Today however, the real basis of our commonality of wealth is that of tyranny represented through fiat money. Fiat money is not accountable to our laws and systems of politics, but comes from jurisdictions that are outside and beyond our power as common people to impact, direct or change. No matter what political system you live under, there is no possibility 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 that have democratic processes available for us to change the systems as we need to, but when we attempt such audacious goals we cannot even enter the door. Like Kafka’s man “Before The Law,” we too find ourselves waiting before the law pleading to access the only way that we can see. We have waited for countless lifetimes before the law only to realize right before we die that we will never be given access to it by the guard; only deprived of it. The secret key to understanding this parable and decrypting the secret of how to access the law comes from the hint given at the very end. The watchman who waits before the door of law who has been refusing entry to the man states, “Here no one else can gain entry, since this entrance was assigned only to you. I’m going now to 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 an agreement with another, so, too, do we enter the law. State actors do not provide access to the law; they can only at best facilitate its entrance. We must understand before it is too late that the state cannot and will not ever create an entrance to a form of money that is fair and unbiased. It cannot do that because the state itself is unfair and biased — it does not have the capacity to ever move beyond that, and we should not expect that of it. There will never be a time that the state will want to liberate us from its shackles of fiat money and the bondage of debt slavery, because it has no incentive in doing that. The only interest the state has is in continuing itself at all cost and expenses — in the most real monetary, economic, social and biological cost that are entailed within that. The state literally cannot exist without fiat money, which means that 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 mean to exercise power usefully; but who mean to exercise it. They mean to govern well; but they mean to govern. They promise to be kind masters; but they mean to be masters.” Let us heed that warning as we move forward in seeking to differentiate what sets Bitcoin apart from the politics of the past.
Bitcoin is The Political because it has the real possibility of creating radical change to our respective political systems through our personal choice to use and hodl bitcoin as our main form of wealth. It is political because it can change the entire affair of politics through the personal decision that is bitcoin upending the entire 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 contorted and mutilated to serve one ruler, or another, as all prior tools have been used; but because it unilaterally and unapologetically ends the need for there to be any masters to rule on the commonality 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 correct god. Bitcoin has the power to reactivate The Political and vanquish politics forever. We know that God is Dead, and he has been dead for a long while now — long enough that we can understand that he is not coming to save us. In fact, it has been long enough that we now know it is we who need to save him.
We must rescue God from the nihilistic abyss he has been sacrificed into because to rescue God is to save value itself. In a valueless age, the age of nihilism, recovering a value that cannot be corrupted or contorted by politics is to reactivate that which is the most powerful, the most austere, the 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 what money is is the root of evil. Evil in the deepest sense of the word; it cannot think but only be — it is us who must do the thinking. 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 error in the truth and magnanimity inside the idea of wealth. It is a decree of the stake of authority over the truth of work and the meaning that it gives to value. But in a world where we have recovered the meaning of value and wealth once again, we also understand the truth of real risk and work that must go into building wealth. There is no declaration that can create value — only destroy it through the most guileful and deceitful obfuscations of what the truth is. It is this same obfuscation of the nature of value itself 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 that is assigned only to you. I cannot access it, just as your private key is something only you can know in order to remain potent; I cannot. It is within this ritual that creates the private key where we find the key that opens the door of law only accessible by you. A private door assigned to only your key. The Political is not something that the watchman will give you access to, but rather an entrance that only you may 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, once again.