The Political – Bitcoin Magazine
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“Today, nothing is more modern than the attack on The Political. American financiers, industrial engineers, Marxist socialists unite in demanding that the partisan rule of politics over objective economic management be abolished. There should no longer be political problems, only organizational-technical and economic-sociological tasks. The kind of economic-technical thinking that prevails today is no longer capable of perceiving a political idea.”
—Carl Schmitt, Political Theology
Politics in today’s world no longer has anything political about it. Politics as we understand it has destroyed the very nature of what we would call The Political, replacing it with a popularity contest between two corrupt sides of the same fiat coin. Politics then is nothing more than changing the colors of the rotting and gnawing system of abuse and exploitation that we call government. Politics lacks some of the spectacular potential or deep empowerment belonging to The Political which requires itself to think beyond the meager boundaries that politics has tried to confine within it.
This is why there is no way through politics to end wars, defund the military, or to create new and better political systems more appropriate for our time. There is nothing in our time that is political about politics – it’s just a show. A two-ring circus to distract the masses into feeling that something can change politically, when politics is exactly what will ensure that nothing will change. The sad hidden truth is that there is no longer any possibility of radical or revolutionary change through our forms of politics – that possibility died long ago with the death of God and its hidden meaning for the world.
However, there is a secret ritual that can be performed by individuals to resurrect the ghost of The Political once again. It is not for the faint of heart or those of fiat persuasion, but it is possible and only you can make that choice. It is a method in which politics must be approached in a completely new and foreign way. A way that no longer bothers with the parties of the past or the ideology of state bureaucracy; but through a new and creative way that manages to cut off the head of the king in contemporary politics. This beheading allows the birth of an idea that is the most political of all ideas in a world that has made every effort to destroy The Political – Bitcoin.
Bitcoin is “The Political” as opposed to just another form of politics because it activates this secret ritual that enables the recovery of The Political. It is the political because it exists outside and beyond the power of any state, and it creates a form of organization that is outside the electoral politics or bureaucratic systems of any state. Bitcoin creates real and significant political change because it has nothing to do with modern politics – that’s the whole point. Bitcoin doesn’t need to elect the right leaders, get the right laws passed, or even need to be understood by the majority of the population. All Bitcoin needs to do is exist to present its political goal to the world.
Since the birth of bitcoin a little more than a decade ago, it has gone from being a nascent curiosity to one of the most valuable assets on the planet. It has done this because it has achieved a political goal that no person, institution or revolutionary movement has been able to achieve in the last century; the creation of an independent, self-sovereign money that is loyal to no person, state or institution. Bitcoin has decrypted the most spectacular form of The Political in existence; the political nature of money itself.
Money is secretly the most political object that exists not because it is inherently political, but because of the way fiat money has transformed it into a political object. Money has only been mutilated into something political through the most deceitful and cunning confusions of politics which have demanded, through the self-inflicted state of emergency, that money become fiat. It is only when we begin to understand that fiat money is inherently political that we can begin to understand why Bitcoin is more political than any kind of policy that can be voted on.
The global monetary system is the most political object in our highly interdependent, digitized, globalized society, and refusing to recognize it is itself a political issue. Money is the most political ideal because it is what involves all people everywhere and how we secure ourselves and our families for the future. Bitcoin is the declaration that the time has come to overcome the monetary imperialism of the last century, and to throw off the last vestiges of slavery from this antiquated political system called fiat money. The time is now for each of us to perform the ritual that will exorcise the demon of fiat money and open us to the common political dignity that is Bitcoin.
Bitcoin is our common wealth that we all share; the commonwealth that defines us.
Money is political not just because it is our medium of exchange, or even because it is the legal tender that has been forced upon us, but because it is something that all people everywhere use every day. Everywhere, all the time, people trade with each other, primarily in fiat money, for their financial wants and needs in the world. This is what makes the commonality of money truly political – it is something we must share if we want to co-exist peacefully and cooperatively. Bitcoin is the secret ritual that any person can perform to reopen The Political again, where their wealth will be protected by the common bond that is consensual exchange that is Bitcoin.
