American software culture produces developers who are, for the most part, over-socialized. From early on, institutions are designed to cultivate trust in authority and submission to group norms. Genuine crypto-anarchists are rare precisely because they resist that conditioning. Satoshi was one of those rare figures. He built a system that does not depend on leaders, and then he stepped away to make sure it stayed that way.
This over-socialization is not limited to schools and workplaces. Online gaming culture has reinforced it through endless peer group-think. For an entire generation, online worlds trained people to organize around emergent hierarchies where knowledge is shallow but socially reinforced. It is the blind leading the blind, and over time this produced a reflex: align with the dominant peer consensus rather than interrogate first principles. The same dynamic now plays out in technical communities.
The people who rise to prominence in global software projects almost always embody these institutional and peer-socialized traits. They are comfortable representing "the group" because they were trained to align with it. When this psychology enters Bitcoin development, it manifests as a kind of soft technocratic priesthood. Instead of letting the market arbitrate, they invoke the authority of prior discussions, developer consensus, or "long-standing decisions" as if these were binding decrees. It’s the same maneuver used in public hearings when lawyers say "this was decided long ago" to shut down meaningful debate. It’s not technical reasoning; it’s authority signaling through procedural language.
This is exactly what we are seeing in the OP_RETURN and relay policy debate. Real technical issues: bandwidth abuse, RAM pressure, and mempool externalities; are being dismissed not on their merits, but because they fall outside the cultural frame of those holding the microphone. The instinct is not to engage, but to close discussion and declare the decision settled. That instinct is cultural, not technical. It comes from the same systems Bitcoin was built to circumvent.
The irony is that this behavior reintroduces centralization through culture, not code. It creates a developer class that sees itself as the legitimate arbiter of Bitcoin’s future, using the language of technical stewardship to mask what is, in essence, social control. This is the real root of the issue. OP_RETURN is just the surface. The deeper fault line is between those who view Bitcoin as a self-regulating market protocol and those who view it as a managed project.
Moments like this sift the wheat from the chaff. Those who understand Bitcoin’s nature will resist every attempt, soft or hard, to reinsert authority into the system. Those who do not will become its domesticated managers.