Where things get uncomfortable
In the last article, I explained how Blockchain could deliver a dead man switch innovation that for the first time in history could speak truth to power by making sure killing someone no longer guarantees their silence.
It seems trivial and perhaps not that important, but history is littered with death bed revelations of wrongdoing, people being killed for speaking out, chased down, intimidated into silence, or just simply killed to suppress the truth.
Silas Soule, the soldier who refused to participate in the Sand Creek massacre of Native Americans in 1864, was one of the early ‘whistle blowers’ in American history. He was stabbed to death downtown Denver a year later.
Gary Webb, a journalist who exposed the CIA’s cocaine importation in exchange for weapons and money was later found shot twice in the head, a murder the government ruled a suicide.
Edward Snowden, was chased across the world for revealing U.S. Government illegal activities to Americans and to this day is still called a ‘traitor’ by some politicians.
But with a decentralized dead man switch, one designed to prevent even the owner from eliminating the information, then it is impossible for a government to stop the release of information that is locked up. It can’t attack the blockchain, it can’t attack the encryption, it can’t attack the nodes that hold the information, it can’t force the early decryption to find out what information has been locked and it can’t suppress the publication of the data once the owner has failed to check-in. Now of course, the designs may vary, and the security guarantees may change.
But if you were in possession of evidence of treachery, corruption or crimes, would you trust a company to have any control over whether your dead man switch can function properly ?
Janet Ossebaard, Jamal Khashoggi, Seth Rich, Gary Webb and many others paid the ultimate price, even after the information was revealed. In other words, while the psychopaths care to prevent their secrets exposed, they also want to scare anyone who might come in possession of their secrets by making examples of the ones they can identify. Dismembering Jamal Khashoggi was on the surface just an attempt to conceal the murder, but it’s hard to believe they didn’t think someone would figure out what happened. These are not teenage amateur killers on Methamphetamine.
This was a message, intended to scare everyone who might think of criticizing the regime, let alone leak its secrets.
The asymmetry we talked about in the last article, the fact psychopaths can kill without remorse but it’s much harder for the rest of us, manifests itself in our relationship with the State due to the fact that it has developed the ability to provide a refuge of opportunities for the psychopaths who don’t mind cutting people in half, while at the same time convincing a majority of people of its legitimacy, from early childhood in its indoctrination centers they call public schools.
I know this is a sacred cow for many and in their eyes I’m committing blasphemy, but that’s exactly the point I was getting to: the State, for many transforms into deity that cannot do wrong, can answer all your wishes and can elevate or damn anyone it chooses, whose enforcers become martyrs if they are harmed, unless of course the State demanded it first, in which case it’s just sacrifice. The cult comes with a full array of dignified positions, symbols to revere and rituals to follow, angels and demons. Above all, like most gods there can be no other and those who worship from the ever increasing array of options available, better do so quietly and not make waves, compete for attention, encourage others to disobey or worse, try to resist.
In the last article, I explained how Blockchain could deliver a dead man switch innovation that for the first time in history could speak truth to power by making sure killing someone no longer guarantees their silence.
It seems trivial and perhaps not that important, but history is littered with death bed revelations of wrongdoing, people being killed for speaking out, chased down, intimidated into silence, or just simply killed to suppress the truth.
Silas Soule, the soldier who refused to participate in the Sand Creek massacre of Native Americans in 1864, was one of the early ‘whistle blowers’ in American history. He was stabbed to death downtown Denver a year later.
Gary Webb, a journalist who exposed the CIA’s cocaine importation in exchange for weapons and money was later found shot twice in the head, a murder the government ruled a suicide.
Edward Snowden, was chased across the world for revealing U.S. Government illegal activities to Americans and to this day is still called a ‘traitor’ by some politicians.
But with a decentralized dead man switch, one designed to prevent even the owner from eliminating the information, then it is impossible for a government to stop the release of information that is locked up. It can’t attack the blockchain, it can’t attack the encryption, it can’t attack the nodes that hold the information, it can’t force the early decryption to find out what information has been locked and it can’t suppress the publication of the data once the owner has failed to check-in. Now of course, the designs may vary, and the security guarantees may change.
But if you were in possession of evidence of treachery, corruption or crimes, would you trust a company to have any control over whether your dead man switch can function properly ?
Janet Ossebaard, Jamal Khashoggi, Seth Rich, Gary Webb and many others paid the ultimate price, even after the information was revealed. In other words, while the psychopaths care to prevent their secrets exposed, they also want to scare anyone who might come in possession of their secrets by making examples of the ones they can identify. Dismembering Jamal Khashoggi was on the surface just an attempt to conceal the murder, but it’s hard to believe they didn’t think someone would figure out what happened. These are not teenage amateur killers on Methamphetamine.