Today, however, the real basis of our common wealth is tyranny represented through fiat money. Fiat money is not accountable to our laws and political systems, but comes from jurisdictions outside and beyond our power as ordinary people to influence, lead or change. No matter what political system you live under, there is no way to directly change how money is issued, directed, credited, placed or created. Whether you are from Communist China, Capitalist America, Socialist Europe or the Global South; all monetary systems are part of the same bureaucracy that exists for the elite and powerful alone. It is a commonwealth of poverty, and it is the most defining political feature of our age.
We have been told that we are free people who have democratic processes available to us to change the systems that we need, but when we attempt such audacious goals, we can’t even walk in the door. Like Kafka’s man “Before the Law”, we too find ourselves waiting for the law to ask to access the only way we can see. We have waited for countless lifetimes before the law only to realize just before we die that we will never be able to access it by the guard; just deprived of it. The secret key to understanding this parable and deciphering the secret of how to access the law comes from the hint given at the very end. The watchman waiting in front of the door of the law who has denied the man entrance says: “Here no one else can enter, since this entrance was only assigned to you. I will now close it.”
The key is that the law is not something to be “accessed”; it is something to be entered into. Just as we enter into a contract or agreement with another, we also enter into the law. State actors do not provide access to the law; they can only facilitate entry at best. We must understand before it is too late that the state cannot and will never create an entrance to a form of money that is fair and objective. It cannot do so because the state itself is unfair and biased – it has no capacity to move beyond that, and we should not expect it to. There will never be a time when the state will free us from its shackles of fiat money and debt slavery, because it has no incentive to do so. The only interest the state has is to perpetuate itself at all costs and expenses – in the most real monetary, economic, social and biological costs associated with this. The government literally cannot exist without fiat money, which means it cannot exist by providing access to sound money. As Daniel Webster warned us nearly two centuries ago: “There are men, in all ages, who think the exercise of power useful; but who means to exercise it. They mean to govern well; but they mean to rule. They promise to be kind masters; but they mean to be masters.” Let’s heed that caveat as we move forward in trying to differentiate what separates Bitcoin from the politics of the past.
Bitcoin is political because it has the real opportunity to create radical changes in our respective political systems through our personal choice to use and hold bitcoin as our primary form of wealth. It is political because it can change the whole politics through the personal decision which is that bitcoin undoes the whole criminal ponzi that we call politics. Bitcoin is democracy taken to its most extreme place and in the most serious way possible by going beyond politics and into The Political itself. This is not because Bitcoin is another tool of politics to be twisted and mutilated to serve some ruler, as all previous tools have been used; but because it unilaterally and unapologetically ends the need for there to be some masters to govern the community that is our wealth. In our world, within an advanced global digital economy where our shared idea of ”what is money” is greater than our shared idea of who is the right god. Bitcoin has the power to reactivate The Political and overcome politics forever. We know that God is dead, and he has been dead for a long time now – long enough for us to understand that he is not coming to save us. In fact, it has been long enough that we now know that we are the ones who need to save him.
We must save God from the nihilistic abyss into which he has been sacrificed, because to save God is to save value in itself. In a valueless age, the age of nihilism, to restore a value that cannot be corrupted or distorted by politics is to reactivate what is most powerful, most austere, most political. To fix the money is to fix the world, and not because money is the root of all evil, but because the misunderstanding of which money is is the root of evil. Evil in the deepest sense of the word; it cannot think but only be – it is we who must think. And if we are to think of money as we understand it today, as fiat money, then money is nothing more than an authoritarian decree. This decree that creates money “ex nihilo” is a fundamental flaw in the truth and magnanimity of the idea of wealth. It is a decree of the authority effort over the truth of the work and the meaning it gives value. But in a world where we have reclaimed the meaning of value and wealth again, we also understand the truth of real risk and work that must be put into building wealth. There is no declaration that can create value – only destroy it through the most guilty and deceitful obfuscations of what the truth is. It is this same obfuscation of the very nature of value that has corrupted our forms of politics.
If we want to escape the night that is politics and reactivate the light that is The Political, we must heed the secret that the watchman in “Before The Law” has offered us. The entrance to the law is a door assigned only to you. I can’t access it, just like your private key is something only you can know to stay potent; I can not. It is within this ritual that creates the private key where we find the key that opens the door of the law available only to you. ONE private door only assigned to your key. The political is not something the watchman will give you access to, but rather an entrance that only you can enter. It is through knowing that this door is only for you to access, that you may be able to reactivate The Political, meant only for you, again.
