Key ideas: Published in 2023.
We cannot abolish war by outlawing it. We cannot end it by disarming the strong. War can be stopped, not by making the strong weak but by making every nation, weak or strong, able to defend itself. If no country can be attacked successfully, there can be no purpose in war. -- Nikola Tesla
In 1921, Henry Ford (while reportedly standing with Tesla’s rival, Thomas Edison) claimed society could eliminate one of the root causes of warfighting by learning how to create an electric form of currency that bankers couldn’t control.
"This [MIT] thesis was inspired by the following question: what if Tesla and Ford were both right, and they were both describing the same technology? What if Ford’s theory is valid, and it is indeed feasible to mitigate a root cause of warfare by converting electricity into monetary and financial information?"...
"This thesis introduces a novel theoretical framework for analyzing the potential national strategic impact of Bitcoin as an electro-cyber security technology rather than a peer-to-peer cash system. The goal of this thesis is to give the research community a different frame of reference they can utilize to generate hypotheses and deductively analyze the potential risks and rewards of proof-of-work technologies as something other than strictly monetary technology." (J. Lowery)
What if Ford’s theory is valid, and it is indeed feasible to mitigate a root cause of warfare by converting electricity into monetary and financial information? What if Tesla’s theory is valid, and the future of warfare does indeed involve intelligent machines competing against each other in human-out-of-the-loop energy competitions? Would this technology not reduce casualties associated with traditional kinetic warfighting? If it did, would this technology not be worth every watt?...
5,000 years of written testimony indicate that failing to recognize the strategic importance of emerging warfighting technologies is the rule, not the exception. Time and time again, empires rise and fall because they keep allowing themselves to be surprised by the emergence of game-changing power projection technologies.
Even more absurdly, the people in charge of these empires keep acting like they have an option to refuse or ignore new warfighting technologies after they emerge – as if the cat can be put back in the box, as if they live in an isolated bubble completely separated from the rest of the world, as if their empire is the only empire which gets to decide how they’re going to use this technology.
Attempting to outlaw electric forms of power projection technology like Bitcoin could eventually be seen as a double-standard. Why would it be acceptable for citizens to utilize kinetic (i.e. lethal) forms of physical power to secure the property and policy they value, but not electro-cyber (i.e. non-lethal) forms of physical security?
The intent of the second amendment was to make it more difficult for leaders of the US government to infringe upon their citizen’s right to physically secure what they value. Should it matter if the technology used to physically secure property utilizes electric power rather than kinetic power? And so what if that technology uses a substantial amount of power?
Civilizations have been projecting physical power to secure the property and policies they value since policies first emerged more than five thousand years ago. There is no evidence to suggest that society has ever found, or ever will find, an energy-free way of doing it. Physical security requires the expenditure of watts. Watts are expended to impose a severe physical cost on attackers, thus stopping or deterring the attack. Therefore, the fact that some policy makers are discouraging the use of proof-of-work cyber security technologies like Bitcoin because of a belief that these technologies expend too many watts could be an affront to the intent of the 2nd amendment and the founding philosophy of the US...
Private property is private property regardless of what form it takes. There may not be a lot of room for moral ambiguity when it comes to the right to defense; Americans already have a right to bear arms to physically secure their access to the property and policies they freely choose to value, including and especially against their own government (this was the express intent of the amendment according to several founding fathers).
It's also not difficult to make the argument that it would be morally, ethically, and ideologically preferable to everyone involved if physical security of property and policy could be achieved non-lethally and non-destructively, as it could be if physical costs were imposed electronically...
Note the baked-in assumptions of the previous question – that a nation even has the option of prohibiting anyone but their own population from benefiting from strategically important physical power projection tactics, techniques, and technologies. If proof-of-work does indeed represent strategically important power projection technology for the digital age, then banning it for ideological reasons (namely that it’s too energy intensive) would be banning one’s own population from benefiting from a strategically important technology that other nations could adopt for their own strategic benefit. It would be akin to denuclearization, a.k.a. banning nuclear weapons for ideological reasons (incidentally, nukes are also considered to be too energy intensive).
Those in favor of nuclear disarmament are often criticized for demonstrating a severe lack of understanding about the complexities of global strategic power competition and the dynamics of strategic deterrence. Consider, for example, the fact that Ukraine used to be the world’s third-largest strategic nuclear superpower behind the US and Russia. Ukraine once had a strategic nuclear arsenal that housed thousands of nuclear warheads, but Ukraine surrendered them to Russia in exchange for a guarantee that Russia would never invade them. As of this writing, we are one year into a Russian military occupation of Ukraine.
The control authority over Earth’s natural resources that many plants and animals enjoy today appears to be the byproduct of energy exerted over time (joules/sec). This would imply that property ownership has a physical signature that can be denominated in watts.
Watts signal ownership. Organisms determine what they own based not on what they say, but on what they do – how they project their watts. When an organism decides to stop owning a resource, they stop spending the watts needed to gain and maintain their access to it.
Perhaps an organism stops spending watts because their priorities changed; perhaps it simply doesn’t value the resource anymore. Either way, when an organism stops using watts to secure their access to a resource, their perceived ownership of that resource disappears. Ownership of the discarded resource then passes onto the next able-bodied organism capable of and willing to spend the watts necessary to gain and maintain access to it.
As our oceans began to fill to the brim with bacteria, organisms began to face a new challenge: resource scarcity. It was in response to resource scarcity that life appears to have discovered one of its most primordial economic equations: the benefit-to-cost ratio of attack (BCRa).
Every organism could be described as a nutrient-rich bounty of precious resources. Inside every organism are the building blocks necessary to create other organisms. For this reason, most organisms represent an attractive target of opportunity for other organisms to do what we have established that life does demonstrably well: capture with force. Consequently, a weak, docile, or ineffectual nutrient-abundant organism is essentially a floating gift basket of vital resources for neighboring life forms to devour. This is because of the primordial economic dynamics:
Benefit-to-cost ratio of attack = Benefit of attack ⁄ Cost of attack
Survival and prosperity do not appear to be birthrights. Nothing in our observations of the Universe indicates that life on Earth has an inherent right to live or to keep living. This would imply that survival is an act of earning life’s seat at the table by countervailing the formidable entropy of the Universe. The key to accomplishing this daunting task is for life to innovate and develop increasingly clever power projection tactics, techniques, and technologies.
