All right. So Lucas and I again are here today. We're talking about software, a novel theory on power projection and the national strategic significance of Bitcoin. That's Jason Lowry's thesis. We have a PDF of that. There's also a book, but we have the PDF, which is floating around online.
We've gone through chapters one through three, and today we're on chapter four. The previous conversations are also out there. Chapter four is power projection tactics in human society. The last conversation was about power projection tactics in nature.
So this is building off of that as a foundation of kind of general principles that are relevant to animals. Now we're in the domain of humans, obviously more relevant as we move to the general thesis of this whole work, which is something like Bitcoin is a form of cyber warfare that can be used, as we'll learn today, to possibly counter the dysfunctions of abstract power.
Bitcoin being a form of physical power that one can project into cyberspace, it may be able to
help alleviate some of the dysfunctions we see with something Lowry is going to call abstract
power. So what I'll do now is, as I did last time, give kind of a general rambling introduction,
or not introduction, rambling summary of chapter four. It's going to be so this thesis is really
interesting, because as we learned in chapter two, over methodology, it's a grounded theory,
is the methodology that's being used.
And so what the grounded theory framework does
is it encourages drawing from lots of different areas
as you're analyzing the data
to come up with the data with fresh perspectives
and then be able to code the data
based on those perspectives.
So we see a lot of different perspectives in this chapter.
And I'm going to build a machine here
using the parts of the chapter,
but I'm not going to say all of the pieces
that go into that machine
because that would just be me reading the whole chapter.
There's a lot of interesting stuff in here.
I'll hopefully get enough of the concepts on the table
that Lucas and I can kind of click on the hyperlinked things
that I throw out and expand as necessary.
But in any case, so as I mentioned,
last chapter we talked about power projection tactics in nature,
about how organisms use physical power to settle intraspecies disputes
regarding their dominance hierarchy.
animals. We heard an evolutionary story last time about how animals evolved into pack animals
cooperating in groups. Humans are now like groups of apes moving around. There's packs of wolves.
Intraspecies disputes arrive regarding pecking order, regarding who gets property within that
pack. And so physical power projection emerged as a way to settle those intraspecies power disputes.
The wolves' snarl was a way to project power using watts.
And so we learned how that helped with the systemic security of the pack because it rewarded those who were most fit and able to project power.
It rewarded the strongest and most intelligent that they then survived, reproduced, and through evolution produced a stronger pack.
pack. We then learned about the opposing phenomena of domestication in which a pack became weaker
if it selected for things other than strength or intelligence as humans did when we domesticated
wolves and turned them into dogs who are very exploitable. As much as we love them, we love them
because they're not powerful and we can do with them as we want, make them our friends by force.
So that brings us to today. We're talking about, again, now power projection in human societies.
So humans are different from animals.
We develop our intelligence is what separates us from animals.
Abstract thinking is big for this section.
So intelligence develops as a power projection technique.
For humans, it ramps up very quickly and escapes that of what animals are possible of doing.
Because humans are possible of abstract thinking.
Our brains develop very rapidly.
They develop a lot of, they consume a lot of energy.
We harness fire to feed our brains by cooking meat to pre-digest it, getting lots of nutrients.
And so we have this evolutionary ramping up of intelligence, which helps us survive.
We develop a capacity for abstract thinking, for imagining the world not as it is, but developing ideas and concepts and beliefs that are not actually in the world.
So one of the things we do is we develop this capacity for abstract thinking.
we develop a theory of mind, which is us putting ourselves in the shoes of other conscious entities.
So that helps us to model predator and prey, do hunting simulations in our head as we're evolving,
to outsmart our prey and to further become a sort of apex predator and continue developing our intelligence.
This sort of this type of abstract thinking we develop is a form of imagination.
Again, we can form ideas, images, concepts that are independent of sensory input.
So it's kind of like constructing a pattern in your head of your expectation or hypothesis about the world that we develop abstractly and then verify through sensory input.
This abstract thinking gives us lots of kind of evolved superpowers.
We develop storytelling and complex communication to convey to others the results of our internal hunting simulations about how we could potentially better hunt our prey.
Through storytelling, again, this evolved abstract form of intelligence that allows us to tell stories, we can create abstract realities that evoke emotion.
We all know what it means to tell a good story, hear a good story, to explain natural phenomena, imbue them with meaning, and also to begin defining what is good and bad, to create abstract systems like morality and ethics.
Abstract powers like storytelling also allow us to cooperate with other humans beyond Dunbar's number of 150, the limit that we would usually have based on memory or physical interaction with others.
We can create a shared story that shows that we all have a similar belief and so allows trust among greater numbers of people that there is this developing story of the tribe, the clan, the religion, the nation state.
So our abstract thinking is enabling us to scale up cooperation.
We also, our abstract thinking helps us to assuage the guilt that we develop. As part of our theory of mind, this capacity we develop with abstract thinking to imagine what other conscious things are thinking. That also helps us imagine empathically the suffering of other animals. And so we develop ways to justify our killing and exploitation of animals through elaborate belief systems, rituals, religions.
So we have this, again, revolving a capacity of abstract thinking. This leads to us inhabiting two realities. There's the objective physical world, which is the world we have with animals, other humans, energy, space, matter, time, like the real world you can touch, see, feel, lick, whatever you want to do with it.
There's the objective physical world, and then there's also the subjective abstract world.
That's the non-physical world of thoughts and beliefs that our abstract thinking is creating inside of us, which we can also share with other humans through language.
But again, now we have these two worlds.
However, for humans, these two worlds kind of mix and intertwine.
Again, this abstract thinking is a way to create patterns, hypotheses, beliefs about the world that we superimpose on it.
We then update those beliefs in real time as we interact with the world. But we really can't turn off that abstract thinking capacity. We see faces in trees, you know, we see lines on the page, and they arrive in our consciousness already as words, we hear sounds arriving already as language.
And so in that way, objective and subjective worlds intermix for humans. And we have a problem verifying sometimes what is real and what is just our abstract thinking about what is real. We can see this even like nowadays, it's tough for us to metacognitively, that is, thinking about thinking, to realize when we're actually afraid of something that's not real.
For example, if you see a scary movie, it's triggering some sort of, you know, you have an abstract conception of what the world might hold.
You know it's false metacognitively, and yet you still feel afraid.
So in that way, humans, we, again, are mixing objective and subjective worlds through this evolved capacity of abstract thinking because we see our patterns onto the world that we try to verify with our senses.
and even when we can't verify, we still sometimes hold on to our abstract beliefs and believe,
okay, yeah, there was something on the screen there.
It's still recording.
It just took a blip because it said you got interrupted somehow.
I did.
Yeah, go back.
So where I was at again, we have this evolved capacity of abstract thinking that leads us
to construct a subjective world, which we mix with the objective world and oftentimes
have difficulty telling the two apart.
So this then leaves us with the rise of a new form of power called, which Lowry calls abstract power, and hierarchies, dominance hierarchies based on the use of abstract power instead of physical power.
So let's get there.
What does that mean?
Again, we have developed a theory of mind that makes us not want to kill because we have empathy and we can imagine the suffering of other creatures.
And so we develop abstract belief systems to help us.
We don't want to also hurt or kill our fellow man, so we develop belief systems to help us resolve pecking order and intraspecies, dominance hierarchies without violence.
We do this abstractly by developing belief systems where we invest some individuals with power to settle disputes. We have judges, priests, chiefs, god kings, presidents. They adjudicate and settle disputes instead of us doing it with physical power displays like snarling or physical contests.
Instead of watts, that is, we begin to use things like rank and title, designated forms of authority that are conferred by a belief system on certain individuals.
We, again, as we do this, as we've constructed these beliefs, these abstract belief systems and overlaid them onto the world, map onto territory, it's not a perfect one-to-one fit.
And we begin to confuse our abstractions with real things.
We see maybe priests as actually holy, kings as actually powerful, a person doing something
as actually just and believe that those concepts are real things in the world, justice, holiness,
power, the powerfulness of the king, his goodness, his divine right.
These are all abstractions, but humans, again, have difficulty separating their belief-based
abstractions from the actual physical world, just given some of the peculiarities of our
evolved abstract intelligence.
One of those, I mean, just to mention an example of that, that maybe helps us see why we sometimes have difficulty separating abstraction from reality is evolutionarily, if you see a stick and you overcorrect and believe that it's a snake because you've developed a pattern for seeing snakes in windy, thin objects, then you jump away in fear when you see the stick, but it's an error.
But when you actually see the snake, you are likely to overcorrect and see more snakes instead of less snakes, which is good in the long run because it's better to jump away when you see a stick rather than not jump away when you actually see a snake because you haven't decided if it really is a snake.
So again, our abstract patterns about how we see the world become confused with the world we actually inhabit.
We have ideology-tinted glasses that we always view the world through.
