Welcome to the second week of our book club reading A Lodging for Wayfaring Men. We're reading one chapter every two weeks, so we are discussing Chapter 1 today. You can find the book club reading schedule here: #1582413

A Lodging for Wayfaring Men, Chapter 1

Out the gate, let's just accept that Rosenberg is pretty awful at writing. He may have an interesting story to tell, but his dialog is hamfisted, and the narration is frequently painful. For instance:

Somehow, the urgency in Frances' voice pushed Farber over the edge. She was desperate, violent, in her lust for knowledge.

It reads like a teenager's attempt to mimic Ayn Rand (who was pretty awful at prose herself) and is frequently so clumsy that it gets in the way of the story. The characters are constantly awash with an extreme sincerity that makes them feel like cardboard and Rosenberg indulges in a moral certainty that makes the characters even less believable.

If you can get past Rosenberg's delivery, there's an interesting question in this first chapter.

Our heroes seem to have started a parallel economy and the State is not too happy about it:

"Our current problem is that technology has made it possible for average people to conduct business invisibly...What you don't know is that someone - and we don't yet know who - has set up a fully encrypted form of electronic cash."

"We consider this an assault on the sovereign economy of the United States."

As is tradition, this parallel economy is initiated inside RPG of some sort, although Rosenberg doesn't give us many details about the game -- he's more interested in the grand plans of great people.

"Frances, did you ever really doubt that you were capable of doing great things?"

James Farber, one of the highly successful businessmen behind this parallel economy, is completely smitten with a journalist named Frances -- and God save us from such a romance: it's like a middle manager who tried to use a love scene as the central conceit of a powerpoint presentation on a sales company's mission and vision.

But, in the midst of it, Farber poses this question about greatness -- that not everyone is capable of it.

"There are some of us who somehow escaped deep emotional scars, and who also had the right combination of genetics and circumstances that allowed us to do things of note...working hard to make something of yourself is a separate issue, as important and necessary as it may be. There are not many of us that have an operational ability to do great things."

Frances, of course, agrees, but, not being fully blinded by the light, she has her doubts:

"James, I've always been told that thinking such things about myself would make me arrogant. Am I going to turn into a loudmouth braggart if I believe this?"

They certainly do come off as arrogant, which Farber acknowledges:

"Most people hearing us talk like this would think that we are inherently superior or are lying to ourselves. Now the truth is that the only meaningful difference between us and many of those people is in our estimations of our selves. But getting people to believe that - to even consider that - is sometimes impossible."

Two decades after Lodging was published, it remains unfashionable to think that only some people are able to achieve greatness. We seem to much prefer to believe that it is a product of hard work, circumstances, and if you continue the list very long you end up with attributes that obviously only to some people. Our culture resists acknowledging that some people are much more effective than others.

But Farber holds it to be true, and because of that, he has a motto of sorts that he has relied on since he was a child:

That which I have seen and heard, I bear witness to.
I believe my own senses.
I believe my own mind.

One follows the other. If there are such people of greatness in the world, their most difficult struggle is succumbing to the pressure of the society around them and disbelieving the things their own mind tells them.

In the world of Bitcoin, it's often the case that what we have seen and heard -- how we understand the world with our own minds -- is at odds with most of the people around us. Many of us, it seems, lack no confidence in our worldview, and yet it has felt lately like their are chinks this armor of confidence.

Perhaps because number hasn't gone up enough and many of the free market experiments based on bitcoin (like Silk Road, Wikileaks donations, the Canadian trucker donations, and numerous privacy projects) have all bent the knee to the state. Bitcoin maximalism is out of fashion. Is this because it was wrongheaded or because we no longer believe our own minds?

Would Farber have been a toxic bitcoin maximalist?