“This is the terror: to have emerged from nothing, to have a name, consciousness of self, deep inner feelings, an excruciating inner yearning for life and self-expression, and with all this yet to die.”
-Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death
There is a joy in running in the mountains. They become part of who you know yourself to be. Each crag and hollow, each false summit, the way the wildflowers quiver in the cold air, cool water rushing over cool stones, the sound of aspens shaking like 1,000 years has blown that way and is returning again. Each like an old friend, older than old, ancient. And underneath it one comes to hear the quiet mind of the mountain gods, a low tone of wisdom and care and abiding just below the register of our ears. The feeling of the heart beating which we can hear through our veins, and the trial of ascending and the sweat on the forehead, completes a sacred union: in our muscular aliveness we belong to this place. One feels the mountain also knows him – in the heart’s recesses a mutual knowing has taken place – and great gratitude seeps in like water cresting up gently from the roots of marsh grasses – and that the animals and the trees and the thistles know it too, a sort of kinship among species and sunlight and wind.
And what were these mountains called, 10,000 years ago before our language was ever spoken? Maybe they had no name? The endless millennia spent spinning in the black, lit by a star with no name also, and the solid might of the granite was merely a remnant of molten cores that have grown cold. This sacred trace of home in the heart, of this mutual knowing, becomes alien all of the sudden. How quickly the terror electrocutes us with finality and undeniability: that we have emerged from nothing, and that we are drawn pathologically, compulsively, choiceless-ly through this life by fear and shame. We are locked into a certainty of ourselves as empty, purposeless, and soon to die irrelevantly. The quiet mountain gods were just our imagination: a child shamefully living in the body of an adult tricking himself, selfishly wiling away. Like Adam and Job covered with ashes, shame becomes our nature cast into a plane that cares nothing for Beauty, communion, truthfulness, baiting us from the gallery to enter its torture room of caprice and nihilism, and to renege.
David Whyte described that pregnant stillness of all things as a “dream-ladder to divinity.”
The stairs are your mentor of things
to come, the doors have always been there
to frighten you and invite you,
and the tiny speaker in the phone
is your dream-ladder to divinity.
And admonishes us that the folly of alienation is ours to make:
Your great mistake is to act the drama
as if you were alone. As if life
were a progressive and cunning crime
with no witness to the tiny hidden
transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny
the intimacy of your surroundings.
David Whyte
This intimacy is not just found in Whyte’s cottage life of central England, but in the mass and American grandeur of the Rockies also. It is the clinging to a permanent plateau which degrades the deep Beauty and soul of things, the desire to preserve in stone which destroys.
The thing about sound money is that it offers to bring our lives into parity with the longest arcs of our vision, that intimacy with the soul of things, the most potent faculty of our race, and to bypass the reactivity, stupid-ness, shame and fear of materialism and all the annihilation and placelessness it bears within it.
But the great tool of sound money still lives in a bastion of alienation. It exists to help us create in deep time, not to clutch-to like sewer rats as we sink deeper in the dark, echoing, nameless underworld of Anthem. To make an identity of oneself only as a holder of sound money is to renege on one’s birthright as a progressive creator. It is cheap and nameless like a contrived postmodernist pronoun. Becker would describe a Maximalist as one who “lives a whole lifetime with the fate of death haunting (his) dreams and even the most sun-filled days.” Like gold bugs before them, they believe everything can be achieved merely by possessing an instrument, not by using it in the pursuit of noble, productive causes. A tacit renunciation of the possibility of the noble, as if Man is made merely to die, and that sound money is a grail that helps cheat death. Or even more cheaply, not that cheating death itself is the achievement, but that his friends will see him cheat death before they do and will be seen to have been right in their now-dead eyes. The obsession with monetary derangement has percolated into the realm of Bitcoin such that it is more important than the warm skies and abundant future sound money offers. The ideological obsession with the death and finitude of the adherent/worshipper is juxtaposed against the messianic financial perpetuity of the money.
“Fighting the Fed” and “Banking the Unbanked” are the reactionary, limited narratives that result from this world in which intelligence, curiosity and endeavor are irrelevant, in which oblivion is the ideology. A world which has more in common with fiat rent seeking than the developers of the local strip mall. Where the payoff from generating is never more than the payoff from clutching, leaving the creative work which actually builds the purchasing power of the sound money instrument to others. As Becker writes, “To live is to engage with experience at least partly on the terms of the experience itself.” Sound money will never be more powerful than ingenuity. Its value is derived from ingenuity and production. The refusal to acknowledge this is to construct a new fiefdom for the statist sky deity to roam. The same old deity that seeks to wrench Man into sacrifices and self-betrayal, to alienate Man into a cult of self-referential regression. It is an anticapitalistic disparagement of the beauty of human purpose.
Bitcoin mining itself is plagued by the one-dimensional and the extractive, who fall squarely and incuriously into a finite game mindset of maximum debt for maximum take today, at the expense of roundabout, infinite game payments and patience for a positional advantage in the future. It is as though there were no future at all. Again, a renunciation of the great primordial gift of human future-minded perspicacity.
Bitcoin is not a brand nor an ideology. In its genius it was never meant to be, and retail clingers would be better to ignore it. For those seeking an ideology, let it be the ideology of freiheit from which Bitcoin was forged. Let it be that the soul of Man is triumphant and that his innate communion with Beauty is the engine of his productive achievement. Let it be that the mountain gods know you as you know them, and that they beckon you to originality, to discovery, to discipline and to heroic heights of thin, cold air.
Man is mightier than money.
-RC
