Image Credit: By Source, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=25210935
(Some days, you just need to hack some prophets to pieces.)
“Blockchain will decentralize everything. The balance of power will shift back to the people, as blockchain is increasingly adopted into our society,” Andrew excitedly claims.
“Oh my. Is this the power to the people tripe again?” I reply absently.
“Why do you hate freedom and self-determination? I think you are unhappy with your life, so you lash out at others.”
“I just don’t think the next bauble will change fundamental human tendencies and social organization. Did Aiko-chan pout at you for our dinners out again?”
“Stop. She is not jealous, and we are not tied at the hip, like some couples.”
“Well, Asian women tend to be insecure.”
“Aiko is not jealous. You are just projecting.”
“We all project our wishes onto the universe and only perceive that which is in concord with our desires.”
There is an instructive tale in the Bible of Elijah battling 800 priests and prophets of Ba’al and Asherah in a contest of divine manifestation. The priests and prophets begin their dances, rituals, and chants to call upon their gods, while Elijah looks on absently. Having failed to produce any visible manifestation of their gods, the priests’ and prophets’ activities become feverish, as Elijah taunts them. In the final desperate attempt at calling their gods, the priests and prophets begin to mutilate themselves, spewing their life essence onto the lifeless altars of their indifferent gods.
Humanity projects their wishes onto an impersonal universe, in the hopes of organizing the chaos into an understandable form. As advanced physics experiments demonstrate, mere act of observation results in fundamental shifts in expected outcomes. In a more mundane sense, a man’s a priori beliefs regarding the universe and himself attunes him to only perceive data that reinforce his beliefs and conclusions. Conclude that the day will be miserable and tiring, and such belief will reify the prophecy of the the biased mind. This tendency for man to selectively encode data, bias, is an adaptable trait in living life; for, if man’s proclivities were the converse, he would not have mastered the first technology - fire - because he would have been staring into space for all eternity, unable to filter and organize millions of data points that assault him every second.
Biases inherent in our observation, then, ought to caution man as he conducts himself through his life, lest he be trapped by the beliefs of his own creation. At times, despite every data sets that Indicate the contrary, man willfully adheres to his a priori beliefs to the detriment of his well-being. Such delusions, on mass scale, can result in entire communities, societies, and polities collapsing upon themselves, as reality overwhelms the collective sum of their insanity.
The current economic model, upon which all of the modern Westphalian states are built, hinges on the religion of infinite expansion on a finite planet. As delusional as such concepts may be, virtually all the leaders of our modern world are obsessed with “growth.” So obsessed with this ludicrous idea of infinite expansion, that any mercantile entity in our world must provide a metric of ever-increasing profits, every three months, for the lifecycle of that entity. The monetary system, with which our society conducts commerce, assumes within its structure this infinite growth paradigm, due to the debt-based monetary creation. Without growth, the entire edifice of our modern world collapses.
Any rational analysis and objective observation of human history indicates that human society faces contraction, not expansion, with each advancement of technology. The printing press antiquated the massive workforce of monks, effectively contracting the publishing industry from hundreds, if not thousands, of monasteries to a few publishing houses. The industrial revolution shifted production of garments from tens of thousands of household spinstresses to a few centralized garment factories. The rise of department stores wiped away the hundreds of thousands of local stores, that in turn were swept away by Walmart and Costco warehousing stores, which in turn are being ground to extinction by Jeff Bezos’ Amazon. The blockchain threatens to erase even more resources from the economy than all the previous technological advances combined.
The blockchain obviates the fundamental basis for existence of financial institutions and judicial bureaucracy - verification and certification. When transaction are verified publicly, immutably, near instantly, the necessity of financial and banking industry diminishes. So too, the massive judicial bureaucracy that holds ownership certifications for the economic activity of an entire polity. The contraction of this massive economic sphere will not result in prosperity for the common people, but their ultimate enslavement, as the financial power concentrates and contracts unto a few individuals and institutions. It is incumbent upon every society to formulate rational policies to limit and regulate such concentration of power.
Sadly, like the priests of Ba’al and prophets of Asherah, the modern day political leaders and their subjects are stuck in their deluded belief of expansion and growth as the solution to all their economic woes. This insane belief results in the observable “bubbles,” as the fanatic expectation of growth meets the inexorable reality of contraction. Like the deluded fools facing Elijah, the modern day prophets and priests expend the life-blood of their society in their mad quest for economic expansion. When the cryptocurrency bubble bursts in following year or so, unlike the past eras, there will be no new continent to rape, no new natives to exploit, and no new markets to enslave.