It’s not a wrong take, I suppose. I’d frame it much differently. But, yeah.
“He is, after all, very stupid and very easy to control. And he’s ours. Good boy, Donald.”
In the guerrilla warfare against liberalisms institutions, the demagogue is always a tool of the fascist, and never the true fascist himself. Lenin. Stalin. Should Germany have prevailed, we might have found who Hitler’s true heir would have been. And it comes again … Trump. I promise you he’s just step one of the plan.
Mine involves two precepts: cooperation is better than violence. And the truth can be known. The fascist doesn’t really care which one of these he needs to disabuse you of. It only takes one. He’s happy to talk the language of Capitalism (Putin) or Communism (Xi) to you. Whatever it takes to get you to take a knee, and admit there’s no point in fighting it.
Although, I can imagine having it framed this way, could conceivably cause one to question for themselves, whether they want to be one?
If you read my narrative here, and your sentiments are the exact inverse of how I framed it here … then you are a fascist.
The liberals thought we did a pretty good job at fascist containment. But the fascist laid low and found weaknesses. It always knew if it was going to take down liberalism, it was going to be from the inside. So it buried itself in its institutions, and started looking for weaknesses.
When the time was just right, the fascists surrounded both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party (and yes, this is very much an America-centric conversation), and out popped populists on the left, and populists on the right. The 2008 Financial Crisis was the moment they waited for.
This is where all the famous “libertarians” line Rockwell, and Block and Hoppe, send out their troops to seize the Republican Party. They knew what they had to do. Goebbels had it all written down for them. He passed on the fascists knowledge of how to weaponize the human spirit against itself.
So it sought to establish the media infrastructure that would ultimately become the replacement media, having fully discredited the establishment, elevate a fool like Donald Trump, who we can control, with his stupid narcissism. But we’ve made the masses just so mad enough at the elites, and fueled this culture war, so expertly to bring us to this moment … that in your anger, which they so expertly controlled, as their father Goebbels intended of you, that you will hand control of your precious stupid little liberal institutions over to us. And our friends Putin, and Orban are waiting for us guys. “Let’s put these liberal fuckers down for good. We just need to get rid of thjs Trump guy, right after he blows this whole constitution thing up.” Then they’ll figure out what to do with Beijing and their Eastern totalitarianism, which they think is way less sexy than their paeanistic stuff. So they’ll fight that out later.
It’s what makes the Austrian school such a pernicious school of thought in my mind. It’s why its produced so many outright fascists! Its goal is to convince the liberal by their predilections to reason, to give up on any notion of a Greater Good.
Its goal is two-fold: to convince you there is no Greater Good (to sell you on cynicism). But if you’re just too romantic for that, convince you it’s impossible to know what the Greater Good is (so why try? Leave it to the market!)
The fascist wants to convince you of that, because he’s got big plans. And you’re in them. nostr:note10u7dshfqymr97cx66cwassrz98m35l26t7ut84745q9pzjdvmhlqgu9n5a
It’s what makes the Austrian school such a pernicious school of thought in my mind. It’s why it’s produced so many outright fascists! It’s goal is to convince the liberal by their predilections to reason, to give up on any notion of a Greater Good.
It always made perfect sense that fascists travelled in libertarian circles. There should have been, in retrospect, nothing at all surprising about it. If libertarianism is not met by a representative of the collective interest, fascism just comes out the other side. It should come as no surprise to true liberals that the fascist would want to convince you there is no collective interest. They’ll never convince socialists of that. That’s why they whisper in your ear.
The libertarian impulse is a beautiful, necessary and emancipatory part of the human spirit. Without it, we’d all already be in bondage. Or dead. But the libertarian impulse, improperly contained is ultimately self-destructive and closes in on its own contradictions. It should actually not that all be surprising, to find that when, uncontained, its contradictions emerge in the fascist tendency.
+1 on the Animal Farm reference. I might use it!
Someone privately asked me why I am wasting my time refuting the hyperbitcoinization narrative. They suggested that if I’m right, it doesn’t matter in the end. They also suggested this represents an unnecessary argument *within* the bitcoin conversation.
One, I don’t feel like I’m wasting my time at all. Because my goal isn’t even to convince people who hold the view that hyperbitcoinization is inevitable. In fact, given their predilection for simple, self-consistent narratives and their tendency to dismiss my attempts as nuance as a “lack of critical thinking skills”, I don’t actually expect to convince them of anything. But I do want to debate them, if for no other reason than I can test the strength of my own ideas. Which for me, is pretty important to being intellectually honest with one’s self. Alas, it does not surprise me that they refuse the opportunity of debate. Because, well, you can guess where I’m going.
The audience for things like this are always the unconvinced. The people who are coming to bitcoin for the first time and trying to make sense of it. I seek to give them a theory of bitcoin I think makes sense, and steers it towards its potential. That focuses people on believable use cases, that will hopefully, on balance direct research and development into more productive products and ideas.
Also, I am just generally fascinated by people who think they have everything figured out, and can smugly claim that something in the future is “inevitable”. I’ve never thought anything about the future is inevitable. To me, the future is an epistemic fog-of-war. The fact some people think they see it with overwhelming clarity (even in the narrow issue of money and markets) by playing forward some theory from a first principles foundation, says to me something about human nature that, quite frankly, I see as the seeds of fanaticism at worst, and sophistry at best.
As for the worry that I’m trying to create unnecessary discord within the bitcoin conversation, this just offends my intellectual and truth-seeking sensibilities. If I think something is wrong, and I feel strongly enough about it that I want to say something about it, then I’m going to. I don’t know what to tell you. Suggesting that it’s counterproductive to engage in a debate against a relatively popular strain of thought, in a field I work in, that I think is wrong, is just bizarre to me.
It’s the anti-intellectual golem showing up again.
This is actually beautiful.
When the crux of your argument is to just start demanding the other party subscribe to more simplistic categories of thought, you’re through the Dunning-Kruger looking class.
When they start dismissing nuance and complexity as a lack of critical thinking skills, you know you’ve come face to face with the golem of anti-intellectualism.
Is it true because you want it to be? Or is it true because it fits the facts?
Culture is an emergent epistemology. The relationship between an emergent epistemology and a person is the person's belief that it is best for their sentiments and goals.