So this gets us to these dominance hierarchies, which are essential to pack animals, as we learned last time.
In nature, there's a physical power-based hierarchies based on the wolf scenario.
Now we see the development in humans of abstract power-based hierarchies.
Again, these are hierarchies based on development of belief systems that designate power to certain individuals to adjudicate disputes about property, the priest, the judge, the president, the god king.
What's the difference between a physical power-based hierarchy and an abstract power-based hierarchy?
Abstract power-based hierarchies are based on trust.
You have to believe in the system and you have to trust that the gatekeeper who is the one who gives permission and decides right to property and settles disputes, you have to believe in them.
You have to convey their trust and buy into the system.
Physical power-based hierarchies are zero trust.
They're based on Watts.
Watts are objective ways to dominate another thing by displacing matter, mass.
Abstract-based hierarchies are permission-based because, again, they give permission to the priest, the judge, the god-king to determine, as a gatekeeper, to determine who gets what property and what rights are conveyed.
Power-based hierarchies are permissionless.
Everybody can participate and potentially access all of the resources.
Abstract power-based hierarchies are inegalitarian because they're based on title, rank, and things that are conferred abstractly and then just given value by virtue of the system.
Physical power-based hierarchies are egalitarian.
Everybody has equal access to Watts and can vote with what they think the proper distribution of property should be through their deployment of Watts.
So physical power, zero trust, permissionless, egalitarian.
Abstract power-based dominance hierarchies based on trust, permission-based, and inegalitarian.
And abstract power-based hierarchies do have a couple of advantages, which is why we adopt them. They are less energy intensive. You don't deploy watts. They're just based on belief. You can buy into a belief system with no expenditure of energy, which allows abstract power-based systems to scale very quickly and to allow large numbers of people to cooperate and be a part of the same tribe, clan, city-state, nation-state.
That's one benefit of an abstract power-based hierarchy.
Another one is that they are less prone to cause harm because we're adjudicating disputes.
We're deciding pecking order based on designations of rank, title, conferred, privilege, and
entitlement, and not based on physical power projection displays like snarling or grappling
or something like that.
Drawbacks, though, of abstract power-based hierarchies.
There's really two, and these are kind of key to, I think, understanding the rest of
the chapter and the later deployment of Bitcoin as a solution to the dysfunctions of abstract
power-based hierarchies, the two drawbacks to using abstract power to adjudicate disputes or to
kind of define the dominance hierarchy in a society. One is the possibility of oppression,
that's abuse within the system, because again, you're conferring upon some people as priests,
presidents, judges, the power to determine and settle disputes. And so those individuals can then
abuse the code of society, manipulate it, do things for themselves, not correctly decide who
should get the piece of property, the right in question. So that's oppression. That's one drawback.
Another drawback is invasion from the outside. So oppression is like the threat from within an
abstract power-based hierarchy. The second drawback is invasion, the threat from without.
People outside the system. So an abstract power-based hierarchy is not decided based on physical power. We saw with animals that when a pack animal does not have a dominance hierarchy based on physical power projection, that pack then selects in the long term for characteristics that are not good for the fitness of that pack, clan, tribe, or whatever.
And so you get a weaker thing overall, leading to threats from the outside coming in and dominating that pack. Same with humans. If humans have a hierarchy that selects for things that are things other than strength, intelligence, ability to project power, it makes them potentially subject to invasion from the outside as you have a large group of people cooperating based on an abstract power-based dominance hierarchy, amassing resources, but not also scaling their ability to protect those resources all the time.
because they don't have a meritocratic principle that's determining who gets the resources,
but rather something like divine right or rank or privilege, you know, something that's
converted based on the belief system that defines that abstract power-based hierarchy.
So Lowry's point is that, you know, so this actually leads to more war.
We have these abstract power-based hierarchies as humans because we're skittish.
We don't like physical power.
We don't like violence.
we're trying to avoid conflict, but it actually leads to more war. The oppression from within,
that threat from within, the dysfunctions of abuse within the system encourage internal
revolution. That's how the United States began. There's violent revolution when people perceive
the abstract power-based hierarchy they're a part of as exploiting them. And so that encourages the
threat from within as a result as a response to oppression in that way wars have decentralized
power abstract power-based hierarchies tend to encourage large numbers of people to cooperate
and so to centralize power but as they become more oppressive wars happen and tend to break them up
national borders then emerge and we have different you can look at the map nowadays and see the
different nation states and each of those nation states has national borders that are kind of
separating off different abstract belief systems that govern those states.
So we have more wars when we have abstract power-based systems because we have oppression
that leads to revolutions.
Also, we have invasions from without.
Again, as you have an abstract power belief system, a group cooperates more and more,
masses resources.
But if they don't also scale their ability to repel outsiders by rewarding strength and
intelligence, then they make themselves subject to attack.
In this, Lowry develops the point meticulously that he's not against war. In fact, wars provide an irreplaceable social and technical benefit to humanity. So abstract power-based hierarchies lead to more war in this way. But war in itself, he's careful to say, is not bad. War breaks up centralized power.
And so it ensures that we don't have one world government. We don't just develop an abstract power-based hierarchy that consumes the earth. As oppression develops within such a hierarchy, revolutions happen, power is decentralized. This is a good thing.
Pacifism, indeed, he says, is a security hazard because it makes pack animals, cooperative societies, abstract power-based hierarchies, whoever adopts it, it's a security hazard that makes them vulnerable to predators.
so warfare
Lowry argues
ends up causing more warfare
abstract power based hierarchies
scale cooperation
and so increase the size
of the number of humans cooperating
but also the benefit of attacking those humans
because of the resources they accumulate
and so as they scale
these abstract power based hierarchies
in order to survive their neighbors
they also have to scale militarily
And so a shelling point between scaled cooperative societies is the deployment of a military, shelling point being a point of agreed strategic arrangement between two parties in a game-theoretic competition.
Nation-states realize if one nation-state has a military, another nation-state also is going to need to have a military.
So because abstract power-based hierarchies can scale very quickly, it takes nothing to buy into them. They're not energy intensive. They do scale very quickly. They become ripe targets for attack. So they deploy militaries to defend themselves, and then they scale militarily. That tends to encourage war.
Also, what encourages war is government dysfunction, decentralized power, again, under an abstract power-based system, is rife with systemic exploitation, abuse, oppression, which causes warfare. So war causes war. As societies scale up based on these abstract power-based hierarchies in these nation-states, we see wars continue to happen.
So we, in these abstract power-based hierarchies, again, it's necessary to scale militarily because all of the other societies are scaling militarily too. So societies are deploying first, you know, cavalry and then tanks and then airplanes.
And you can see like this arrow going up and to the right as far as deploying kinetic power, kinetic physical power, until we see nowadays we've actually reached a kinetic stalemate with the deployment of strategic nuclear weapons.
because we have this need to keep on scaling the cost of attack, the need to keep on scaling the
cost we can impose on others who attack us. We have scaled ourselves completely out of the
possibility of practical warfare by developing strategic nuclear arms because those present
the possibility of mutually assured destruction. We can't have two nuclear powers engaged in all
out warfare. And so what's happened is these kind of small surrogate wars, cold wars, trade wars,
where maybe in some battlefield,
there's like a scaled down kinetic conflict
that is kind of a surrogate war, proxy war.
But Lowry notes that even those scaled down wars
are going to keep on scaling up.
Even if we don't deploy nuclear arms,
we're going to see the scaling up
of those smaller scale conflicts
with the arrival of AI powered drones
or something like that.
He says that this is just the nature of,
again, the evolutionarily impelled need to keep on scaling up cost of attack so that you can protect
the resources as other abstract power-based hierarchies are also scaling up their cost of
attack. So the trap is that it seems like, well, there is no peace because peace would require a
world without predators and humans are simply evolved apex predators. So there will not be that.
But stalemate, there can also not be like a perfect stalemate that will lead to peace and
nuclear armed powers in perfect stalemate. Because as we've shown, once you have an abstract
power-based hierarchy, you still have oppression if there's not wars to come in and break up
and decentralize oppressive hierarchies. So we can't have a nuclear stalemate,
and there's going to be wars. So what Lauer thinks we need then is human antlers. This goes
back to the last chapter. Deer antlers evolved as a way to have physical power-based competition
that reduced the potential for harm within those conflicts, deer, butt antlers, instead
of doing something that instead would cause them serious physical harm.
So we need a form of non-kinetic physical power that is zero trust, permissionless, and
egalitarian to provide for competition, non-kinetic, in that it won't cause harm, but physical
power, not abstract power.
And we need that physical power-based competition to be able to scale indefinitely without becoming too deadly because, again, the nature of abstract power-based hierarchies as rival packs of humans is that they're always going to be in conflict with each other, defending their own resources, and so wanting to increase those resources, and so needing to also increase the cost to others of coming in and taking those resources.
