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0 sats \ 3 replies \ @elvismercury OP 16 Nov 2023 \ on: _Broken Money_ book club, part 4 bitcoin
Lyn makes a provocative statement about the origin of some of the most forceful political movements that emerged as a result of the GFC of 2008:
“I contend that these Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street movements were two sides of the same coin — a pushback against the country’s flexible ledger and the associated practice of using public debt and money-printing to save the large and well-connected entities at the expense of the everyday person.” (p. 285)
If this is true, I'd expect to find bitcoiners equally represented across the political spectrum, perhaps focusing on different aspects of the underlying monetary issues. Yet this is manifestly not the case. Why?
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304 sats \ 2 replies \ @k00b 17 Nov 2023
Political narratives seem to be altered more often than they are rewritten. It's easy to alter the right's political narrative to include another abuse of government, abuse of the flexible ledger. The left's political narrative has government as a protagonist - it's something like "the government would be great if it weren't for greed affecting government."
If you stare at them long enough though, the narratives aren't so different. The right wants to remove the government's power so it can't be abused and the left wants to remove the rich so it can't abuse the government's power.
Perhaps we could sell bitcoin better to the political left by altering their narrative rather than rewriting it, eg
So long as there's a flexible ledger, the rich will use the government to steal from the middle class and poor, finance their wars, and gain political favor. Replacing the flexible ledger with Bitcoin takes this power away from the rich so that governments can redistribute wealth and provide social services unhindered.
When the left was anti-war, military industrial complex capture was a major plot point. As precedent, there were calls to defund the military so that there was nothing for industry to capture ... but even that fell out of favor recently for some reason.
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0 sats \ 1 reply \ @elvismercury OP 17 Nov 2023
I like that framing a lot -- from a dissonance reduction or cognitive consistency perspective, it's easier to integrate the btc story into the right's ideological edifice than it is the left's. I've never read any of the Progressive bitcoin books, but presumably they take this angle, in a manner that would be maximally compatible with that body of belief?
If the fucking bitcoin philosophers would publish their book already there might be more of these mental constructs to draw from.
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304 sats \ 0 replies \ @k00b 17 Nov 2023
Well they should. We're more than halfway through Broken Money and will need another book to club.
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