Sigh on Nostr: I feel this; the concept of "capitalist realism" deprives all social interactions and ...

I feel this; the concept of "capitalist realism" deprives all social interactions and cultural productions of their verve, their soul. We see it and feel it every day, and it's most apparent of all in the rhetoric we see within the shifting political landscape for a sense of community and belonging. On the one hand it's a tale as old as time, humans seeking others who reflect their inner world to build something greater than themselves, but on the other its history reaching the cultural limitations of modern globalised anglo-saxon hedonism. Weber diagnosed the dysfunction more than a century ago when he pointed out that "sensualists without heart, and specialists without spirit" have created a "nullity which imagines itself the greatest society which has yet existed" but the fact of the matter is that no theoretical explication could counteract or undermine the unprecedented, and frankly unrepeatable, explosion in material prosperity that accompanied the rise of the post-world war American empire that we all live under. All discussion of theoretical paucity and spiritual emptiness has been relegated to the status of the ancillary discourse of the malcontent and the workshy, while everyone else sells their souls to keep up with the reified standard of middle-class prosperity, as precarious and as doomed as it is.

This is why Bitcoin has drawn me so much more in the past few years; we are butting up against the limits of the state to secure cheap commodities and extend the illusion of material prosperity past the upper echelons of the managerial class that was created to insulate the oligarchs whose rise coincided with the dismantling of much of the centralised state's power in the 70s and 80s. The central question as to why an institution which has abdicated so much of its powers to banks and corporations, while failing at its basic functions of representing the will of individuals, should still have control over the most essential of functions, namely the control of and issuance of money, should absolutely be paramount in our lives, and for Bitcoiners it is.

It's only just a start, it doesn't provide any answers, but to at least have the correct question in mind has to be a decent place to begin the journey of reinvigorating and revitalising the human spirit, which has been waylaid by capitalist realism for centuries. Money and markets are supposed to facilitate human economic activity and allow us some sense of control and purpose in our lives, but this only works in a system that allows for the free and direct expression of this activity, and with the way that functions of the current dominant economic regimes impede and distort this expression, the imperative to break the money cartel is clear.