So we need to develop a form of warfare that's physical power-based, so it's not based purely on abstract power, and that also can scale indefinitely without becoming too deadly.
That leads to his final point that he leaves us with in this chapter, is that maybe that's going to be electronic antlers, some way to compete in cyberspace with energy by moving charges along resistors rather than forces displacing mass in the real world.
And we know, of course, that he's going to go on to argue that that's Bitcoin.
So that was a ton. I feel like I ran through that and there's so much there and you can zoom in on any one point and it becomes very interesting because there's a lot of foundation that's laid for each of the points I said. And I hope I got it out all out coherently, but I guess help me patch any holes there that that made no sense.
No, you did it all. We can just shut down, go home.
Shut down, right on.
I got Thanksgiving dinner to help make, and, you know, so we're good.
No, that was brilliant, as always.
I think you did an incredible job of running through kind of what Lowry is The brilliant thing about this is like I think we heard you seen the word Bitcoin like a couple times in the first 140 pages of this book right
He's laying the groundwork.
He is going through this grounded theory methodology in order to just walk us up to the gate and then take us on through.
So I think it's brilliant.
I think you can summarize this entire chapter with my favorite quote by Thomas Sowell, which is that there are no choices in life, only tradeoffs, right?
So we as humans, we have abstract, you know, capability of abstract thought, which makes us an apex predator and separates us from all other things.
But he goes on to make the point that not only do we have the capability to abstract thought, we can't turn it off.
Like we are not only benefiting from it, we're also in some ways prisoners to it.
And so we're always in this realm of seeking, seeking me.
One thing that I wanted to point out, because I found this really interesting, this is something that I had kind of studied myself,
was he talks about the objective versus subjective reality and how our eyes take in a visual field and our brains then make meaning of it.
So one thing that I learned, like every other mid-30s white guy from Andrew Huberman, which is that our visual cortex is everything, right?
We have five senses, and over half of our brain power is dedicated to the visual cortex.
Eyes are an external part of the central nervous system, and they are prioritizing threats at all times.
And the reason they're prioritizing threats is because of evolution, because we basically have the same brain for, say, maybe 300,000 years, maybe 50,000 years, but truly maybe only in the last couple hundred years, really, have we been able to live in a world that was not really, really dangerous at all times.
A couple thousand years ago, you stub your toe, you might die.
You eat the wrong, like the food is not labeled.
The dogs are not dogs.
They're wolves, and they're not on leashes.
The lions are not in cages.
This is a world that wherever you ventured to, you were constantly vigilant in order to stave off attacks.
The most important thing was that you didn't get hurt, was that you didn't contract an illness,
was that you didn't eat the wrong thing, step on the wrong thing, go the wrong way.
Like it was so life and death.
Like literally anything that you go visit your dentist for that's not a regular checkup,
anything that you've ever been to the ER for, half of the things that I've eaten,
I was like, expiration date, shm expiration date, right?
Like those things could have killed you previous.
And so it makes sense that you're prioritizing these threats.
But then, as John Verveke talks about in his work, is that not only do we take that in through a filter, because we're prioritizing threats, but then it goes into the brain where it goes through a second filter.
And that second filter is searching for meaning.
That second filter is searching for symbolism.
So every bit of reality that we experience is filtered twice before we even get to.
And also, most people, and it's a blissful existence, I think, most people are blissfully unaware of this.
And so when your subjective reality maps to your own definition of objective reality, great, because everything lines up in your world.
But if you know that I'm capable of misperceiving threats, I'm capable of making judgments that are inaccurate because I'm merely, I have this brain that, God help it, it loves me.
And all it wants me to do is get all the calories I can, but that's why I'm eating 20 Krispy Kremes at a time.
That's why I am laying in bed telling myself I need to rest instead of going out for a walk or going to lift weights.
It's why you avoid the things that may feel as though they can be difficult.
The beginning of this chapter, he starts with this quote by Alex Carroll,
man cannot remake himself without suffering, for he is both the marble and the sculptor.
What else is there to say about that?
Yeah.
That every, nothing great happens overnight.
Every overnight success that you've ever heard of, be it physically or even, you know, relationship-wise or in business, every one of them was a decade or more in the making.
You talk like some names that are like the top of the public consciousness now, especially on X, would be like Alex Hormose.
Guy went broke twice.
Chris Williamson from the podcast Modern Wisdom, he just, I think, passed 3 million subscribers.
I want to say he did like 500 episodes before he ever had multiple thousands or something.
Those aren't exactly accurate, but they're generally speaking accurate.
It's just you must continue to suffer.
You must continue to do the thing over and over and over again.
Yeah.
Because the rewards are late to come. It's the work that you do today that will be rewarded next month, next year, a decade from now.
Yeah.
So, yeah, I think that's – yeah, go ahead.
No, yeah, I think it's maybe not so strange that we have abstract power-based hierarchies because people want to escape all of the ways that the world is harmful, some of which you mentioned.
I mean, we want to create belief systems that are going to accept us from things like predation and the struggle that we all of the ways that we see animals acting.
We want to create belief systems that make an exception for ourselves and that make it so maybe we don't have to suffer that these types of ways that are uncomfortable for us.
Maybe we can create a belief system in which humans don't have to worry about things like that.
And so people are then going to buy in to those things and give up the dog-eat-dog world in which suffering is normal. Humans reshape themselves as a material that feels the suffering while it's being reshaped, but that's a necessity.
So maybe, you know, it's understandable why we begin to get into these abstract power-based hierarchies. They also alleviate some of the most existential pangs we have, like the thought of death. We see the first, Lowry notes this, kind of the first types of abstract power-based hierarchies are parallel to the observance that, like, we begin to see people buried in a way that shows consciousness of an afterlife.
And we see them also buried in a way that shows a abstract power-based hierarchy in play because some people get more elaborate burial rites than others. And so we want to insulate ourselves from all of the terrible things in the world, the terrible evolutionary struggle we see amongst animals, the struggles we feel with our brethren, the fratricidal impulses that might arise in a feeling of anger.
We want to will and wish these things away. And so we buy into a belief system. And we see that others have bought into that belief system, too, because they have these same, again, the same existential delays of being human and being consciousness.
David Foster Wallace said, consciousness is nature's nightmare. We're the only animal that has that theory of mind where not only can we empathically see and feel and understand the suffering of other animals, but we recursively reflect on our own state as an entity that has a finite amount of time on Earth in which we're going to die. And what does that mean?
And so we construct these abstract power-based belief systems in which we give certain individuals, shamans, priests, the ability to tell us what is right and wrong, give us permission slips for what it's going to take to get into paradise, right?
And then these things rapidly get out of control.
Lowry notes, we get things like god kings in Egypt and mass enslaved populations because they've subjected themselves to the permission slips of somebody who can tell a good story about what an afterlife consists of or what your role or meaning in this earth is.
And so it's very understandable that we have abstract thoughts that govern the way that we operate in the world. But metacognitively, maybe it's helpful, as you know, if we can see the value in suffering and escape from those and enter a much, much harsher but realer world in which we're free from the oppression of people who are telling us a nice story.
Yeah. Yeah. So that's like, that's the allure of the woke mind virus, right? Which was that you, if you ascribe to that theory and everyone else around you does, then you are able to have status that is solely based upon something that you identify with, not that you earn meritocratically.
And you can see, by the way, and you mentioned this, by the way, how fast that's cooperation at scale.
If you have this type of ideology that people, they want to ascribe to this type of abstract order because most people will not be the best.
Like just by definition, most people will not be on top of the hierarchy.
Almost all of them will be on the lower rungs.
And so it's very attractive to want to join in, to want to be part of something that delineates power based upon trust or based upon this mutual signaling.
Virtue signaling, I guess, would be the way that we talk about it.
with the example that I'm giving.
Yeah.
But what happens?
I just want to reassert that that's such a great example,
like a woke mind virus or the woke set of beliefs in that it does,
it conveys abstract power to people based on an idea of intersectionality
that the number, that however many boxes you can check on the victim scorecard
of race and unprivileged race, unprivileged gender, unprivileged class,
that's the within that abstract power-based hierarchy it conveys power to you based on
those things so there's somebody who has defined um a way of settling disputes in that way is based
on an idea of intersectionality do you have a set of protect or unprivileged disprivileged whatever
characteristics i think that's a great example of what we might see as a form of abstract power that
is susceptible with the prick of a pen to disappearing once people realize that it's
not based on on a real thing that physical power can supplant that exactly yeah that's exactly where
i was going with that which was that you can like that again that all works until it doesn't work
and when it doesn't work and you you said um one of the things you said was that there's like
one of the downsides of this was that there's a possibility of oppression and violence down the
road, but I would argue that there is a guarantee of oppression and that there is a guarantee
because in these systems of abstracting based on rank, like what is rank?
Rank is like enforced oppression, right?
