It is somewhat concerning to us that people seemed, and still seem, to be lining up to both defend and attack “capitalism,” when the object of discussion could hardly be further from any worthwhile meaning of the word but is rather better described as: To boost aimless consumption, primarily with uncollateralized debt, by destroying the price signals for capital and depleting its stock.
We humbly suggest the following schema for categorizing both the attacks and defenses. To borrow an expression from James C. Scott’s “Seeing Like A State ” that we use throughout “Bitcoin Is Venice: and this series, the attackers tend to be “high modernists,” concerned with aesthetic knowledge and emotional persuasion: They dislike what they think capitalism is because it feels wrong , and they want to redesign it from the top down. Scott introduces “high modernism” as follows:
“It is best conceived of as a strong, one might even say muscle-bound, version of the self-confidence about scientific and technical progress, the expansion of production, the growing satisfaction of human needs, the mastery of nature (including human nature), and, above all, the rational design of social order commensurate with the scientific understanding of natural laws. It originated, of course, in the West, as a by-product of unprecedented progress in science and industry.
“High modernism must not be confused with scientific practice. It was fundamentally, as the term ‘ideology’ implies, a faith that borrowed, as it were, the legitimacy of science and technology. It was, accordingly, uncritical, unskeptical, and thus unscientifically optimistic about the possibilities for the comprehensive planning of human settlement and production. The carriers of high modernism tended to see rational order in remarkably visual aesthetic terms. For them, an efficient, rationally organized city, village, or farm, was a city that looked regimented and orderly in a geometrical sense…
“High modernism was about ‘interests’ as well as faith. Its carriers, even when they were capitalist entrepreneurs, required state action to realize their plans.”
Those who attack “capitalism” unfortunately tend to be exceptionally high modernist. They undoubtedly require state action to realize their plans and, in many cases, this is what they are openly agitating for. And they are partly right: Degenerate fiat “capitalism” is wrong. Yet while their diagnosis might be sound, their prescription would do nothing for the disease and would kill the patient besides.
The defenders are degenerate fiat financiers, concerned with codified knowledge and authoritative persuasion. They are in no way right : They are the most inadvertently inhumane and destructive people alive — one is tempted to say they are evil in the Arendtian sense of the banality of their inhumanity and destruction. They mindlessly repeat the exact dogma that has caused all the problems to date, and in the course of lobbying for more power to fix the problems their power has caused.
We, on the other hand, and Bitcoiners in general, neither attack nor defend “capitalism” — in scare quotes so as to distinguish degenerate fiat “capitalism” from actual capitalism — but rather question the premises and do our best to clarify what we are talking about in the first place. We are concerned with practical knowledge and logical persuasion. We value experimentation, such that it might lead us to discover some sliver of informational signal that can, in principle, be independently verified, provided the dynamic process being analyzed has not changed too much in the meantime, although it probably has. But this is all far too sensible for so early in the series. We will get to this in due course.
This is your brain on central banking, regulatory capture and financialization. This is not capitalism.
This is a guest post by Allen Farrington and Sacha Meyers. Opinions expressed are entirely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.