The power we project must be used to capture the precious resources we need to survive, because the Universe does not appear to be inclined to part with them otherwise. The power we project must also be used to continually secure our access to those resources, because predators and entropy seems to always want to take them.
To innovate as quickly as possible, life’s emergent behavior is to compel its organisms to keep searching for better power projection tactics under threat of predation. As birds and mammals demonstrated, the competition for better power projection tactics is daunting, but the strategy clearly works.... Nature gives us abundant supporting evidence to indicate that the more organisms battle with each other, the more they develop better power projection tactics which help them lower their BCRA and grow their prosperity margin....
Unfortunately, nature’s process of compelling life to overcome the innovator’s dilemma seems to have led to yet another dilemma, one that has driven sapiens to the brink of self-destruction via nuclear annihilation... The author calls this dilemma the survivor’s dilemma.
The reader is now invited to place themselves in the shoes of an organism faced with the task of survival (you are technically already in these shoes, whether you accept that or not). You have a power projection budget of X watts. What do you do with those watts? Do you put those X watts towards growing resource abundance (thus increasing BA) or towards growing your ability to impose severe physical costs on your murderous and fratricidal neighbors (thus increasing CA)?
The precise amount of BA or CA you need to grow is impossible for you to know because it depends on factors outside of what you can see and control, factors like what hungry, envious neighbors are choosing to do with their watts.
The survivor’s dilemma creates a game theoretic situation where you can’t trust your neighbor, you don’t know what BCRA level qualifies as hazardous, and you don’t know how quickly the hazardous BCRA level is chasing you. This means you don’t know how much prosperity margin you have or how quickly it’s dwindling. You know you should try to outrun your neighbors from the invisible bear, but you don’t know how quickly you need to run because you can’t see the invisible bear.
In this situation, the optimal strategy is to simply run as fast as you can afford to run – to invest your watts into keeping your BCRA falling as quickly as you can afford for it to fall. This will minimize the probability of causing your prosperity margin (i.e. the distance between you and the invisible bear) to close while still giving you the opportunity to grow your resource abundance.
The survivor’s dilemma represents the same fundamental challenge as national strategic security: there’s no way to know how much security is enough security. A nation can only guess how much security they need based on the intelligence they can collect about their opponent’s power projection capabilities, but the only way for a nation to know for sure that they haven’t dedicated enough resources towards security is the hard way.
This is the same dilemma that all organisms face, no matter what kind of organism they are and no matter what they think about primordial economics. The organisms which survive are the ones that adopt the Schelling point of lowering BCRA as consistently and as affordable as possible. In other words, the organisms which survive are the ones who learn to continuously maximize their capacity and inclination to impose severe physical costs on their neighbors.
We can define an infinitely prosperous organism as an organism that is capable of growing its prosperity margin ad infinitum. Mathematically, this is only possible if the organism can grow its CA ad infinitum, thus decreasing its BCRA ad infinitum and potentially increasing prosperity margin ad infinitum. With an infinitely growing prosperity margin, an organism can grow its resource abundance without the threat of being devoured.
The purpose of conceptualizing an infinitely prosperous organism is to generate the following insight: the key to survival, resource abundance, freedom, and prosperity is to maximize your ability to impose severe physical costs on neighbors. This insight helps us understand the dynamics of primordial economics and the resulting emergent behavior of life at increasing scales.
The resource abundance enjoyed by all organisms, organizations, and civilizations alike are simply the byproducts of life aspiring to become an infinitely prosperous organism. We owe our survival, resource abundance, freedom, and prosperity to our physical power projectors who burn watts to increase our CA and decrease our BCRA
Through this lens, a macroscopic topic as complex as national strategic security can be simplified down to a simple illustration. All of the power projection tactics employed by sapiens are merely a higher-scale version of the same type of power projection tactics that first emerged during abiogenesis. The lessons of survival are exactly the same, whether we’re talking about bacteria, nation states, or anything in between.
Natural selection caused many pack animals to become sexually dimorphic, where one gender is genetically optimized to be physically stronger and more physically aggressive than the other. For some species, the female is genetically optimized to be more physically powerful and aggressive. For others, it’s the male. Either way, with few exceptions, natural instincts make animals sexually attracted to physically powerful, intelligent, and assertive members of the pack. These instincts ensure the species genetically self-optimizes itself for survival by passing on the genes of the most physically powerful, intelligent, and assertive members.
In the mammalian class, males often have higher testosterone levels, contributing to sexual dimorphism and making them physically stronger and more aggressive members of the pack. This sexual dimorphism is a design feature that sapiens learned how to exploit.
To change the “feed and breed the powerful first” pecking order heuristic employed by mammalian pack animals, sapiens learned how to neuter the strongest and most physically aggressive males to remove their genes from the gene pool. This tactic is given polite-sounding names like selective breeding, but what it represents from a sociotechnical (and honest) perspective is a way to force an entire species to become less physically powerful and aggressive through genetic modifications, thus less capable of and inclined to impose severe physical costs on their human oppressors.
Domestication is therefore a form of predation – a power projection tactic that dramatically reshaped our world and put sapiens at the top of a global interspecies dominance hierarchy.
Wild mammals which have had their pecking order strategy exploited via domestication are called livestock. Wild birds which have had their pecking order strategy exploited via domestication are called poultry. Today, the biomass of domesticated livestock is comprised mostly of cattle and pigs and is about 14X higher than the biomass of the rest of the world’s non-domesticated wild mammals combined. The biomass of domesticated poultry is about 3X higher than the biomass of the rest of the world’s wild birds combined. It’s harder to domesticate birds because they can fly away, hence why most poultry are flightless or nearly flightless birds.
A domesticated animal is a wild animal that has had its CA unnaturally shrunken... This type of exploitation is possible because many pack animals employ a specialized workforce devoted to the task of being physically powerful and aggressive. By simply identifying that workforce and not allowing them to multiply, it’s possible to dramatically reduce an animal pack’s overall CA over time, thus raising their BCRA, shrinking their prosperity margin, and making them easier to devour....