So it's this person has this thing and you dare not challenge it, you know, lest, you
know, lest you face violence, right?
Because otherwise you would challenge it, you know, and that's, I can't remember who
it was.
I heard somebody talk about like why the woke mind virus spread so rapidly throughout Hollywood.
And they said it wasn't because people believed it.
It was just because they feared retribution.
And like that's violence.
Like it's violence inherent.
By the way, this, when I was reading this, what this made me think of was the scene in Monty Python when the king comes along.
And he sees the two peasants and he's like, you old woman.
And he's like, I'm not a woman.
I'm Dennis.
You know, like first thing, hilarious, because this was 35 years ago and somebody's making
a joke about misgendering somebody.
Awesome.
But also goes on to say, you know, like, I'm the king of the Britons.
And they're like, who are the Britons?
He's like, we're all Britons.
Like, I'm your king.
He's like, I didn't vote for you.
Like, you're not my king.
You know, like, you know, like just because you say you are, just because you wear this
hat, just because you have this patch, you that other people recognize, see how far that
gets you when somebody comes in and chooses not to recognize that and chooses to instead
enforce their own hierarchy with power.
And it just, it is, this is, this is that imagination.
This is that illusion.
And it just bursts, right?
Yeah.
By the way, well, let me finish.
Yeah, yeah.
The reason why I say this is all, it's not why it's a guarantee, why it's not a possibility of oppression, it's not a possibility, blah, blah, blah.
It's because it requires trust.
Trust is an attack vector.
When you trust something, then you open yourself up to that trust being broken, et cetera, however you want to put it.
But the way that I think about this, and Jason talks about this.
He grew up, his grandpa is a cattle farmer, cattle rancher, and we grew up with cattle.
And one thing that I can tell you about cattle is that if you put cattle into a pasture and there is a hole in the fence, they will find it.
It's not a possibility.
It is a guarantee.
They will find it and they will get out.
And what is that?
Like that's an attack vector.
Like that's an escape valve, right?
Yeah.
Anyways, that's just like, that's the analogy I just kept thinking of when I was going through
this part, which is like cows, cows get out.
Yeah.
No, I was get out.
No, definitely.
An abstract power-based hierarchy is going to have to, I mean, the rules that it constructs
are kind of written on water in a sense, in that even if they're committed to paper, they're
always subject to revision by whatever authority wrote the rules.
And there's always going to be, as Jason notes in here, kind of manipulable parts of the rules
or code.
He's later going to go on in the next chapter to talk about software as the new form of written law, I believe.
But in any case, the rule of law is always manipulable, exploitable, with some sort of open texture that's going to allow for a new interpretation.
Any abstract power-based hierarchy is you state that it's oppressive, and I think that Lowry agrees with you.
So he kind of gives like, how can you kind of generally describe an abstract power-based dominance hierarchy?
Or how would you go about creating one if you were an innovative storyteller and you wanted to, you know, enslave in that sense a set of humans, right?
You would first construct, delineate a desired state of being, he says.
You construct like this category of the saved, the category of the worthy, the category of the one, the patriotic, whatever it is.
you first define the valuable state of being. And then two, you note that there's a gatekeeper
who can determine who satisfies the criteria to ascend to that desired state of being.
So first, you create a gated area defined by the desired state of being, and then you
nominate a gatekeeper who's going to let people in and out. You're patriotic, you're not. You're
worthy, you're not. You're saved, you're not. That's, in a nutshell, an abstract power-based
hierarchy is a gated heir and a gatekeeper. As we talked about last time, the word paradise
etymologically means walled garden, and it is about adjudicating who is allowed in and who
is defined as much by who's allowed in as who is not allowed in. And so you have, again,
to your point, that all of these types of gated structures with a gatekeeper who gives out
permission slips is inherently oppressive. Lowry says, as soon as a population nominates someone to
be their gatekeeper, they become subservient to that gatekeeper. In parentheses, then,
as a side note, this could be one reason why a popular mantra within the Bitcoin community is to
slay your heroes, because they instinctively recognize this passive aggressive power projection
technique of nominating a gatekeeper who can then give out permission slips to those who are allowed
to ascend to the desired state of being. And so in a sense, every abstract power-based hierarchy
is oppressive in that sense. We should be acknowledged, though, that we live in an
abstract power-based hierarchy modified to a certain extent. We have a constitution in the
United States that defines a set of abstract powers, who gets to determine who has what
piece of property. All of this is underlied, finally, by the use of force in the United
States military. And we all, we have a second amendment to this kind of this clause that was
hard earned that allows us to potentially break up our own government if it becomes too centralized,
oppressive and powerful. But I just want to note that we are part of an abstract power-based
hierarchy and we can acknowledge that maybe, as you say, maybe those all are to a certain extent
oppressive by the very structure. Yeah. Well, I think, I mean, the most clear part of that is like
So we'll get off the woke mind virus thing quick because it's gross.
But how fast it spread, like really fast.
You could go back maybe, I don't know, 2012-ish or something like that.
I listened to somebody link it from Occupy Wall Street to E2 to Black Lives Matter or something like that.
Like all these different causes where it just kind of kept accelerating.
I found that really interesting.
Just the apex of the woke mind virus was ideas are dangerous, right?
Was that words, thoughts, abstract thought is dangerous because it challenges the hierarchy that exists.
And therefore you can't, you know, we literally were living through that 1984 scenario,
the thought police and the censorship, you know, the truth, ministry of truth.
and all of that.
But see how quickly it's popped.
Like, I mean, the way that you know it was like you can look at the,
you can look at the viewership levels of like traditional media since the election.
Like they were already in a steep downward decline and had been for like 30 years.
But since then, it's like gone.
Like gone, gone, gone, right?
It's just, it doesn't exist.
And people are walking around.
And this is why, by the way, I think it's so perfectly timely impression that we're having these discussions right now is because you have so many people right now that are just walking around.
Mark Andreessen, yesterday I heard him on a podcast, you know, Morning in America.
This is hearkening back to that day of like, let's shake off whatever it was that was this cold, dark shroud that laid upon us.
But I wanted to go back. You made a point about the rules change. And that's really something so dangerous about dangerous. I don't know. But it's so fallible about the abstract hierarchies is that the rules can change. Did you ever read the book? What's the matter with Kansas? Do you remember that?
Thomas Frank, that was sort of like a diagnosis of why Kansas is sometimes votes Democrat, although it's very conservative in nature.
Is that the thought or that thesis?
Well, I guess maybe that's maybe that's what his intent was.
When I read it, what I got from it was he was questioning, like, come Kansas has not become more politically liberal like everyone else.
And I was thinking, like, I remember I was like, well, if you take, like, the state and, like, the positions that they held in 1860, they were just consistent.
I mean, they were just kind of stayed the same.
I mean, they certainly moved left, but they just didn't move extreme left.
And it was like, it was this weird thing because, like, that's kind of, again, part of, like, the woke mind thing, which is that it was calling out, like, hey, you didn't change with us.
Like we changed all the rules and you didn't change with us.
You just stayed consistent.
And so you're the problem.
Yeah.
You know, you're the, you're the, you're the thumb sticking up, you know, you're the,
you're the, uh, you're the nail sticking up that must be hammered.
But the flip side of that is war warfare is, it's just, it's merely the way that we've,
we've always competed because there did not exist a non-lethal means of power projection
competitions like but war has rules with you know military age males no women no children
no elderly you respect you respect you resist using certain types of weapons certain types of
strategies and those that break the rules like they are viewed as dishonorable they're viewed
as criminals, they're viewed as evil, and they are. They are because they broke the rules. They
violated this inviolable thing that measures on, I guess you call it, yeah, I mean, power projection
is truly meritocratic. Despite the tragedy of war, few of the participants in it are ever of
the mindset to win at all costs. And we know this because we've had nuclear weapons for 70,
80, 80 years, 80 years. And I mean, if that was the case, then every time somebody had a little
dispute, they'd be like, boom, like mushroom cloud, you're done, right? We respect the rules
of the competition. And so I think warfare, I really like I'm coming to view as I read this
book, I'm coming to view warfare as not a permanent thing, but merely the physical embodiment
of something that we had yet to be able to put into the abstract world.
Like, now put it in cyberspace.
Yeah.
And think, and he'll make this case, which actually I've been saving it, so like, I'm
literally just reading this chapter by chapter, I'm not going all the way, but I think he'll
make this case is that we will go that way. Like we, we naturally went to warfare because that's
what made sense, but we also naturally had rules because that's what made sense. And we, we went
to those things and I think we'll naturally go to power projection competitions in cyberspace
because it makes sense because all wars are wars of attrition. Like all wars are wars of attrition.
It's just one side quits when it no longer sees a positive or acceptable benefit-to-cost ratio.
Wars are fought because they are beneficial because to the winner, there is a high benefit-to-cost ratio.
