Bitcoin Revolution And The American Revolution – Bitcoin Magazine
This is an opinion editorial by Frank Nuessle, former TV manager, university professor and publishing founder.
This is the rarely told story of Samuel Adams, and how he became a “paradigm buster”, even though he had never heard of a paradigm.
Most of us only know Samuel Adams as a Boston beer or as the cousin of the famous John Adams who became the second president of the United States in 1797.
Samuel Adams was a total failure until midlife, when at the age of 41 he went on to become, as Thomas Jefferson described him, “truly the man of the Revolution.”
Image source: Massmoments.org
On a wet night in the winter of 1770 in a Boston tavern where local farmers gathered, Samuel Adams proved his political, paradigm-bending genius. It was there that he successfully argued that Britain would soon start taxing horses, cows and sheep, and that it was better to rebel sooner rather than later.
From the mid-1760s, Adams began to rail against the encroachments of the British Empire. Then in 1768 two regiments of British soldiers barked in Boston Harbor. This occupation gave Adams the moral high ground.
Adams began to publicize every misstep by the British troops, both real and fictional. Soon women and children began to ridicule the British occupiers who blasted them with all the foul language they could muster. Voltage mounted.
On the evening of March 5, 1770, Boston was a tinderbox with armed British soldiers massing and a rowdy Boston crowd of over a thousand shouting obscenities at the British. Tempers flared. Chaos reigned as the soldiers leveled their weapons.
When the smoke cleared, five men lay dead with many more wounded.
Image source
Although Samuel was no orator, on March 6 he gave dignity, moral authority, and harmony to his argument that nothing would restore Boston to order but the immediate removal of the British troops.
Within months the British troops were gone.
The withdrawal of the British provided hope and a moral basis for the developing American Revolution which culminated in the British defeat by attrition in 1783.
Samuel Adams created the history of the Boston Massacre with his rhetoric, his logic and his deep idealism, which led him to become one of the first advocates of American independence.
Image source: Boston.com
You could say that he replaced the public perception that the British Empire could not be defeated with the possibility of American independence.
I would argue that Samuel Adams was America’s first marketing genius, the first to capture and shape the popular American imagination.
Adams knew that people are governed more by their emotions than by reason; yet with strict logic, he stirred America’s sentiments and opened the colonies to the possibility of American independence.
The idea of American independence spread because it was a paradigm buster whose time had come.
A paradigm, as I define it, is an internally coherent system of thought, a story, that results in useful insights, but is also only half-right because it has difficulty escaping its own assumptions. The concept of a paradigm was formulated by the philosopher Thomas Kuhn in 1970 and has become a fundamental idea.
Until the 1770s, the colonists believed that the British Empire was too powerful to challenge and that they would be better off accepting British rule. They lived within a mindset, a paradigm – that the British could not be defeated.
It took Samuel Adams and others over a decade to change the mindset of enough people in the colonies to make the American Revolution possible.
The American Revolution began with an idea just as the bitcoin revolution began with an idea.
The story of Samuel Adam and the American Revolution shows that Bitcoiners can break through America’s common perception that the Federal Reserve Cartel’s government-controlled fiat money is the only monetary system that can be trusted.
The brilliance of Bitcoin’s design has proven its resilience over its 13-year lifespan, but bitcoin as sound money needs to evolve further so that it becomes more than someone’s get-rich-quick scheme.
A survey of 1,000 Americans found that 62% of cryptocurrency investors believe they will get rich. There is not enough.
There is nothing wrong with wanting to have a good time. I certainly hope that bitcoin helps secure my financial freedom, but my nuance is another, and I think, a deeper goal than just getting rich.
Getting rich is the rallying cry of the current oligarchic, take-team-waste economic paradigm.
America has been living in this get-rich paradigm on steroids since Gordon Gekko, played by Michael Douglas in the 1987 film “Wall Street,” proclaimed that “Greed is good.” In the film, Gekko goes on to say that greed will save the “malfunctioning corporation called the United States of America”
Consider for yourself how much greed has improved America in the 35 years since this movie.
Most people don’t want to think about the money system itself, but when they think about the money in their pocket, they live in fear that they won’t have enough money to live their lives comfortably. I know that fear and have found myself bankrupt twice.
Because our current paradigm of money drives fear while being rife with greed, deception, and get-rich-quick schemes, we are left with a severely deteriorated American society.
Under a mental paradigm where greed rules, it is never enough.
As Robert Breedlove brilliantly points out in his intro to DC Schindler’s book on Plato, “Force and fiat are shown to be incompatible with human reason, thus generating a collapse into relativism…where someone’s ‘truth’ is only as credible as the threat of power that supports it.”
Doesn’t this seem like a good description of America falling apart today?
Have you ever considered the possibility that our monetary system itself may be creating the fear and social isolation that so many Americans suffer?
Money is a critical social system, and like all social systems it must be judged by the results it produces.
As Jeff Booth suggests, the dominance of money as a social system can be shown because money has historically trumped the law with the laws always changing over time to favor money. This is not a healthy outcome.
I am convinced that a healthy monetary bitcoin economy that stimulates fair trade will change everything.
Civilization began because of fair trade. It is time to take the next evolutionary journey into a solid monetary system that stimulates fair local trade, social well-being and environmental sustainability.
America’s monetary blind spot is a direct result of living under an outdated mental construct, a paradigm, a history of money that is outdated and needs to evolve.
But first we all need to recognize that each and every one of us to some extent lives under and is influenced by this existing fiat money paradigm that drives both fear and greed within us.
It is time to move up the evolutionary ladder and develop a more sophisticated worldview now that we know the limits of our planet; limits that the current monetary paradigm does not recognize.
The current corporate sustainability fad called Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) is simply lipstick on the pig.
Fighting the current fiat money paradigm is futile if we cannot offer an inspiring alternative.
That means we need a new paradigm, a new story, a new way of looking at money – one that serves the whole, and not just the small self.
Bitcoin is the technological innovation of this revolution. But what is the social innovation? It must begin with a new story. How do we articulate the new sound money paradigm?
The second part of this essay will explore ideas about a new story of sound money, call it a sound money paradigm shifter, that could accelerate the development of the vibrant Bitcoin economy we all know is somewhere invisible over the horizon.
This is a guest post by Frank Nuessle. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.