The genetic entrapment and enslavement of animals via domestication is the practice upon which “civilized” human society was built in the Neolithic age. This is one of many reasons why modern sapiens should think twice before condemning the physically aggressive behavior of a lion or any other wild animal species that have successfully avoided being domesticated by humans. We have a large enough data set to causally infer that it’s precisely because these animals are physically aggressive that they have not yet been domesticated.
A dog is a wolf which has had its pecking order exploited over the course of 40,000 years to remove its capacity and inclination to impose severe physical costs on humans.... The reason why dogs are “man’s best friend” is because they were genetically modified to worship humans by exploiting their pecking order.
Domestication is perhaps the most vivid display of interspecies domination possible. If we were to discover a planet with alien life, we would easily be able to identify the dominant species of that planet by finding the one which entrapped and turned forty other species into their pets, slaves, and food supply. Domestication represents the ability to remove another species’ physical power altogether rather than fight them – the ability to change a survivor of the wild into food to eat, or a tool to use, or a pet to cuddle. This is an honest and undistorted picture of human predation – that “ugly” part of survivorship that humans don’t like to be reminded about.
What is the point of this uncomfortable conversation? To prove a point. We have conclusive, causally inferable empirical evidence to indicate with a high degree of confidence that substantial impairments to safety, security, and survival are the direct result of not being physically powerful and aggressive.
Domestication has created a data set of highly randomized A/B testing experiments across more than three dozen species of animals of multiple classes in multiple environments over tens of thousands of years. It’s incontrovertibly true that changing an animal’s pecking order strategy to prevent them from giving their resources to their most physically powerful and aggressive members has a direct causal impact on their security. When populations become less capable of or inclined to impose severe physical costs on their attackers or oppressors, they become less safe, less secure, and less free.
The domestication of animals has proven to be a very effective power projection tactic. In other words, domestication is a highly effective form of predation. This is important for the reader to understand because if domestication represents a systemic security risk to the freedom and prosperity of forty different animal species, then domestication has the potential to threaten sapiens too.
Not only is there a systemic danger of self-domestication, but domestication itself is a form of attack against human society. Remove society’s capacity and inclination to impose severe physical costs on other humans, and that will have a direct and measurable effect on their ability to survive and prosper. Human societies therefore have a fiduciary responsibility to not allow themselves to become too self-domesticated. Societies who are interested in survival and prosperity should not allow themselves to become less capable of and inclined to be physically aggressive to potential attackers or oppressors...
This has significant implications for sapiens who condemn the use of physical power and physical aggression to establish pecking order over resources because of the energy it uses or the injury it causes... Physical power and aggression clearly have a substantial effect on a population’s safety, security, survival, and prosperity. Domesticated animals prove a causal link between docility and enslavement.
Therefore, we should be cautious of people who encourage docility and condemn physical power as the basis for settling disputes, establishing control authority over resources, or achieving consensus on the legitimate state of ownership or chain of custody of property. It’s clearly a security hazard and can also be a deliberate attack vector. This is a critical concept for the reader to understand for discussions in the following two chapters about power projection tactics in both society and cyberspace. This concept is also critical for understanding the sociotechnical implications of Bitcoin.
One of the most frustratingly trans-scientific questions for any pack animal (to include sapiens) is how to settle property disputes. What is the “right” way to establish control over an animal pack’s precious resources and to achieve consensus on the legitimate state of ownership and chain of custody of property? This is fundamentally a question that cannot be answered objectively. However, it is possible to observe nature and independently verify from empirical observation what pecking order heuristics are employed by nature’s top survivors...
Another way of saying the same thing is thatreg ardless of whether people believe that “might is right” is “right,” people can’t deny that it survives. The ubiquity of “might is right” in nature proves that proof-of-power is a highly effective survival strategy and a time-tested power projection tactic that has proven itself over hundreds of millions of years to be able to keep pack animals systemically secure against predation. Intelligent, physically powerful, and aggressive animals survive and prosper, period.
Humans are incontrovertible proof of this basic fact of life. Therefore, If we have ideological objections about “might is right,” we should also have the intellectual humility to recognize that we have a fiduciary responsibility to the survival of our own species to recognize that these ideological objections are just that: ideological.
Welcome to life on Earth.
The takeaway? There’s no such thing as “fair” in nature. “Fair” is a subjective and unquantifiable ideological construct that apparently only humans (the most physically powerful and destructive apex predators on the planet to date) are capable of thinking about.
There is, however, such a thing as “fit” in nature. “Fit” is something we can objectively quantify and independently validate through empirical observation, simply by observing what survives. So the primary question to ask is, “what power projection tactics do pack animals employ to be fit for survival?” This question leads us to physical power hierarchies.
Organisms fight and kill each other for their resources... Behaviorally modern sapiens are unique in the animal kingdom in that they fight and kill each other not just for resources, but also for what they chose to believe in. They use their powerful brains to think abstractly, adopt belief systems that other organisms are physiologically incapable of perceiving, and then they physically compete over those belief systems at unrivaled scale.
Ironically, amongst the most commonly adopted belief systems over which humans routinely fight and kill each other is the belief that people shouldn’t have to fight for their resources – that sapiens and sapiens alone have “natural rights” to their lives, liberties, and properties which other animals don’t have, and that humans are special exceptions to primordial phenomena like predation, entropy, and the existential necessity to establish dominance hierarchies using physical power.
As discussed in the previous chapter, animals use physical power to settle intraspecies disputes and establish dominance hierarchies over limited resources, but this can sometimes lead to fratricide. Fratricide is especially troubling for highly empathetic predators like humans, who are hyper aware of the stress and trauma they can cause others thanks to their big brains. One way to circumvent the discomfort of potentially injuring a fellow human to solve a property dispute or establish a pecking order is to adopt a belief system where disputes can be settled and pecking orders can be established by people who have imaginary power rather than real power.