There's a positive and, you know, accepted, but it's for the one who just hangs in the longest, who's there till the end.
And the difference that we have now is that we have wars that will not be,
cyberspace will not be wars of attrition.
Wars in cyberspace will be wars of accretion because the participants in those battles
will be seeking cheaper and cheaper power, free energy,
in order to power their competition so that they can stay in it longer
because all Bitcoin mining is is a war of attrition.
It's power and attrition.
Like when the price goes down and it's no longer profitable for you to mine, you have to stop mining.
And it forces you the volatility again.
And this is this is what Saylor is teaching the world right now is that volatility is beneficial Because volatility it shakes out the weak it rewards the strong it shakes out the inefficient it rewards the efficient
Yeah.
It's the game, like, this is the aim, like, the point of the game is not to win, the point of the game is to keep playing.
Like, this is what I loved about baseball growing up.
like so much different from all the other sports is that there's no clock in baseball.
At least there wasn't until they ruined it and they put a clock on the pitcher, right?
I think that the point of war is to win war.
It's not, I mean, it's not-
No, you're right.
You're right.
Yeah, that.
Yeah.
But I was also going to say, like, to back up a step, I do think that even the rules of warfare
are an abstract, our attempt to impose abstractly restrictions on what otherwise, like, and so
So war has no limitations.
The limitation to war is only now the threat of mass extinction because we went past the kinetic ceiling.
We now have arms so powerful that it's practically useless to use them because there's this idea of mutually assured destruction.
If we deploy strategic nuclear arms, then other countries will do so as well, those that have them.
And so it's just there's no reason to do them.
They've scaled ourselves out of kinetic warfare, so to speak.
And that doesn't mean that kinetic stalemate is always still going to be there.
It's never going away.
And so, you know, if we begin fighting wars in cyberspace through human out of the loop energy competitions, then which Bitcoin is could be an example of, there will still always be the need for that kinetic stalemate.
Because humans, again, it's a winner take all.
And if we would only, I mean, we can transpose the continuation of that war into cyberspace because we've arrived at stalemate as far as kinetic warfare go, but that stalemate's still there. And this other type of war we may fight in cyberspace will maybe be a funneling for certain types of competitions related to specifically like who is going to have the reserve currency or something like that.
But I think, I mean, we're going to go there, I think, in the next two chapters, as far as like, how far Lowry's thesis go. Is this an end all to war? Or is it a simply a statement of a new type of war in cyberspace with, of course, kinetic warfare always still, as a nuclear stalemate and existential threat looming over us?
And I think it's going to be that, the latter, that we're still always going to have the possibility of recourse to mutually assured destruction. And maybe it's a release valve to have wars in cyberspace that are mutually assured preservation, as Lowry entitles a chapter here.
But there's always still going to be those forms of rules because – or those two forms of war because there cannot be any rules to warfare.
It's simply power projection and not subject to abstract qualification, at least if you want to win that war.
So the point of war is to win, but the point of winning the war is to keep playing the game so that your ideology can continue to live.
And I think, I guess that would be kind of the point that I'm making, is that if you scale that out, like, yes, you want to win the war, but the reason you want to win the war is that not only are you fighting over resources, but you're fighting over resources, the perspective of different ideologies, because you're going to do different things.
Like, you're going to, I can't verify this, I can't say this for certain, but it doesn't seem to me that different ideologies go to war with each other, or that similar ideologies go to war with each other.
It seems to be capitalist versus communist, fascist, socialist.
It seems to be that it's always, right, that it's always, this is our ideology, this is your ideology, we feel that we can do better with these resources than you can, therefore we're going to compete with you over them.
I think, again, I think this makes sense because, so yes, you can disregard the rules of war, but it is becoming more and more uncommon to do so.
Like, everybody wants to talk about how horrific Hitler was, but go back a couple thousand years and Hitler was just a dude.
He was just your regular, average, savage, horrible person because that's what it took to survive then.
The difference was that we had all been on this gradual trend, like of the saying that trajectory is more important than position.
Like, where are we going?
It doesn't matter really where we are, but where are we going?
That's like from James Clear's book, Atomic Habits, where he talks about, you know, if you do these habits every single day, you'll get 1% better every single day.
1% better every single day is 37% better in a year, and then it grows exponentially.
Like, we're not capable of perceiving exponential numbers, exponential growth.
It's just not something that our brains can do because they think linearly.
Which is why, by the way, it's why when the debt hit a trillion, nobody can perceive that.
We can barely perceive what a million is.
That's pretty hard.
And then you get a billion, and then it goes to a trillion, and it literally is just like magic money.
It's gone.
Nobody has any idea.
Nobody cares.
Like, eh, whatever.
So we were trending on this path of more and more and more and more civilized warfare.
And yes, there are going to be anomalies in that.
There are going to be, you know, there's going to be a Hitler.
There's going to be a genocide, a genocidal warlord here and there.
But when you look in the big picture, when you scale out, it's like, yes, there really has never been a more peaceful time to live, generally speaking.
And we continue to get more peaceful over time because we continue to find ways to project power and compete for resources that are getting closer and closer to abstraction.
And now we're going to be able to do it.
And so, like, think about, like, there will be this short time frame, I think, where it's not recognized of the power, but the power of proof of work, I think, will very rapid, like, right now.
Now, Michael Saylor and MicroStrategy are very rapidly making known to the world the power of proof of work.
As they leapfrog from a $500 million company to a $90 billion company in four years,
and every Redditor on WallStreetBets is getting their face ripped off trying to short this thing
because they do not understand it, because they haven't done the work,
because they don't understand what happens when absolute scarcity meets infinite demand.
We've never seen anything like this before.
There are no comparisons for it.
And so I do think that, yeah, there will be this violent, probably, objection in the short term.
But when you look at wars in the past, especially modern war,
Like what allowed modern warfare to become so outsized to truly have world wars was fiat money, was the idea that we could create this money out of nothing without or against the will of the people whose wealth we were taking and then mortgage the future of their children, their grandchildren.
And, you know, God knows how many, how many.
Yeah.
In order to go into the future and pull this capital back to the present and then turn that capital into power and project it upon somebody else.
Like that's the only thing that allows for World War II and World War I to happen in Vietnam and Afghanistan was that if you had to go to the citizens and ask them for that funding, they would not give it.
And they wouldn't give it because they can't.
Like they literally would have to reach generations into the future in order to pull that productivity back.
So it's just, you know, on the money side, yes, horrifically destructive.
I think it's awful.
Like I think that's the true horror and the true tragedy.
But we do have a system now that exists that you can't steal from the future.
Satoshi buried Bitcoin in time, not in place.
And so there's no way to reach out 30 years from now
and pull Bitcoin from 30 years from now into now.
Like the only thing that you can do is just tick-tock next block.
By the way, I had never heard that quote, slay your heroes.
And so I was kind of curious about that.
But anyways, I've been rambled for a bit.
in some larger story or struggle.
Virtuous to a degree that is laudatory
or something like that.
But it's an abstract category.
If you conceive of somebody
and when you conceive of them,
there's a warm glow, a halo,
something like that,
you are seeing a thing that is not real.
You are matching a pattern onto reality
and not verifying it
because you can only know that person
to the most barest cuticle degree
of knowing them,
only seeing what they manifest
in the realm that you see them.
so if you have heroes slay them slay the category that they are slay the hero from them see them as
humans see them as people who say what they say and do what they do but are merely humans don't
superimpose upon them something that they're not and give to them the power to grant you permission
to enter the heroic realm if you act as they do or something like that and so just another way
slay your heroes, I think is a perfect way to say slay the abstract ideas that you see superimposed
on reality so you can metacognitively, so that you can step back out of your thoughts as much
as possible and see your thoughts in reality and so see them as separate from reality.
That's not to say that you're not going to sense that other people are heroes. You're not going to
feel that positive buzz, but step back from that and try to see reality as it is. See it in the
most basic terms of matter and energy, of watts, of power, and things like that. That's a healthier
way, I think, to see things. This is kind of a longer quote, but I think it's worth reading in
this context. In that Lowry, I'll just read the quote. Maybe it's not really what I think it is.
There are stoic lessons from which many military officers like the author have learned to accept.
