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This is an editorial by Logan Bolinger, attorney and author of a free weekly newsletter on the intersection of Bitcoin, macroeconomics, geopolitics and law.
I am more interested in asking the question: The financial situation on a macro level is such that you have to financialize your entire existence, so why do you need to hyperfinancialize every aspect of your personal life? Is it really a victory for democracy, a victory for the mental and spiritual well-being of all of us and the life we want to live? This is basically the power of definancialization, a world where you can actually save money and not have to spend it, invest it, or speculate on anything, as opposed to something like Because we think it might be better to unlock a way to feel more fulfilled and satisfied as a person so that you can pursue other things. I think it’s about all of us collectively thinking less about money and thinking about other things that interest us.”
I recently made these statements episode In my podcast “What Did Bitcoin Do”, I talked about Bitcoin and its potential to bring about positive changes in our inner lives as opposed to the modern Web 3 state of affairs. A discussion about how people think.
We frequently discuss and theorize how Bitcoin reshapes or reconfigures our external reality, whether political, financial, or legislative.inner life, as a whole, can lead to dripping processes Up priorities and values.
I would like to talk about two different concepts of freedom. This is to explain why we stick with one or the other.When people describe themselves as “libertarian maximalists,” they are primarily concerned with negative liberties, liberties from Intrusive external constraints. This kind of freedom is obviously the most basic and most important. Without freedom from certain external constraints, the meaningful pursuit of self-actualization, the pursuit of positive freedom, is difficult, if not impossible.
We have focused too much on the negative freedom aspects of Bitcoin and not fully understood the positive freedoms it promotes.In other words, Bitcoin is protected from external intrusions and restrictions (freedom). from) We are not exploring how Bitcoin creates an environment in which we can more rigorously pursue our full expression (freedom). To).
[N.B. for my humanities/philosophy friends: Yes, I am drawing on the work of Isaiah Berlin with these positive/negative freedom terms]
Liberal maximalism, I would argue, cannot be met sustainably in the long run because it is not really a final state. It is a necessary marginal attitude, a means of achieving a particular environment in which positive freedom can be exercised productively. But it’s like you don’t know what you want to see. It’s like being free to pursue whatever you want without having any way of determining what you actually want to pursue or what is worth pursuing.
Americans are particularly sensitive to negative liberty ideas, but not particularly adept when it comes to positive liberty. If one makes a living, builds a following, and builds an entire identity around being a “liberal maximalist,” one’s livelihood and ego depend on the continued existence of external constraints that one condemns. . As writer Lewis Hyde once wrote about irony, a person can unwittingly (and almost unconsciously) become a bird who has grown to love cages.
So while maximal liberty (negative liberty) is very important, you should also pursue and prioritize what your wife has properly created. deliberate maximalism (Positive Freedom), it is a perspective and a way of life in our inner life. Bitcoin doesn’t get enough credit for its ability and potential to foster this kind of inward change.
What does intentional maximalism look like in our daily lives? One prominent example is our relationship with the unbridled consumerism that pervades the fiat currency system.
Let me share some statistics showing how skewed this relationship is.
According to the Los Angeles Times, the average American home has 300,000 items.
Around NPRthe average size of an American home has nearly tripled in size over the past 50 years.
Nonetheless, 1 in 10 Americans rent offsite. depositoryhas been the fastest growing segment of the commercial real estate industry in the last 40 years.
British research The average 10-year-old owns 238 toys, but uses only 12 each day.
The average American family spends $1,700 clothes an average of 65 pounds of clothing per year.
you get the idea. There is virtually no end to the ridiculous amount of shit we own and the growing space (physical and mental) this shit occupies.
Americans are consuming more than ever.
Source: Fred
No meaningful growth despite their purchasing power.
Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
What explains this? One factor is measuring the health of the economy in terms of spending. This is a fairly constant, Keynesian way of measuring economic vitality. Private consumption is about 70% of GDP. Reducing spending lowers indicators of economic health.
There’s also the fact that we see more ads than ever before.
But most importantly, time preferences, which I believe are part of the fabric of our culture, are widespread.
I think this is where Bitcoin comes into play. Much of this rat race-like consumption is time-priority behavior, incentivized by a fiat currency system that ensures that money loses its value over time. Your purchasing power is like the sand in an hourglass and you will work harder than ever just to maintain it, so consumer spending serves both practical and peaceful purposes. We are motivated to spend because not making or investing means our money just sits and loses value. Many of us have jobs that we don’t particularly enjoy.
Removing yourself from some of the rat race leaves you no room to think about money. That means you can be more intentional about everything else. Hence the idea of intentional maximalism. We regain the freedom to be positive, the freedom to pursue the highest expression of ourselves. In my opinion, Bitcoin is finally looking for a sustainable alternative to the rat race model.
It’s just a difference in values. Consumerism is the value of the fiat currency system. It is both a literal value and an ingrained behavior, as measuring consumption largely measures the health of the economy. By stifling ignorant, recursive consumption and encouraging lower time preferences, if Bitcoin continues to be adopted, we will be able to culturally express deeper things such as pursuits, relationships, creativity, community contribution, and existence. Offer a promise to come forward.
When it comes to this inner transformation, intentional maximalism, and the way Bitcoin is pushing us in that direction, I think Bitcoin shares some basic principles with minimalism. The movement has been around for a long time, but is gaining momentum to become more popular. in the last decade or so. Proponents of minimalism are mindful of the constraints that unchecked consumerism can impose on our experience of life, pursuing life with fewer unused and unnecessary possessions and allowing more freedom over one’s life. and control, and reclaim space to pursue what is important: a more purposeful pursuit of life.
Joshua Fields Milburn, Co-Founder theminimalists.comdescribes minimalism as: thing at all.
Bitcoin’s promise, in Milburn’s words, is that its sanity will make us forget to think about money all the time. , and/or victimized by the consumption and systematically forced pursuit of more and more money.
We spend a lot of time thinking about money (how to get money, how to make more money, how to make more money, how to deal with inflation, how to invest, how to spend money, what how to spend or get rich quick, how to pay bills, etc.). And to some extent this is always true. I am not advocating a platonic form of communism here.
But if money cannot maintain its value, it continues to depreciate, and the national debt is so large that it balloons, the health of a country’s economy is measured by consumption. Sex is pretty much everything we think about.
This is why I was so critical/skeptical of some of the suggestions elsewhere in the crypto world. Many of them seem to seek to financialize every nook and cranny of our lives.
By contrast, I think the implications and downstream implications of lowering our time preferences collectively would inevitably involve a decline in consumerism, to say the least. Imagine being able to finally save a healthy amount of money and spend more time and energy on the things that mean the most to you.
Again, I’m not envisioning a utopian end state where we’re all singing songs around a campfire (I enjoy singing and campfires). I’m talking about giving back some headspace and some presence to those who, out of necessity, have become accustomed to spending every waking moment thinking about money and consumption. , is talking about changes in our inner lives that make room for a more purposeful life. think.
Be a libertarian maximalist because it matters. But don’t stop there, because that alone won’t keep you feeling full in the long run. Also a deliberate maximalist.
Forced, constrained, and unintentionally within the statutory system, many live their lives as follows:
I think Bitcoin is trying to get around this.
This is a guest post by Logan Bolinger. Opinions expressed are entirely his own and do not necessarily reflect those of his BTC Inc. or Bitcoin Magazine.