Sapient brains are so effortlessly gifted at abstract thinking, and people have such strong natural instincts not to injure each other, that people will attempt to use their imaginations to avoid having to physically confront each other to settle their disputes, manage their resources, and establish their dominance hierarchies.
One of the most defining characteristics of behaviorally modern sapiens who lived after the invention of agriculture and the widescale domestication of animals is the adoption of common belief systems where some people wield abstract or imaginary power, and those people are allowed to settle disputes, manage resources, and determine the pecking order for the broader population, explicitly so they don’t have to fight over it like practically all other pack animals do.
Modern domesticated sapiens could be described as being so averse to physical confrontation that they prefer to dress up in costumes and play make believe to settle their disputes, manage their resources, and establish their pecking order. Then, emboldened by their ideologies, they look down upon wild animals precisely because those animals don’t (or more accurately, can’t) use their imaginations to settle their disputes or establish their pecking order (as previously noted, wild animals appear to be physiologically incapable of this – they don’t have the watts to think abstractly and use their imaginations because they didn’t learn how to handle tinder, control fire, and cook their food to fuel their brains like humans did).
Herein lies the reason why the author spent so much time walking the reader through the evolution of abstract thinking and human metacognition. Without critically examining human metacognition, it’s impossible to establish a first principles understanding of how and why agrarian society has decided to adopt common belief systems where fully grown adults put on wigs and gowns and live-action role play (LARP) like they have power in order to settle people’s disputes without physical conflict. Almost everywhere one looks in modern agrarian society, sapiens are seen using symbols of power (e.g. rank) rather than real power (e.g. watts).
They print symbols of their imaginary power on pieces of cloth and tie them on top of flag poles. They wear symbols of their imaginary power as lapel pins. Some even continue to dress up in wigs, gowns, and crowns, and practically all of them stand up in front of podiums etched with symbols of their imaginary power. Why do behaviorally modern humans behave in this incredibly bizarre way in comparison to other species?...
If one were to take the perspective of a non-human outsider (such as an alien visiting earth), the social behavior of modern domesticated agrarian sapiens might seem bizarre compared to the behavior of other animals. Sapiens behave much differently than other species in nature. They live under a mutually-adopted, global-scale, consensual hallucination where very few people get to have extraordinary levels of imaginary power that most of the population doesn’t get to have access to, and then the population chooses to allow these people with non-existent physical power to call the shots.
Why would sapiens behave like this? The answer is deceptively simple: to save energy, and to (attempt to) reduce the risk of injury. Abstract beliefs systems where people have imaginary power serves as an alternative way to settle disputes, establish control authority over resources, and achieve consensus on the legitimate state of ownership and chain of custody of property in an energy-efficient way that doesn’t directly cause injury (emphasis on the word directly). In other words, abstract power is a story that people are intrinsically motivated to believe in because they like the idea of not having to spend energy or hurt each other to settle intraspecies disputes or establish their pecking order...
Unfortunately, abstract belief systems are fictional stories. Our beliefs about a better way to settle our intraspecies disputes and establish our intraspecies pecking order also clearly don’t work as well as we wish they would work, because sapiens still routinely engage in physical confrontation to settle intraspecies disputes and establish intraspecies pecking order the exact same way animals do.
Storytelling introduces a psychological attack vector where sapiens can be preyed upon. The most common way this happens in agrarian society is by telling stories to convince people to adopt belief systems where a select few people have abstract power. The problem is, abstract power is systemically exploitable. By convincing people to believe in abstract power, storytellers deliberately implant an exploitable vulnerability into people’s imaginations which they can take advantage of later (it’s essentially a zero-day, for people who are familiar with common computer exploits).
Once storytellers have convinced a population to adopt a belief system where imaginary power exists, storytellers create a vector through which they can exploit people by giving themselves access to the imaginary power endogenous to the belief system. This type of predatory behavior through people’s belief systems emerged early in agrarian society and has persisted for thousands of years.
One of the major challenges associated with using imaginary power as the basis for settling disputes and managing resources is that it’s imaginary. It exists for no other reason than the fact that people are physiologically capable of thinking abstractly and adopting abstract belief systems. Because of the way our neocortices effortlessly engage in bi-directional abstract thinking and symbolic reasoning, people can and often do live their entire lives cognitively entrapped under these population-scale consensual hallucinations where it’s impossible for them to see how vulnerable they are to psychological abuse and exploitation through their belief systems.
Tragically, this also makes them incapable of seeing how easy it would be to escape their psychological entrapment. People will legitimately believe those who wear striped headcloths or lapel pins are actually powerful and fear their “divine” power over generations, birthing dynasties of oppressive god-kings. Populations will labor for their god-kings, kill for them, forfeit their resources to them, and even let their oppressors define what’s “right” or “good” or “fair.”...
Across multiple generations, entire populations of agrarian sapiens will believe that imaginary logical constraints are viable substitutes for physical power as a mechanism for imposing physical costs on attackers. They will believe they have miraculously transcended natural selection and found a moral or ethical alternative with the same capacity for survival (moral or ethical according to whom?). And then, once enough of the population has been convinced that they’re secure against exploitation due to nothing more than the logical constraints encoded into rules of law, they self-domesticate. They become docile; they condemn physical confrontation and aggression.
Instead of vectoring their resources to the most physically powerful, they socially exile them. They condemn them as war mongers. They place the people with real power at the bottom of their pecking order, in favor of people with “peaceful” forms of imaginary power. The fossil record shows us what happens next. Either their own god-kings exploit/slaughter them, or their neighboring god-kings do....
When human populations become too docile or domesticated, either their territory gets physically captured, or their belief system gets psychologically exploited.