This was a message, intended to scare everyone who might think of criticizing the regime, let alone leak its secrets.
The asymmetry we talked about in the last article, the fact psychopaths can kill without remorse but it’s much harder for the rest of us, manifests itself in our relationship with the State due to the fact that it has developed the ability to provide a refuge of opportunities for the psychopaths who don’t mind cutting people in half, while at the same time convincing a majority of people of its legitimacy, from early childhood in its indoctrination centers they call public schools.
I know this is a sacred cow for many and in their eyes I’m committing blasphemy, but that’s exactly the point I was getting to: the State, for many transforms into deity that cannot do wrong, can answer all your wishes and can elevate or damn anyone it chooses, whose enforcers become martyrs if they are harmed, unless of course the State demanded it first, in which case it’s just sacrifice. The cult comes with a full array of dignified positions, symbols to revere and rituals to follow, angels and demons. Above all, like most gods there can be no other and those who worship from the ever increasing array of options available, better do so quietly and not make waves, compete for attention, encourage others to disobey or worse, try to resist.
This isn’t my idea of course, this is what Larken Rose has elaborated in his book The Most Dangerous Superstition, and later his movie The Jones Plantation .
Once you understand this, you start seeing things for what they really are as the scam is exposed. I can also recommend The Art of Liberty’s Etienne de La Boetie2 ‘s coffee-table book To See the Cage is To Leave It in which all the tricks are exposed.
Why these tricks work, of course goes back to the pillar of charisma identified by Graeber and Wengrow in The Dawn of Everything. Larken Rose’s categorization of Government as a cult may seem extreme, but he comes after a long line of philosophers who asked questions of morality regarding most aspect of life when organized around an authority, from Thomas Aquinas, to Lysander Spooner (No Treason: The constitution of No Authority) Michael Huemer (The problem of Political Authority) just in the West and many others in Russia, China, India and so on.
The fact you’ve probably never heard of them makes my earlier point about public schooling.
With a combination of Secrecy and Charisma, only two of the pillars, large organized government (secular or not, does that really mean anything) can last a very long time. Eventually, without the third pillar of Violence they fall.
But since the invention of ‘legitimate’ government, with the manufactured consent of the governed, then violence used for enforcement becomes ‘necessary’, ‘legitimate’, a collective good to be rationed out by our high priests in suit and tie.
And rations we get.
You might take to the streets to demand a bigger ration of justice, welfare or transparency, only to be pepper sprayed by the praetorian guard in armored vehicles. Only when your demands reinforce the stronghold on power, does it even achieve ‘results’.
The monopoly on violence does not hesitate to wield its weapons against you.
In fact, it almost always punishes crimes against itself far more severely than crimes against actual victims. Once you understand this, all the outrageous rulings coming out of European countries, those in which rapists of young, often minor, women get very light sentences while the citizens guilty of merely criticizing these injustices online get severe punishment sentences, start making sense.
The regimes have decided on policy and your opinion gets in the way. The rapes don’t get in the way of anything, in fact they subliminally remind you of your lower status.
Clearly, making sure governments cannot suppress the truth and ensuring it will come out is a good thing.
But it’s graffiti. If the people seeing it cannot understand it, if they have been so indoctrinated they ignore it, or if they just vote harder for one of the candidates the regime has approved in advance, or if they simply take to the streets in an act of no consequence, of virtue signaling performance, then it’s a dud.
And so it is for the release of the Epstein files and the dozen pedophile clients who were named inside. Epstein died in 2019, during Trump’s first term. It’s not difficult to understand that 7 years later, none of his customers have been arrested because the system protects them. As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn famously said:
“We know that they are lying, they know that they are lying, they even know that we know they are lying, we also know that they know we know they are lying too, they of course know that we certainly know they know we know they are lying too as well, but they are still lying.”
The people who have captured the monopoly on violence cannot be stopped by free speech alone, not by demonstrations or lawsuits, not by elections or guerilla journalism.
The people on the sidelines have lost the courage to tar and feather their legislators, and the police will soon have AI powered weapons that would make Stalin envious, removing any hope that pitchforks could once deliver.
The psychopaths have managed to ‘boil the frog’ one loss of freedom at a time, until the cost of jumping out, pushing back and risking rebellion is greater than the cost of accepting our servitude.
In the next article, I’ll discuss how the world has traditionally handled risk.
Because that’s where things will get really interesting.
