This is a part of the Bitcoin Infinity Academy course on Knut Svanholm's book Bitcoin: Independence Reimagined. For more information, check out our Geyser page!
Why Collectivists Win#
People, in general, want to be free to do whatever they want with their lives. Even left-wingers seem to have their personal freedoms as an end goal, even though personal freedom means something else to them than it does to those actually capable of supporting themselves. A lot of people see welfare as an opportunity to live their lives as they want, as starving artists, hermits, bums, or junkies. If you’re a nihilist, depressed, or just not very materialistic, you might think that living off of social welfare for the rest of your life is actually a viable option. It’s not really immoral to crave as little as possible, is it? Nor does it really deprive you of your freedoms, does it? Well, ask a Venezuelan what he thinks about such claims. The problem with giving away more and more power to politicians is that you become defenseless when the system implodes, which it inevitably does one day. Once a draconian law, a bureaucratic institution, or an infringement of your right to freedom of thought is in place, it is very hard to remove it again without an outright revolution. A revolution is always violent and hardly guarantees any better shot at independence than what you had before it, though.
People keep voting for more and more government interference while they keep complaining about the government interfering in their lives too much. Why? Let’s examine what attributes define a specific voter. An individualist voter tends to care less about what others think about his political views than his collectivist counterpart. A person who cares about what others think of his opinions is, by definition, less individualistic than a person who doesn’t. What this inevitably leads to in a democracy is that individualists will tend to vote for a greater number of, hence smaller, parties than collectivists will. A collectivist naturally tends to care more about belonging to a group, per se, and less about what that group actually wants.
Individualists, on the other hand, are less agreeable than collectivists because whether they share their opinions with others or not matters far less to them than it does to the collectivists. In other words, collectivists form larger groups more easily than individualists. This is one of the most subtle yet most dangerous pitfalls of democracy itself. In the long run, every government, every state institution, and every politician is bound to become corrupt because the forces that spawned them were more concerned with tribalism than individual rights. Psychopaths thrive in such environments. There’s just no way of telling if a seemingly polite and friendly political leader is really a cold-hearted, calculating monster underneath his facade.
It’s depressingly easy to get a political or even a religious belief to be considered an intersubjective truth. You can count on an enormous amount of pre-existing credulity among illiterate, frightened, ill-educated populations. In Sweden, we were repeatedly told about every human’s equal value in school. As I recall, none of the kids ever questioned this. No one ever mentioned that value might not even be something you can measure because of its subjective nature. Those asking the really hard questions are seldom rewarded for doing so by the group, no matter what type of group we’re talking about. The larger the group, the more intolerant it becomes of the skeptic, or as George Orwell put it: “The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those that speak it.”
Political correctness is a perfect example of this phenomenon. The words “climate denier” and “islamophobe” are examples of how even our language has changed in order for the mainstream to quell undesired opinions. Most people labeled with these epithets are merely critical of the way the world is presented to them by mainstream media and not in denial or phobic by any stretch of the imagination. The word “denier” implies that there is an absolute truth somewhere that ought not to be questioned by serious thinkers. What this truth actually consists of is unclear, though, since those who just refuse to buy into the idea that politicians can change the weather are labeled in the same way as those who actually question scientific data. Those who criticize religious dogma are labeled as phobic towards the people who identify as belonging to that particular religious group.
A lot can be said about the late Christopher Hitchens and his criticism of religion, but you can hardly say that he was “phobic” of Muslims. On the contrary, he confronted religious leaders without fear all the time. On the other side of the political aisle, the word “pro-life” comes to mind, which implies that all those in favor of liberal abortion laws are murderers. As discussed earlier, speech is the only tool we humans have, apart from violence, to resolve our conflicts, and this type of political censorship of our language always seems to stem from political or religious groupthink. Large flocks of people mimicking each other’s behavior can be a very scary thing, as those who have ever found themselves in the midst of a riot can attest to. The most hideous atrocities ever committed against humans have all been made possible by armies of collectivists following orders and not questioning the morality of their actions.