If the former, the population gets emergency drafted, misplaced, sent to labor camps, sent to mass early graves, or most likely starves. If the latter, the population gets systemically exploited and oppressed at extraordinary scales through their own belief systems, leaving them entrapped and enslaved with no capacity to understand what the root cause of their oppression is.
colonial America, oppressed by the monarchical State, brought in the republican State; Germany gave up the republican State for the Hitlerian State; Russia exchanged the monocratic State for the collectivist State; Italy exchanged the constitutionalist State for the “totalitarian” State (A.Nock).In each of these cases, one variant of the State was substituted with another, the stories and belief systems changed but the State exploitation of the population remained (even in the US, as is very evident today). The State oppression will continue for as long as the State exists becuase the sole invariable characteristic of the State is the economic exploitation of one class [population] by another [the state]. (A. Nock)
During the collapse of these complex agrarian societies, maybe a few will have the intellectual humility to think twice about their decision to condemn physical power and aggression. Maybe they will stop and consider the idea that it was a mistake to adopt belief systems which require trust in untrustworthy people to function properly, and recognize that their beliefs in imaginary power, combined with their condemnation of physical power, led them straight to the slaughter.
Rather than take accountability for their decisions and question the grossly unrealistic assumptions they made when they adopted their belief systems, many will instead choose to blame their invaders or their systemic oppressors for their losses.
To their graves, they will continue to LARP like they ever had the option of living in a world without predators and entropy – as if they are the only organism in the world that doesn’t have an intrinsic responsibility to keep themselves physically secure against attackers. They will masquerade like “peaceful” alternatives to physical conflicts ever existed at any time in history except temporarily, or at any place on this planet except exclusively within their imaginations. Such is the tragedy of domesticated sapiens and their willful ignorance of power projection tactics in modern society.
Rather than using theological, philosophical, and ideological arguments to convince people that one’s abstract power is real, it’s possible to create displays of physical power, and then let your audience draw false positive correlations between two physically, systemically, and ontologically different things.
To illustrate this point, consider the difference between kings and knights. We have established that a king’s power is symbolic, not physically real. Yet, sapiens have a clear tendency to cherish the symbolic world in their heads more than the physical one in front of their eyes...
Knights are people who have volunteered to subscribe to a belief system where kings have abstract power. Some of them may even believe that the king’s abstract power is concretely real. Because people subscribe to these belief systems, they are willing to shape physically objective reality ex post facto to match what exists exclusively within their imagination.
So for example, storytelling kings will claim that disobedient people (i.e. people who have not subscribed to the same belief system as them) should be physically constrained or have their rank demoted to prisoner for being unsympathetic to the orders of the king. In response, knights will use their physical power to legitimize the king’s abstract power by making shared objective physical reality match their shared, subjective, abstract reality.
This process of using physical power to legitimize abstract power is more commonly known as enforcement. The name literally means to introduce force. In other words, the name means to inject real power into a situation where only imaginary power was previously being exercised. Enforcement is noteworthy because it shows the two aforementioned use cases of physical power projection occurring simultaneously: (1) imposing physically prohibitive cost, and (2) creating a proof-of-power a.k.a. proof-of-real signal. The knights’ power is not only projected to increase the CA and lower the BCRA of undermining an abstract belief system, but it’s also projected to produce a proof-of-real signal to motivate people to draw false positive conclusions about the “realness” of the king’s abstract power.
People are inclined to believe the king’s imaginary power is real for the same reason they are inclined to believe a harmless stack of sticks is a deadly snake. Our brains produce false positive correlations between abstract thoughts (e.g. the imaginary power of the king) and sensory inputs (e.g. the physical power of the knights) because natural selection has caused our brains to take abstract imaginary things as seriously as physically real things...
The result of enforcement is compliance with the king’s orders. People who blatantly undermine the king’s rank are physically punished for not recognizing his imaginary power by obeying his orders. This, combined with routine physical shows of force, makes people quick to commit the logical fallacy of believing the king’s imaginary power is something concretely real.
People will sincerely believe they are being physically compelled to behave some way merely by virtue of reading about it or watching physical power projectors march around on a computer screen, despite never having been involved in any physical confrontation (as another side note, this is why some regimes love military parades – these parades are marketed as a show of force to foreign nations and a way to comfort a proud population about how secure they are, but in actuality, a hidden purpose of the parade is for the regime to produce a proof-of-power signal for their own populations to motivate them to hypostatize the regime’s abstract power as real power and make them less motivated to resist the regime).
US President Kennedy was among the most abstractly powerful people to have ever lived when he was assassinated in 1963. Incidentally, Kennedy’s assassination occurred just five months after signing EO 11110, which journalists have argued was an attempt to reign in the abstract power of the Federal Reserve.
In his book Crossfire, Jim Marrs presents the argument that President Kennedy attempted to replace the purchasing power of Federal Reserve notes (i.e. money issued and controlled by the Federal Reserve – a private institution) with silver certificates (i.e. money issued and controlled by the US Department of Treasury – a public institution with the deferred abstract power of the US President).
In other words, the logic encoded into EO 11110 would have stripped the abstract power of the Federal Reserve to make money and given it back to the US government. For that reason, journalists have argued that the Federal Reserve Bank (most notably the bank’s anonymous shareholders who receive interest off their notes lent to the US government) would have had the largest financial motive to contribute to President Kennedy’s assassination, as EO 11110 would have undermined their monopoly control over the US monetary system.
But no matter what the true motive(s) for JFK’s assassination was, it very clearly demonstrated how physical power is both superior to and unsympathetic to abstract power. President Kennedy had far higher rank and far more abstract power than the person who took his rank and abstract power from him, but it didn’t protect him because abstract power is merely imaginary power – rank doesn’t stop a speeding bullet...
A primary difference between what populations consider to be illegitimate and legitimate belief systems or legal policies (a.k.a. a generic set of rules versus the rule of law) is the amount of real-world physical power projected by people to enforce and secure those policies.
As an example of this concept, the abstract powers encoded by the US Constitution are backed by the US military. When people of high rank try to undermine the US constitution, the US military’s job is to step in and remind them that the abstract power of the US Constitution is backed by real power of the US military and that real power is non-negotiable regardless of how unsympathetic people are to it.
The phenomenon of power hypostatization is also why US military servicemembers do not have the same freedom of speech rights as civilians do, most notably the right to speak contemptuously towards public officials regardless of rank. In other words, people wielding physical power on behalf of the US are not legally allowed to speak contemptuously towards people wielding abstract power on behalf of the US, because physical power illegitimatizes abstract power and represents an existential threat to the existing abstract power hierarchy.