And these are the blunt logical reasoning goes something like this. Your opponent's strength may
not be the only thing to blame for your losses. Your own physical weakness, incompetence, or
complacency could just as easily be blamed for your losses. Your opponent's inclinations to be
physically aggressive may not be exclusively to blame for your losses. Your disinclination to be
physically aggressive at appropriate times and places could just as easily be blamed for your
losses. Your fear and aversion to using physical power could just as easily be blamed for your
losses. Your trust in untrustworthy people or your reliance on imaginary power, which doesn't
physically defend you could just as easily easily be blamed for your losses so if you don't want to
experience losses or become oppressed it stands to reason that you should consider taking
responsibility for your own weakness ignorance and incompetence rather than rather than assigning
the blame to other people if you don't fight for what you value then you will be devoured like
everything else in nature and i think he's talking there about the need to stand up within oppressive
abstract power hierarchies. And that, again, that's the only thing, that willingness to stand
up is the only thing that keeps an abstract power hierarchy from becoming oppressive when the
populace is armed, when the populace sees with clear eyes that the permission-giving structure
is not, you know, it's not divine, not magical. It's thereby our willing it to be there. So that's
the stoic lesson that he gives. I don't know that that relates, again, to slaying your heroes, but
And there is, it's akin to it, I think, in the need to see with clear eyes.
And again, just taking a step back, just being aware that we are part of abstract power hierarchies levels you up.
It gives you a superpower because once you begin to see that you are part of a permission-granting structure, all the rights and privileges that you would want to attain to in a certain sense are granted you by society, that pulls a bit back.
your permission granting the provision granting this to yourself because you can say i don't want
to follow along i don't agree with that and i'm going to not feel disvalued because i don't have
the title or rank or something like that and i'll just read one more quote and if you want to respond
to you can because i think it's relevant here this is lowry saying by trying to create systems where
we replace physical power with abstract power in order to reduce injury and intraspecies fratis
fratricide, human society ended up creating a system where we fight and injure each other at
unprecedented scale for access to abstract power. That is that, he says, with title comes entitlement.
And so we begin to fight for things that don't matter for abstract power. Like, I mean,
who gives an F, right? If you have title or rank, I mean, yeah, it grants you power within an
abstract structure. But if you see clearly, if you see that you are an animal subject to
the evolutionary struggle that all animals are subject to, and that power projection is what
matters, then you can not buy into abstract power hierarchies and buy into real physical
power projection dominance hierarchies like Bitcoin, right? If that's what it is, like if it
is a proof of work is that type of real world instantiation of physical power projection,
You can accept yourself from abstract power and begin to project power in a very real way.
Do deadlifts, right?
There we go.
That's him.
So if you can slay your heroes, by the way, what you read, like that quote from him, it made me think of Dr. Willink's book, Extreme Ownership.
Yeah.
And also, you know, takes you back to Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, which both kind of are saying the exact same thing, one a bit more wordy than the other.
and intended for public consumption.
But both saying, look, control what you can,
and that which is out of your control, don't fret about it.
And if you can slay your heroes, what you read about the first quote,
where it's literally saying, you know, hey, maybe it was the thing you didn't do.
Maybe it was the thing that you didn't do.
Maybe it's your fault, right?
Yeah.
If you can slay your heroes, you can also slay your villains.
They're the same thing.
They are merely imaginary gods, one evil and one good that you've created that are in front of you that are dictating the way that you live.
And if you can take them down, if you defeat the god, then what does that make you?
It makes you, in your own mind, you don't have to be a god, but you can certainly be in control of your own future.
So whatever it takes to do that, right?
If it's push-ups, if it's running, if it's, you know, it's whatever it takes for you to break out of this idea that you are within the realm of someone else's power.
It's so, like, it's so obvious when you see people break out of that.
Like, when you see somebody break out of a toxic relationship, there's, like, they just flip.
And they're like, oh, I'm not giving you power anymore.
And they realize, they're like, you never took power from me.
I gave it to you. And when I stop, when I stop giving you that power, you can no learn, you can't control me. You can't be a Lord over me. I don't recognize your authority.
Yeah. Yeah.
You, you exist on your own and you stand on your own.
Yeah. Yeah. That's one way that Lowry says that we can deny power to an abstract power structure or to any structure is to just not value the resource over which it adjudicates or gives permission to access.
So if you, for example, fiat money, if you don't want the value that that has to offer, then that whole abstract power-based structure has no power over you.
And so if the category of villain or the toxic relationship, if you don't want what that relationship has to offer, you could just refuse to like whatever abstract power is conferred by you buying into that whole hallucination is totally dissipated.
these abstract power hierarchies have imaginary rules with imaginary ranks they create imaginary
gods then they use imaginary money to create real tragedy like you know real world changing
horrific tragedy and nature is just truly undefeated like entropy is always going to win
there's nothing that you can do to stop it.
Following nature's rules appears to be the best way to do it.
And again, so back to the theme of the chapter,
there are no choices, only trade-offs.
So we humans, we discover fire,
and then we're able to pre-digest our food,
which leads to an evolution of our biology
that allows for the expansion of a neocortex that dwarfs any other.
Yeah, yeah.
that exists, right? But what's the trade-off of that? Well, the trade-off is that we're born
very frail, and we require much more time to progress, but it's not only that. It's like
that ability for abstract thought that we gained from the use, you know, that we gained because
fire was able to pre-digest our food and our brains were able to grow, that ability for abstract
thought makes us avoid, you know, all of these things that would otherwise make us powerful,
you know, if you take our primate cousins. So I had this, my parents' farm, we had a rooster.
It's incredibly, like the greatest rooster ever, incredibly violent. I called him the dragon cock.
There was one day he attacked my mom, my dad, and me, got blood out of all of us.
And it made me think straight up, no, no weapons, no technology.
Like what animals, like people talk about this, but like what animals can I actually beat in battle?
And I think the average American loses to an angry house cat and anything up.
I think the most exceptional people in the world lose to a German shepherd and anything up.
And those aren't wild animals.
They're, those are domesticated.
Like they have names.
These are things that – people put furry jackets on things that already wear furry jackets.
As physical predators, we are shockingly low on the totem pole of violence.
Yet because of that –
Of physical power, like violence.
Sorry.
Well, so imparting – using physical power to impart violence.
But yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
No, you're right.
That's a better way to put it.
But because of that capability for abstract thought to plan and strategize, we have tools that project power in ways that they make hunting the most dangerous things in the world.
Sharks, lions, gorillas, snakes.
It's utter child's play to the point that most of them are extinct or on the edge of it.
Yeah, yeah.
Right?
So, like, it is – technology is the ultimate – it's the ultimate democratizer of power.
Like it puts power in the hands of the meek.
And we talked about this in the last episode where I think you kind of brought up the, you know, like it's the, you know, the belief that the meek shall inherit the earth kind of thing.
And I've heard Jordan Peterson talk about that.
He says if you read the actual script and kind of interpret it as close as you can to what maybe the original writing was, it's not the meek shall inherit the earth.
It's more along the lines of you shall become a monster and then you shall learn to tame that monster and be able to walk through the world with your sword sheathed so that you appear to be like, even though you are capable of great violence, that you retard your ability to do so.
And I think it's Lowry makes this point where it's like the greatest warriors are also like those who are capable of imparting the greatest violence.
They are also the ones who are most empathetic to the pain that they inflict.
And it makes sense because they know what it is like.
They know what that violence is.
And so, you know, these tortured lives that the great warriors live, you know, doing this thing that they must do and then living with the results, I think it goes perfectly in line with what Lowry talks about, which was the, you know, the rise of religion.
Like, why did religion come? And it was a justification for us to, you know, basically set the blame and the guilt that we feel for killing things, be it animals or other humans, because I don't think that there is a natural killing instinct to humans.
I could be wrong, but I have my felt experience.
My felt experience as somebody that grew up on a farm,
and I've put down cattle, and I've butchered chickens,
and I've hunted deer, and I've hunted pheasants and stuff.
The wet thwack that a bullet makes when it smacks into the meat of a deer,
I have never, and I've probably harvested, you say harvested, I've probably killed.
I've probably killed 15 or 20 deer.
When that happens, without fail, every single time, I feel something.
And it's something very primordial.
It's something very deep and doesn't feel good.
They talk about buck fever that people get, you know, when you get a big buck in the sights
and you're looking at it and you're getting ready to pull the trigger
and you just for some reason you can't.
And it's because you're, you know, and you'll see it so close and so up front
when you get to the body, when you kill that deer and you go
and you're standing over and looking at this thing that is just perfect.
Like it doesn't have a bad haircut.
It didn't forget to tie its shoes.
It's muscular and it's beautiful and it's laying there cold dead
with its tongue hanging out of its mouth.
And you did that.
And the only way to continue to be able to do that is to kneel down and look up and say, thank you for giving me this sacrifice that you created.
Right, right.
Or something like that.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It makes a lot of sense.
It makes a lot of justification.
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, I don't know.
I haven't thought that deeply about it.
No, that's right on with what Lowery's...
Makes a lot of sense.
It does.
And that, you know, as we, I mean, we didn't mention this aspect of chapter four that Lowery talks about the progression from kind of a hunter-gatherer Neolithic type of human to an agrarian society.
