates why corrupt money is such a destructive force. John’s original work is available in its entirety here.
Bitcoin is Hope
Why was Christ’s example, real or narrative, so powerful?
Because it showed how each individual could transcend their suffering, and foster harmonious cooperation with others. It revealed the path to liberation, by bringing the ideal (or most truthful principles) into light, and thereby making more explicit ‘proper aim’.
It represented a greater perception of the ‘truth’, which helped to transcend ‘illusion’, and it produced one of the most transformative ideas that can possess a human being — HOPE — the knowledge that more goodness can and will emerge, and that the degree to which it does so is determined by the actions of each individual.
This is the very hope that bitcoin is motivating in so many bitcoiners — that through accepting it’s rules (and embodying its principles), and engaging with them properly, a far better life for themselves, and for everyone else, is possible.
Such a belief, or vision, not only pulls us more enthusiastically and energetically forward, toward actualizing such a future, but greatly enriches the process of doing so. This occurs because the value and meaning ascribed to the future being sought, directly determines the salience and vibrance of the present environment, bringing it to life with potentially useful information, to be used for the more expedient or efficient movement toward it.
The ‘ordering principle’, whether found in Christ, the Lapis, or any of a number of other representations throughout history, is the information which permits the closest union possible with the truth of reality — it is the greatest ‘access to god’. It permits optimal congruence with the constituent components of that reality — via the proper ordering and interaction of all value hierarchies — and fosters maximal individual liberation and social harmony.
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That is, it’s:
“The truthful information that rectifies pathological hierarchies, to confront the chaos of being itself, and generate habitable order.”
It seems possible to me that bitcoin may very well be the next stage in the evolution of this idea — of the truth which expands our access to the generative forces of reality — or what might also be called, the ‘divine’.
A Messiah for the Digital Age
Is this what Eliade meant by a change in the ‘ontology’ of the age — an expansion of the ‘spiritual’ dimension of reality?
This seems to me to be a recurring theme in the history of human civilization — religion — the continual enterprise of identifying the most meaningful or truthful principles, and updating them periodically, or at least their representation, as the landscape of meaning evolves.
Perhaps this occurs because as technology changes, relatively novel or complex environments for human action emerge, and the ‘world of meaning’ expands, necessitating new modes or methods of relating to it optimally.
Eliade explains the influence of such a change in a previous era:
“..the discovery of metals and the progress of metallurgy radically modified the human mode of being in the universe. Not only did the manipulation of metals contribute considerably to man’s conquest of the material world; it also changed his world of meaning. The metals opened for him a new mythological and religious universe. A similar, though even more radical, modification was effectuated through the discovery of agriculture. I cite this example because it better illustrates what I mean by saying that an important technological discovery ‘opens’ for man a new spiritual world. It is useless to insist on the revolutionary character of the discovery of agriculture and on its economic, technological, and social consequences. They are evident, and are laboriously repeated in all books and textbooks on the subject. But no less important are the ‘spiritual’ consequences of the discovery of agriculture. A new world of meaning was grasped through agricultural work. A number of analogies and homologies suggested themselves naturally: for instance, the relations between women, field, sexual life, human fertility, agriculture, lunar phases, death and rebirth etc. The early farmer expressed his specific mode of being in the world through plant symbolism and in vegetal terminology — and we will conserve something of this archaic heritage in our language, allegory, and symbolism….The symbologies, mythologies, and rituals accompanying these technological discoveries played a no less important role in shaping post-neolithic man than did the empirical discoveries themselves.”
If true, what should we expect to be the impact of the emerging ‘digital world’ in our current time?
Culture has always been a kind of ‘externalization’ of our minds, whereby we manifest (in symbol or in form) the things of greatest desire, value, meaning, pleasure etc. The emergence of digital worlds, and the pace of the feedback loop which fosters their development, has allowed us to do that in a more immediate and ‘high-resolution’ manner than ever before.
Of course, there are no hard lines of demarkation between the digital and ‘physical’ worlds, at least as far as our consciousness is concerned. They both contain meaning, value, information, possibility, potential, novelty etc, and our brain doesn’t treat them as entirely separate. Instead, it simply approaches or addresses what it confronts, and does what it normally does — observes signal, pushes it through a ‘value framework’, and then responds.
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The parameters and ‘laws’ of the digital world are far less rigid than those in the ‘real world’, and as such, the ways in which it can appeal to us, draw us in, reflect back to us, and allow for the ‘expansion of ourselves’ into it (at least our conscious experience), are seemingly much greater.
It is a genuinely new world, limited only by our own imagination — for better or worse.
If Eliade is right, would we not expect similar ‘god like’ symbology to emerge in such an environment? Or rather would not such an environment, and the expanded meaning which emerges from it, be used to establish more coherent relationships with ourselves, each other, ‘reality’, and the principles which most animate or optimize all of them? Should we not expect the emergence there, of things which manifest the principles that connect our ‘experience of reality’ at the deepest levels, but which take a form or representation suitable for that particular ‘world of meaning’, and the possibilities therein?
Put another way, if reality does indeed, as the alchemists and several others have asserted, have a ‘fractal’ architecture or structure, in which every pattern or system is ultimately nested with perfect congruence within another, would we not expect those connections — and what makes them ‘fit’, so to speak — to necessarily be established and maintained through some common or fundamental principle(s), which most promote the generation of all ‘order’, and therefore permeate every layer of it? Are these the necessary principles for any sufficiently complex system to ‘work’ or ‘survive’ long-term?
What’s more, if humans are now imbued with even greater world-creating, ‘god-like’ powers, is it not possible, or perhaps unavoidable, that theses principles, as far as we can access or understand them, would eventually emerge symbolically, or even be ‘built-in’ to such worlds, subconsciously or not?
Perhaps.
In Part 16, we will return to the place where it all began: The Word…
Thank you for reading Money Messiah (Part 15).
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Money Messiah (Part 15)