The truth is, one who seeks to achieve freedom by petitioning those in power to give it to him has already failed, regardless of the response. To beg for the blessing of ‘authority’ is to accept that the choice is the master’s alone to make, which means that the person is already, by definition, a slave. (Larken Rose)
To seek permission or social approval from someone is to tacitly give them abstract power over you. On the flip side, if you want to create and wield abstract power over a large population of humans, simply convince them to adopt a belief system where they need permission or social approval from you. Once a population believes they need your permission or approval, you have successfully gained abstract power and influence over them.
It should be noted that abstract power is a relatively new phenomenon. Evidence of abstract power appears quite recently in the human fossil record. An easy way to detect when humans started believing in abstract power is when they started giving some sapiens far more materially grandiose burial rituals than other sapiens.
Pre-Neolithic society appears to have been largely rank-less, with what anthropologist Peter Turchin describes as “remarkably cooperative and egalitarian societies, with leaders who could not order their followers around, leading instead by example.” For hundreds of thousands of years, humans lived in rankles societies like this, with very few distinctions beyond age, gender, and earned reputation. Everyone had a similar burial ritual.
Then, starting in the Neolithic age after the invention of agriculture, disproportionately gaudy graves emerged, packed full of gold and other precious resources. God-kings wielding enormous amounts of reified abstract power emerged. Not surprisingly, they exploited people with their imaginary power. As Turchin describes,
they oppressed us, enslaved us, and sacrificed us on the altars of bloodthirsty gods. They filled their palaces with treasures and their harems with the most beautiful women in the land. They claimed to be living gods and forced us to worship them.
Based on nothing more than artifacts dug up from the ground, we can observe that several thousand years ago, people suddenly learned that they could psychologically exploit their peers through their mutually adopted belief systems, and they’ve been doing it ever sense...
To illustrate the ambiguous nature of rhetoric, consider President John F. Kennedy’s famous inaugural address written by Theodore Sorenson, perhaps most remembered for its “ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country” statement.
This chain of logic suggests American citizens exist for the sake of serving their government, which is directly contradictory to the philosophical intent of the American Constitution and the founding fathers who proposed the exact opposite theory that governments exist to serve the people.
As previously discussed, Americans are insurrectionists – people who are overtly defiant to abstract power – dismissive of rank, disloyal to their king, capable of and highly motivated to kill thousands of redcoats to delegitimize their oppressive king’s abstract power. The US Constitution gives American citizens the right to free speech and the right to bear arms for the explicit purpose of empowering American citizens to delegitimize the abstract power of their government if it becomes too abusive or systemically exploitative, just like the British monarchy did in the 1700s.
Gold and economic freedom are inseparable. In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation. Gold stands as the protector of property rights (“Gold and Economic Freedom”, A. Greenspan)American government ended the gold standard in 1971 and ever since has been confiscating money from americans through inflation. Confiscating through inflation means stealing purchasing power. It's hard to find a better example of a systematic exploitation than this.
The bottom line is that the formally encoded logic of our belief systems is the source of systemic exploitation, not the solution to systemic exploitation. No amount of encoded logic can eliminate the systemic exploitation of logic, no matter how well it’s designed and no matter if it’s encoded using rules of law or software.
The exploitation of the law (and software) keeps happening because people keep making the mistake of thinking that high-ranking people with imaginary power can be constrained by written logic (i.e. laws). Logical constraints can’t prevent the exploitation of logical constraints, they just change how logic can be exploited.
So merely adding more rules of law to an abstract power hierarchy to attempt to constrain the abstract power of high-ranking positions is never going to fully remove the threat of exploitation of abstract power, it’s just going to change the way abstract power can and will be systemically exploited.
Abstract power hierarchies have not become less systemically exploitable since the early days of god-kings, they are just exploited in different ways (and at much larger scales). People get confused and they misattribute the less oppressive governments we have today to better encoded logic in the rules of law. In reality, rules of law are just as equally incapable at stopping god-kings as they were seven thousand years ago.
The reason why we have less oppressive governments today is because people have spent a great deal of time, energy, and injury slaying god-kings (and their armies) when they become too abusive or exploitative. In other words, the reason why we have less oppressive governments today is because of people who are capable of and willing to project physical power to impose sever physical costs on those who abuse their abstract power....
Despite how much people like to condemn the use of physical power to settle their disputes or establish their dominance hierarchies, surviving societies (emphasis on the word surviving) eventually come to terms with how nature works.
To solve the survivor’s dilemma, societies must master the art of projecting physical power to impose severe, physically prohibitive costs on their attackers – whether those attackers come from the outside or the inside. They must adopt tactics, techniques, and technologies which allow them to continually increase their CA and continuously lower their BCRA. Sapiens aren’t miraculously exempt from primordial economics. If anything, the growing size of their tribes makes them even more vulnerable to their number one predator: themselves.
War can be summarized as the act of domesticated sapiens rediscovering, time and time again, that there is no viable substitute for physical power (a.k.a. watts) as the basis for settling their disputes, establishing control authority over their most precious resources, and achieving consensus on the legitimate state of ownership and chain of custody of their property in a systemically secure way.
War is the act of people admitting that the trust-based, permission-based, and inegalitarian control authority over valuable resources gained by using abstract power hierarchies is not a viable substitute for the zero-trust, permissionless, and egalitarian control authority over valuable resources gained by using physical power.
War is incontrovertible proof that dominance hierarchies based on abstract power do not sufficiently replace dominance hierarchies based on physical power. War proves that as much as humans like to play make believe and pretend like they can break free of physics and nature and learn to settle their intraspecies resource disputes or establish their intraspecies pecking order using something other than physical power, they can’t. War proves they can’t, no matter how much thinking and design logic and imagination they try to throw at the problem, there is incontrovertibly no viable replacement for physical power as the basis for settling disputes and establishing a pecking order.
In 1503, Admiral Christopher Columbus landed near the north coast of what we now call Jamaica with a crippled fleet of merchant ships. When he arrived, native Jamaicans welcomed him and aided him. But over the following year, Columbus’ crew were extremely abusive to their native hosts. They repeatedly stole from the natives, cheated them, raided them, and committed several other indiscretions including rape and murder. Not surprisingly, the native Jamaicans responded by ceasing to provide aide.
