erikcason on Nostr: The Ontological Violence of Fiat Systems “The money is dead, but it still kills.” ...

The Ontological Violence of Fiat Systems

“The money is dead, but it still kills.”

There is a violence that cuts deeper than war, more subtle than theft, more persistent than empire. It is the violence of the fiat order—not just a system of currency, but an entire metaphysics, a mode of being, an ontological regime. Fiat is not merely paper made legal by decree; it is the very medium by which reality is priced, categorized, and consumed. It is the decree that creates the real.

Fiat money—born of nothing, backed by force—asserts itself as a god over man and matter. It carries no inherent value; rather, it projects a hallucinatory sovereignty by command. That command is the root of its violence: it does not persuade, it declares. It does not emerge from mutual relation or discovery—it is imposed. Thus the fiat system does not just distort markets; it distorts the world, it disfigures being itself.

This is the first wound: value severed from truth.

Where once gold or goods bore weight from the labor of bodies and the consent of communities, fiat emerges ex nihilo through the alchemical ritual of central banking. It is the creation of “something” from nothing—and it demands your everything in return. Not simply your productivity, but your time, your attention, your belief. Fiat makes a mockery of consent: taxation without choice, inflation without representation, debt as inheritance.

Each dollar printed is not neutral—it is a claim on the future, a theft pre-authorized. The child yet unborn already owes. The citizen who resists already bleeds. The world that cannot speak—forests, oceans, silence—already burns.

This is the second wound: time enslaved to abstraction.

Fiat temporalizes existence into linear obligation. It turns the eternal now into a ledger. It reconfigures human life not as presence, but as yield. One’s worth becomes measurable by one’s ability to serve the machine—one’s capacity to extract more from less, forever. And when the curve flattens, when the returns diminish, when the body breaks, you are discarded, discredited, and replaced. Fiat does not believe in humans. It believes in motion, leverage, liquidity. It believes in infinite growth, even on a finite planet.

We are taught to forget the origin of value. It is not labor. It is not gold. It is not decree. It is being. The true source of value is presence, relation, trust. Fiat systems wage war against all three. It replaces presence with digital metrics, relation with contract, and trust with enforcement. It offers no sacredness, only security; no mystery, only models. It is not just unjust—it is ontologically incorrect.

This is the third wound: the commodification of the soul.

Fiat systems induce schizophrenia in the human psyche. We become split between what we know is real and what we are told is valuable. We love what we cannot afford. We sell what we cannot live without. We perform ourselves for survival. The “free market” becomes not a space of liberation, but of performance—an eternal audition for worthiness before the tribunal of capital.

Meanwhile, the masters of fiat—central bankers, economists, institutional asset managers—float above the groundless ground. Their words move mountains, their spreadsheets define famines. They do not produce; they decree. The fiat priesthood lives outside consequence, but their rituals govern all. And the rest—us—become the meat, the kindling, the fuel. We burn for their warmth.

Every empire built on fiat collapses. Not because of corruption, but because it forgets the real. Fiat systems depend on a shared hallucination—faith not in God, not in law, but in liquidity. And when the hallucination fails, when the velocity slows, when the feedback loop breaks—the center cannot hold.

But long before the collapse of the system, comes the collapse of the soul.

This is the final wound: reality becomes simulation.

In the fiat world, nothing is itself. Everything is collateral, everything is speculation, everything is downstream of price. Truth is no longer unveiled; it is marketed. Beauty is no longer beheld; it is tokenized. Love is no longer encountered; it is purchased, or worse, invested in. The world is not known—it is consumed.

And thus, what fiat destroys is not just economics, but ontology. Fiat does not merely impoverish your wallet. It impoverishes your being. It says: nothing is sacred. Everything is for sale.

But there is a resistance. A remembering. A remnant.

The refusal to participate in this ontological lie is the first act of sovereignty. To say no. To exit. To return to the real. To seek systems where value arises from reality, not decree. Where truth does not need enforcement. Where relation is sacred. Where time is not enslaved. Where love is not priced. Where being is enough.

That is the new task before us: to dethrone the hallucination of fiat and restore value to its rightful place—in the presence of the real.