If you’re honestly frightened about whatever political direction your nation seems to be headed in, you have two options. You can either stay in the illusion, believe that your vote will account for something, and hope that everything will magically sort itself out one day, or you can choose to try to regain a little control over your own destiny. Just like in the movie The Matrix from 1999, you have a choice. As the character Morpheus says:
“This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill — the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill — you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. Remember: all I’m offering is the truth. Nothing more.”
Bitcoin offers you a similar choice. To properly understand Bitcoin and why you need it, you must first see the world as it truly is, and you might not like what you’re about to find out. A curious mind just can’t help itself, though, now, can it?
One thing a curious mind ought to be capable of doing is memorizing 24 words. Since memorizing 24 words enables you to cross any border in the world with any amount of money in your head, this is nothing short of a superpower to a Venezuelan refugee or a Chinese dissident. Information has always been a valuable thing, but since the inception of Bitcoin, information can literally hold inter-subjective value. Of course, value is still a subjective thing, but the inter-subjectivity of something we can define as money can be a very useful tool. You don’t have to remember all of the 24 words either — just remembering four of them should provide you with enough entropy to create a time slot long enough to travel from one jurisdiction to another with any amount of wealth in your memory, enabling you to recover the whole seed phrase, and with it, access to your Bitcoin, if you recombine them with the 20 other words which you had already submitted to the destination before. This is just one of the ways in which Bitcoin will inevitably make the nation-state obsolete.
Can a nation hold Bitcoin? Can a bank? It is often speculated that nations, banks, and institutional investors are going to start stockpiling Bitcoin, but Bitcoin is not just another currency or asset. They cannot be owned by a non-existing inter-subjective entity in the way traditional money can. It is even questionable whether they can be owned at all since all that owning Bitcoin means is that the owner has access to them by holding the private keys to a certain Bitcoin address. A nation-state is made up of people. So is a bank, and so is any other man-made institution. Someone in the allegedly Bitcoin-owning institution would have to be entrusted with the private keys. Of course, there are multi-sig setups, and you could picture a nation holding Bitcoin in a way similar to that in which nuclear missiles are handled in Hollywood movies — a room with multiple literal keys for a bunch of uniform-wearing minions to turn simultaneously when a big red telephone rings and the President commands them to do so. The difficulties an institution would have in holding Bitcoin illuminates a bigger problem — even in our current system, there is ultimately a need to trust a single individual at the very end of each ownership chain. Institutions aren’t real. Banks, and even more so central banks, are only possible because of people’s belief in the validity of what used to be a receipt for a specific amount of gold deposited at that bank — the banknote.
Even today, when people ought to know that no currency in the world is redeemable for gold any longer, they act as if they were and take their supposed value for granted. With Bitcoin, this is not possible because Bitcoin is not a receipt for anything; Bitcoin is the scarce asset its private key represents. This turns everything we thought we knew about money on its head because it exposes the biggest lie we’ve ever fallen for as a species. The liars in power on top of the food chain of every human hierarchy are losing their ability to spellbind their subjects more and more for every day that passes. The emperor is naked, and Satoshi Nakamoto has pointed it out. Everyone will realize this eventually because it’s right in front of their eyes. There is no such thing as a society, and there never was. It was just you, me, and the others all along. There is no we. There is no ours. There are only individuals with different amounts of influence on other individuals. Only an individual can make a decision. Only an individual can claim ownership.
Collectivists win because of their ignorance. Because of their willingness to be used. Because they fail to realize that it’s all in their heads. All of it.
About the Bitcoin Infinity Academy#
The Bitcoin Infinity Academy is an educational project built around Knut Svanholm’s books about Bitcoin and Austrian Economics. Each week, a whole chapter from one of the books is released for free on Nostr, accompanied by a video in which Knut and Luke de Wolf discuss that chapter’s ideas. You can join the discussions by signing up for one of the courses on our Geyser page. Signed books, monthly calls, and lots of other benefits are also available.
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