By 1504, Admiral Columbuses’ crew found themselves stranded on the shores of Jamaica and under threat of starvation. They could not leave because they did not have seaworthy ships, but they could not stay because they had an insufficient supply of food and were highly outnumbered by increasingly disgruntled natives. Desperate and danger-close to starvation, Admiral Columbus did what many Europeans had already learned to do well. He used his literacy and storytelling skills to give himself abstract power.
Thanks to his son’s literacy in astronomy, Admiral Columbus was aware of an impending lunar eclipse. Armed with this knowledge, Columbus met with native Jamaican chiefs and warned them that God would become so angry with the natives for not providing Columbus’ crew with resources, that God would destroy their moon<. Having already been betrayed by Columbus, the Jamaican chiefs learned not to trust Admiral Columbus’ crew, so they initially did not believe him.
But in late February 1504, a total lunar eclipse of the moon occurred over the skies of Jamaica just as the Admiral Columbus’ son said it would. In his journal, his son describes what happened next:
The Indians grew so frightened that with great howling and lamentation they came running from all directions to the ships, laden with provisions, and praying the Admiral to intercede with God that He might not vent His wrath upon them and promising they would diligently supply all their needs in the future.
This story has several lessons which many (domesticated) people seem to forget. The core lesson is that people don’t need an army to create and consolidate abstract power and use it to gain control authority over a population’s valuable resources – they just need the population to have a belief system they can exploit. It is possible to inspire an entire population of people to bend to your will by barely lifting a finger.
The god-king playbook is extremely simple: convince a population to adopt a common belief system – particularly a belief system which involves something or somebody with a lot of
If Jamaican natives were more inclined to use physical power to establish their dominance hierarchy rather than subscribe to belief systems where entities with imaginary power were given dominance over them, they might not have been so easily manipulated by Admiral Columbus (someone who was in a very weak position at the time), and history might have played out differently for them. But instead, native Jamaicans literally fell to their knees and begged weak, helpless, starving oppressors for essentially no other reason than the fact that they had adopted a belief system where people with imaginary power have dominance over them.
Here we illustrate an important sociotechnical feature of warfare that many people overlook. The “might is right” pecking order heuristic for establishing interspecies dominance hierarchies creates an amoral foundation which can’t be exploited. “Might is right” could also be called “physics is right.”
Wild animals which use physical power competitions to settle disputes and establish resource control authority (what we call warfare when our species performs the same activity) let physics and probability decide their pecking order for them. By using physics rather than abstract ideologies to determine the pecking order, wild animals don’t suffer from the same vulnerability that sapiens routinely suffer from: population-scale psychological abuse and exploitation.
Consider how much of the population needs to be untrustworthy for modern abstract power hierarchies to become dysfunctional. We can use the United States to serve as a better-case scenario of an abstract power hierarchy which has a lot of checks and balances (i.e. logical constraints encoded into rules of law) to logically constrain the exploitation and abuse of abstract power.
The United States is one of many presidential republics with a fully independent legislature supposedly capable of preventing the consolidation and abuse of abstract power. But with 535 members of Congress representing the will of 336 million Americans, it would only take 0.00008% of the US population (the president plus ~51% of its legislature) to be dishonest or incompetent with their imaginary power for the United States to degenerate into unimpeachable, population-scale exploitation and abuse of abstract power. The reader is invited to ask themselves: how responsible is it to entrust 0.00008% of the population with abstract power and control authority over the remaining 99.9999%?
Combining this observation with the core concepts presented previously, here's another way to frame the same point: because of our desire not to use physical power to establish our dominance hierarchy, people adopt belief systems like presidential republics that can be exploited and abused even when 99.9999% of the population is competent and trustworthy...
It is clearly unrealistic to expect 0.00008% of the population to be clever, competent, and trustworthy with abstract power all of the time.
As an example, consider the US dollar (USD) world reserve currency. USD is an international resource controlled by an abstract power hierarchy backed by the world’s most powerful power projectors (the US military). The US military legitimizes the abstract power of its presidential republic, and by virtue of the design logic encoded into their rules of law, that presidential republic has executive control authority over USD. While it is certainly true that both types of power projectors (the abstract power of the presidential republic plus the physical power of the US military) have control authority over the state of ownership and chain of custody of USD, that doesn’t make anyone have to value USD. Therein lies the key to countervailing US power.
Hypothetically speaking, if the US were to forget how this power structure works and became systemically exploitative and abusive with their control authority over USD (for example, if they started denying people’s access to USD through sanctions, or debasing people’s purchasing power by inflating USD), then members could countervail both the physical and abstract power of the US by simply not valuing USD as their world reserve currency anymore.
For this reason, the “assign value to resources” control action which members can exercise seems small, but it is in fact very empowering. If the people in charge of the USD were to do something which motivated members to exercise this control action and stop valuing USD, their abstract power and control authority would disappear. It is therefore critical for the US to not do anything to motivate members from exercising this control action, else they risk losing their power.
The US deliberately made themselves vulnerable to this attack vector by converting USD from a physical system into an abstract belief system in the 1970s. Like so many organizations to come before them, the US seems to have lost sight of the value of physical constraints to abstract power.
By converting USD from a money denominated by gold into a money denominated purely by bits of information (a.k.a. fiat), the US converted their entire monetary system into an abstract belief system with no physical constraints securing it against systemic exploitation by high-ranking people who control the transfer and storage of those bits of information.
Additionally, the people with abstract power and control authority over USD only have it insofar as people are willing to believe in it because physical power is irrelevant at securing money which doesn’t physically exist. So not only do members have the freedom to choose not to assign value to USD, they also have the freedom to choose not to recognize the abstract power and control authority of the people who control USD.