And with the agrarian society we see domestication the mass exploitation use and killing of animals who we have kind of brought into the fold brought into the household It one thing to kill a deer tough enough another thing to kill the animal that you
have domesticated over years to have kind of more empathetic traits. And so, yeah, religion develops
as a permission granting abstract power structure so that we can give ourselves permission to do the
violence that we want to do need to do in order to gain resources and yeah that's that's pretty
fascinating and pretty dark cognitive dissonance yeah i mean it's to be able to and that is so
interesting that the apex predator is in order to become the apex predator you need to get the
ability to run like mental simulations of the behaviors of the thing you're tracking so that
from that animal's perspective, you can see the future because how does this predator know that
I'm running this way next? And how does he know to, you know, act this way so that I can't ram him?
How does he know to get in the tree or to get on the high ground? From the prey's perspective,
the apex predator sees the future. And that's our ability just, that's just our ability to run
simulations in our head. But that, that power is also like this recursive curse in that it are,
that power is the power to imagine ourselves as that animal. But once we can imagine ourselves
as that animal moving around, evading us, we also imagine ourselves as that animal dying once we
kill it, deal the killing blow. And then morality develops from that. We need some way to grant
ourselves permission to do that. And so the abstract world begins to overlay over the real
physical world become intermixed. And I mean, it goes that deep into our evolutionary history,
nation states being only like the most recent outgrowth, this scaling up of abstract power,
dominance hierarchy, because they have this ability to create belief systems that people
can buy into. They're not energy intensive, anybody can adopt them, we can use language to
convey them, they just scale up so rapidly under Metcalfe's law. As more people enter into these
belief structures, the value of the whole network increases because people, again, are now
cooperating. They're getting mutual benefit, defense, and things like that. And we just see
this kind of explosion in humans as the apex predator that not only simulates animals in its
minds, but cooperates with other apex predator humans and uses an invisible glue called abstract
thought to scale up to unimaginable degrees, creating systems that then recursively oppress
the humans that are part of them. This is one really interesting thing to mention, so I want
to say it, that there are systemic predators. There are humans who have storytelling powers
that can then exploit other humans.
Once you realize that humans need stories,
that humans need belief systems to assuage their guilt,
kind of this original sin thing
that we need some way to tell us that we're good,
even though we're doing this bad thing of killing animals
and exploiting them through domestication.
Once you, yeah, believe all that,
I totally lost my train of thought.
Grifters and politicians, but I repeat myself.
That's what it was, the systemic predators, right?
Once you open yourself up to needing a belief system to assuage guilt.
I knew I was going somewhere, but I lost it.
That's a great point.
Yeah.
You open yourself up to storytellers as a predator.
Yeah.
Like once you open yourself up to – once you absolve yourself of responsibility, you open yourself up to the worst things in the world.
Like you open yourself up to being led towards your inevitable destruction by someone who is telling you a story that benefits them more than it does you.
Yeah, yeah.
And, yeah, I had a thought when you were talking about this, like, you know, we're talking about the religion, you know, religion, the justification, which is just that the closer you are, yeah, those closest to the killing are closest to God.
that those who are doing that actual thing.
So here's my justification for that.
Is that a quote from somewhere,
Those Closest to the Killing and Closest to God?
I just made that up.
That's a nice quote, man.
You put that on a shirt or in some dark existential novel.
That's really good.
Okay, so think about the populations that we have,
urban versus rural.
and you take the rule that are living closer to nature
that probably would more likely be engaged in hunting and killing their own food,
raising their own food,
and then think about where is the population of atheists
and where is the population of believers.
They call it the Bible Belt for a reason.
It's this rule, like people vote for Jesus.
urban people vote for
I don't know
whatever the woke
I don't really know
that wasn't a very well trained thought
I've had a few of those
but I mean that's what I'm saying
that's what I'm saying is
the closer you are to the killing
the closer you are to God
and people that are out here
like I grew up
we both grew up on farms
did you guys have animals?
we did have animals
We were engaged in the brutal domestication, the end stage of the domestication of the Arak into the ox, into the cow.
Is that how it goes?
Yeah.
And so from like – I mean like my earliest memories are like the – like you become very aware of the circle of life at a very young age.
Yeah.
That things are born, that they come into existence, that they are then slaughtered and that they feed us.
and you learn not to give names to animals
because you don't like to eat a hamburger that has a name.
It doesn't feel good.
Sometimes it does.
If it was a particularly boisterous or antagonistic animal,
you're like, ah, it tastes really good.
I'm glad I killed that bastard.
But yeah, anyway, so yeah, the closer to the killing, the closer to God.
And the people that are the closest to the killing,
I think it's backed up by the rule.
They need the most permission.
So they need the most permission to do what they're doing.
So they need that permission granting structure to take out their guilt, one-shot it out, definitely.
Yep, yep.
And these are more – I would say that they're more stable.
Like what is something that you say about small-town America is that it never changes.
Like it's always the same.
You know, the sidewalks roll up at 6 p.m. and, you know, everything's done in the same way that it was done a couple hundred years ago.
And things in the cities, they're always changing.
They're always different.
And the reason maybe could be that it is closer to nature.
It is closer to the natural hierarchy.
That is not abstract.
That is a power projected hierarchy.
That's, I think you could make that case.
I'm not willing to.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
You know, I think you could make that case.
Oh, no, no.
You're in a big city.
You walk around.
What do you see when you step out on the street in New York City?
You see class and wealth and all of these things that are abstract in the way that people are
Celebrity.
Yeah, you see abstract power being projected for sure.
Yeah, but often false power, right?
Oh, no, it's all false.
All abstract power is false power if you don't buy into the system, definitely.
Like the fancy clothes, the fancy shoes, the fancy car.
These are things that are meant to give you the impression of power.
Yeah.
But they may or may not actually be.
They could just be a facade.
But 80-pound deadlift is power.
Like, that's power.
And there's no arguing over that.
There is, you know, there is, hey, is that Porsche?
Is it on lease?
Or do you own that?
Or is it daddy?
You know, like all that.
Like, there's question there.
But the power that is projected through physical power, it's always definite.
And physical power, like you mentioned the deadlift, but intelligence is physical because,
again i mean that it's immensely physical like we evolved as you mentioned this energy consumptive
brain because we could use fire to pre-digest our food and take in more energy like intelligence
this brain we have is a very energy intensive thing so as far as watts go i think intelligence
this light bulb we have burning bright up here definitely is is a show like a power projection
tactic for sure. Yeah, I am. Okay, I want to read this one. I don't really have anything to say
about it. But I just love this, this excerpt from from the from the thesis here. This is in I think
it's in two, all reality is subjective is sapiens, unlike any other animal can and will subject
themselves to a great deal of struggle, suffering and personal sacrifice for reasons which don't
exist anywhere except within their collective imaginations. They will adopt belief systems and
participate in population scale consensual hallucinations. Great, grateful for the opportunity
to labor their entire lives over imaginary things and even to die for them. This is a defining
feature of the human experience. Yeah. A necessary feature too.
It is, right? Because it is necessary for cooperation.
Yeah, exactly.
Without cooperation, we're stuck at Dunbar's number.
Without cooperation, we can't get any further than 150, 160 people.
We can't have specialization.
We can't have people that specialize in only doing facelifts on the right side of a face for someone over 40 that's been exposed to the sun multiple times.
I mean, just, you know, the ridiculous kind of specialization that exists in this world.
We can't have somebody that is a mechanic that only works on carburetors for 1972 Honda.
It's like it just doesn't exist without the ability to cooperate.
But in order to have that level of cooperation, we must engage in a mass scale hallucination,
which is another way of saying that we must collectively believe in something together.
Yeah. The story of what America is at some base level, if we consider yourself an American, you bought into a story. I mean, there's some story implicit in what that means.
Yeah. So I love thinking about this, by the way, because a, so by the way, the, you know,
boiler alert, right? The, the, the thesis of this book, right? Is the, this PhD is the United States
should immediately adopt Bitcoin as a power projection tactic and use that, you know,
create the hash force. I'm kind of on the fence about it, right? I'm not, you know, I was really
into the Balaji Srinivasan, you know, church state to nation state, now to network state.
And, you know, do I really want my government, which has done all of these horrific things,
which has consistently betrayed my trust, which has chosen itself over the people again
and again and again and again at the cost of millions and millions of lives and untold
suffering.
Do I really want to give them the most powerful thing that's ever been created, which I would
say is Bitcoin. They're not giving them. They're participating in a decentralized protocol. So,
I mean, that's good. Yeah. Well, and actually, so yeah. And so that's where I came around to,
you know, I'm like, I'm on the fence thinking about it. And then I come around to like,
so first off the United States was kind of one of the first, if not the first network state,
like it was, we didn't care who you were. Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses.
Well, take them all, just as long as you believe in the same collective illusion.
And traveling around the world, like I lived in Morocco, I lived in Colombia,
I lived in Europe, and the thing that you notice there is that everybody's pretty much the same.
Like everybody in Morocco is Moroccan.
Everybody in Colombia is Colombian.
I was in Colombia for three months.
I never saw another white person.
I saw two black people.
Everybody else was Colombian.
Here, it's just this insane melting pot.
Insane melting pot.
all of these different people. And what are we here for? We're here because we believe in the
same type of thing. It's not because we have the same DNA. We have the most varied DNA. And so
I've come around to the idea that the United States having Bitcoin is not a way to perpetuate
the nation state. It's a way to strengthen the network state. And I also think that just in my
own experience and looking at other people that are within the Bitcoin ecosystem is that
when you opt out of the system that rewards misaligned incentives, that rewards doing
the wrong thing because the punishment is less, when you opt out of that and you go
into Bitcoin, what do you do?
You act morally.
You take care of your body.
You take care of the people around you.
You're being to respect the real world.
Power projection is a real thing, right?
You're out of the hallucination into the real world.
Yeah, like I guess I'm of the belief that people are not inherently good or bad, that people are inherently logical.
And when you live in a system that has trusted third parties, which our security holds, then people are going to do the things.
Like when you put people into a pasture and the pasture has a fence that has a hole in it, they're going to get out.
They're going to take advantage of the system.
They're going to sell drugs that harm people because the punishment for selling those drugs is less than the profit that they make off of that.
They're going to fight wars that destroy entire countries and entire generations because the profit is greater than the punishment.
The chance of being punished is so little in those systems.
When you go and you get into a power projection system, it's just meritocratic.
Yeah.
People like the best people that I've ever met in my entire life are Bitcoiners.
Like I used to would have said musicians, but musicians, we're a lazy and shiftless lot regardless of where we're at.
But we're usually pretty respectful because we respect everybody's, you know, liberal libertarian is becoming a very popular phrase and way to describe people.
people, I think, popularized by Javier Malay, not popularized, but I mean, he's talking about it a
lot and people are listening and they're going, oh yeah, that's kind of what I am. Like liberal,
I don't mind what you do. Libertarian, I don't want you to mind what I do. I just want to do
what I'm going to do. And when you leave people to their own devices without imparting the impression,
the oppression of an inherently evil system upon them, they make better choices.
They do better things.
And so I think that my government winning Bitcoin and standing up for Bitcoin and doing that,
I think it might actually whip things into shape.
I think it will give them a different time preference and they'll make different choices.
We'll get to that in the next chapter is talking about, I think, software and scaling us into
the cyber spatial realm and then Bitcoin is a solution.
And this chapter after that is the recommendations.
And one of those, I think, is the strategic reserve, that idea you have of a nation state
owning.
I think today to get us to kind of bridge over into what I think the next chapter is
going to be about, I'll read a quote here and give my spin on it.
I think this will kind of help us wrap up.
And then you can let me know if you have any additional thoughts based on it.
So this is kind of early in the chapter, but I think it does still bridge into the next
chapter, Lowry says, trapped in an inescapable and imaginary world behind their eyes and
continuously spammed by abstract thoughts.
That's us humans.
Again, we're trapped behind our eyes.
The objective world is outside of us.
The abstract world is inside of us.
And that's all we really have access to is that mixture of abstract and objective that
is processed in our brain.
So trapped in an inescapable and imaginary world behind their eyes and continuously spammed
by abstract thoughts produced by an overpowered, oversized, and overclocked neocortex, proof of
power serves as a reliable signal for the human brain to identify what is physically and objectively
real in an otherwise imaginary world. So humans use a proof of power protocol. We interact with
the outside world by touching it, by pinching ourselves to see if we're dreaming, by touching
an object to see if it's physically real. You touch a hero and you realize they're just a human being.
Bitcoin is the same way. Cyberspace is spammed by all of these imaginary, by the spam emails,
the AI slop, all the copy paste things. Cyberspace is full of spam, right? In the same way that our
mind is spammed by abstractions that are not real. Previously in cyberspace, there was no way to
cross-reference those spamming objects with something real to determine what is spam and
what is real. But Bitcoin is the first thing that's going to get us out of our brain, in a
sense, in cyberspace and touch ground, touch grass and see what are the real things in the cyberspacial
realm in the same way that the real world gets us out of our mind, gets us out of the hallucination
and allows a proof of power that is a proof of realness
and helps us verify that this abstraction that we think is a real thing,
whether it is or is not.
I've got to add a couple of things to that.
So first, yeah, I had a quote that I wanted to throw up too.
Where am I at?
I lost it.
The pinnacle of humans using symbolism to assign semantically
and syntactically complex meaning to physical phenomena
in order to connect their neocortices together
to form a single shared consciousness is machine code.
So I had to, by the way, look up the meaning of what semantics.
Semantics is abstracted into symbolic meaning.
Syntactics is a formal structure.
But why would that be the case?
Why would it be that the pinnacle of symbolism to assign meaning to physical phenomena,
physical phenomena, meaning to physical phenomena using symbolism,
why would it be that that's machine code?
And it would be that it cannot be misinterpreted, right?
That when I tell you a story, you can interpret that in many different ways.
But machine code, when it is fed to something, it's not interpretable.
Well, I guess it is kind of interpreted, but it's fed, so it's consistent.
It's the purest form of language.
The pin is mightier than the sword.
I thought about this.
Again, I went back to the network nation-state book, Bibology.
We went from a bipolar world to a unipolar world to a tripolar world.
In that time frame, we discovered that the pin truly was mightier than the sword.
The media effectively hosted a president in the 70s.
So we're seeing that right now.
We're seeing that fall because the pin was always mightier than the sword.
But previously, when we didn't have read-write, when we didn't have the ability to self-publish, we didn't have a beach with platforms like X, the pen was controlled.
The pen was centralized.
The pen was used against or used in order to forward an ideology.
and I think last just a couple other things that just these are kind of random that I was thinking
but so again meritocratic power projection and what does it mean to have the ability to have
abstract thought and be able to plan and strategize and build and create technology
it made me think of this song this guy named Todd Snyder who's an incredible songwriter
he has a song called If Tomorrow Never Comes
which he wrote in response to Garth Brooks
and some other people kind of stealing another one of his songs
called Beer Run
so they stole his song so he stole theirs back
If Tomorrow Never Comes is a Garth Brooks song
but the last line in that song is
if worms had daggers birds wouldn't fuck with them
and it's just like
when you arm something
when you give something power, when you have technology,
you know, the dagger is a technology,
offsets natural hierarchy of power.
The unnatural hierarchy, yeah, the abstract power.
Yeah, sorry, yeah.
And the very last thing is another song that this made me think of.
I was in a good song mood tonight,
which is there's a song by John McConnell,
incredible songwriter.
Gosh, I'll have to think about.
As you're thinking, I'll just note for anybody still listening who doesn't know that Lucas is a musician. And so as far as the Bitcoin and Bitcoin and Bitcoin and philosophy, Bitcoin and agriculture, Bitcoin and banking, Bitcoin and music, Lucas definitely has a perspective on this.
so this there's this um so lowry in this section and this has been my favorite section so far he
goes deep into the power of storytelling you know and we've talked about that power that storytelling
allows us to cooperate beyond dunbar's number and it allows us to join together in a shared
belief structure, group hallucination ideology.
One of the things that storytelling allows for,
it allows for us to pass wisdom and pass knowledge
without having to have the lived experience of the suffering.
Like, I can save you this suffering if you'll just listen.
None of us listen until it's too late.
But yeah, the line from the song by Sean McConnell,
Is there any way to learn from what you've been told or do you really have to hold the experience?
Because you can heed me now and come out clean.
Trust me, I can spare you the consequence.
And that took me kind of into the, I was thinking about just stories.
There's only seven basic plots of all stories.
And there's only six parts of a story, the structure.
If you can listen to those things, if you can listen to what nature is trying to tell you to the natural order, to the natural hierarchy, then it truly can spare you great consequence.
It truly can give you something more enlightening and better.
We've kind of, I feel like, not we, I have certainly strayed just from the writing today, but this chapter, like it just really, I don't know, it really spoke to me because of the parallels and the examples and the analogies and the metaphors that I could find within power projection in society.
And so, yeah, I guess that's probably where I could leave it.
Look up Kenny the Talking Gun.
He's quoted in here, and I don't know.
Like, that's going to take me down a rabbit hole.
But, yeah, the last thing that I'll say about abstract hierarchies is that strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
That's from Monty Python.
That's very apt and right on.
I can't add anything to that.
Awesome.
All right.
Well, the next time we'll talk about chapter five.
And what did you say?
What's chapter five?
I wish I had the title handy.
Put you on the spot.
It's about software.
And I think it's about software as code and an abstract power hierarchy and how Bitcoin
cures the dysfunctions of typical abstract power-based hierarchies, including coded
ones, something like that.
We'll see, though.
Brilliant.
We'll be there.
All right.
Yeah.
Good.
Nice.