This means the entire USD monetary resource control system is backed by nothing but faith in the value of the dollar and the abstract power of the people who control the dollar. Of course, people can quickly lose their faith at any time, so it’s imperative for the US not to do anything to motivate people to lose their faith in USD, which means it’s imperative for the US to not deny people’s access to USD or to degrade its purchasing power. Yet, in fiat form, there’s nothing to physically constrain the US from doing either of these things
These power dynamics put the people who have control over USD on thin ice and make it especially important for them to have the discipline not to deny people’s access to USD or degrade its purchasing power. These people must be careful not to do anything to cause people to lose faith in their imaginary power, because if they do, their abstract power and control authority over this valuable abstract resource could quickly evaporate no matter how physically powerful the US is.
Countless people have been sent to early graves, warning future generations through bone trails dug up thousands of years later. Countless other warnings have been written into the pages of history by the survivors. For thousands of years, people of the past have been trying to warn the people of the future that something isn’t working.
Our belief systems are clearly flawed; they clearly don’t work the way we wish they would. Countless times people have proven through their actions that there is no viable substitute for physical power for any population who wants to live free from the threat of foreign invasion or who wants to remain systemically secure against the threat of corrupt, self-serving sociopaths who psychologically exploit and abuse people through their belief systems...
Humans chased after more efficient power projection technologies for more than 10,000 years, only to build the most inefficient power projection technology possible. In their hubris, sapiens brought agrarian society to the brink of nuclear wars that cannot produce a winner. And now they have cornered themselves by running straight into a kinetic ceiling. They appear to have scaled kinetic physical conflict to the point where it is no longer practically useful as a basis for settling disputes and establishing a pecking order. And they do not appear to understand how systemically hazardous this stalemate is.
We have scaled our capacity to project kinetic power and compete in global-scale kinetic power competitions beyond the point where it would be practically useful as a basis for settling disputes and establishing pecking order. It is possible that agrarian society is in the middle of a strategic-level kinetic stalemate...
A strategic-level stalemate might secure a population against an invasion from a neighboring abstract power hierarchy, but it wouldn’t secure a population against massive-scale systemic exploitation and abuse from their own abstract power hierarchy....
To improve our own capacity to survive and prosper, it is vital for us to understand that there is no such a substitute to physical power as a zero-trust, permissionless, and egalitarian basis for settling disputes and establishing pecking order, no matter how much people like to preach about alternatives.
If it’s true that agrarian society has stalemated itself at a global-scale strategic level with nuclear warheads, then that means agrarian society has never been more vulnerable to the threat of unimpeachable systemic exploitation and abuse than it has ever been in the past 10,000 years of populations suffering from the oppression of their god-kings.
Summarizing the core theoretical concepts about bitpower presented so far: bitpower protocols like Bitcoin look inefficient to those who might not understand the complexities of computer theory, cyber security, agrarian power dynamics, human metacognition, or the basics of how living organisms establish dominance hierarchies to manage control over their resources. Consequently, people don’t understand how and why people would be inclined to summon large quantities of electric power from the environment, convert it into machine-readable bits of information, and use it for systemic security purposes – particularly to countervail the threat of people wielding too much abstract power via the computers they program...
The bottom-line up front is that for the first time, people appear to have discovered how to project physical power in, from, and through cyberspace by converting global power itself into bits.
Thanks to protocols like bitcoin, people can utilize bits of information that have been reverse-optimized to be physically expensive to produce to impose severe physical costs on belligerent actors who keep trying to interfere with people’s bits or systemically exploit people through software. These physically expensive bits could also be used to prove the presence of real-world properties such as scarcity and decentralization in an otherwise artificial domain where ordinary computers can only be programmed to present the illusion of scarcity and decentralization...
Physically countervailing oppressive abstract power hierarchies is the American way – the United States gained its independence by imposing severe physically prohibitive costs on high-ranking people who were exploiting them through their abstract power hierarchy. Thanks to Bitcoin, Americans now appear to have gained the same capability of digital freedom fighting for cyberspace...
The author hypothesizes that agrarian society is now beginning to recognize that they have the capacity to project power in, from, and through cyberspace to secure themselves against the threat of systemic exploitation of their computer networks. The technology appears to be hiding in plain sight by masquerading as a peer-to-peer electronic cash system.
To that end, the purpose of this thesis is to illustrate how physical cost function protocols like Bitcoin represent far more than just monetary technology – they represent physical power projection technology. And if history is any indicator of what’s to come, the emergence of a new form of physical power projection has the potential to be far more unique, valuable, disruptive, and strategically essential than a new form of money, especially as the global population continues to spend exponentially more time using computers...
Therefore, the author asserts that Bitcoin is not monetary technology – at least, money doesn’t appear to be its primary value-delivered function. Instead, Bitcoin appears to be an electro-cyber freedom fighting technology.
In other words, Bitcoin isn’t a monetary protocol, it’s a bitpower protocol. It creates a new base-layer foundation to the internet by adding a new state mechanism to the bottom of the internet tech stack which physically constrains the world-wide web of computers. It just happens to be the case that the first operational and widely-adopted use case for this novel internet infrastructure is to restore peer-to-peer financial payments. But it’s reasonable to expect many more use cases to follow.
In what could have been an intentional sleight-of-hand and perhaps one day be reflected upon as the most impressive Trojan Horse since the Trojan War, the decision to frame Bitcoin as only a peer-to-peer electronic payment system has motivated trans-national human society to subsidize the development of a global-scale, electro-digital defense industrial complex that literally empowers people with zero-trust, egalitarian, and permissionless access to bitpower.
Extraordinary quantities of physical power are now being drawn from a planetary-scale state mechanism and converted into physically costly bits of information that anybody can utilize to impose severe physical costs on people and programs in, from, and through cyberspace. With this new internet architecture, people are capable of physically securing themselves against hackers as well as physically securing themselves against systemic exploitation from of an emerging, technocratic ruling class – and they can do it all without spilling a single drop of blood.
If it is true that Nakamoto solved the problem he is given credit for solving, then that could imply he also solved a much bigger, much larger-scope problem that has been plaguing society for thousands of years: the problem of how to establish control authority over precious resources, how to settle disputes, how to establish dominance hierarchies, and how to achieve global consensus on the legitimate state of ownership and a chain of custody of property – but do it all in a way that requires no god-kings, no bloodshed, and thus circumnavigates the threat of fratricide or mutually assured destruction.