Love & Blockchain: How We Will Live Together Peacefully in Abundance
Love is the natural state of things
Love is the natural state of things
Love is the natural state of things. Without people, nature goes about doing its business in harmony with itself. In nature, there are no disagreements because the means through which nature communicates are not limited to the spoken word.
Misunderstandings and disrespect are also not natural. They are a result of our inability to communicate through more effective means, similar to that of nature. Don’t believe me? Please — provide me an example of a disagreement in nature. I’ll wait.
You may say, “Oh, the tornado destroys the pieces of nature through which it tears” or perhaps “Tsunamis wipe out giant swaths of land and populations” or maybe even “We used to have dinosaurs and then we believe a meteor came and wiped them out” but these are not disagreements. These are not contradictions. For, to have contradictions, we must have logic. In order to have logic, we must have symbols. Nature is too complex for our simple symbols. No logic, no contradictions—that’s the natural state of affairs.
Good news: there is bright light at the end of the chain, we must learn to love and respect one another to see it
Sex Sells, Not Love. But Why?
We grow up in a society today where we are taught that we need to compete with one another to feed our families, to clothe our children, and to feel fulfilled. We need to make more money, we need to buy more things, we need this, we need that. But when does society teach us that we need to love and develop an understanding of each other? Is that no so obvious to all humans that love and understanding are vital in fulfillment? Where on your fancy cell phones or flat screen TVs do you see advertisements that we should love one another, seek understand amidst our differences, and learn to cooperate.
Answer: no where. Ask yourself why that may be? Why would no one be advertising the importance of love? Certainly, sex is advertised as we all understand sex. We all desire sex. Without sex, we wouldn’t be here. To quote the great Kanye West:
Let me hit it raw like fuck the outcome
Ayy, none of us’d be here without cum
Ayy, if it ain’t all about the income
Ayy, ayy, let me see you go ahead and spend some
All Mine, Ye, Kanye West (if it isn’t obvious from the above lyric, please don’t listen if you’re easily offended)
My most sincere apologies if I’ve offended you with those lyrics. Perhaps Mr. West could have communicated that message in a manner more suitable to sensitive ears, but that’s a conversation for an entirely different time.
Really fancy marketing executives have figured out that old adage that ‘sex sells.’ It’s strange to me then that love does not sell. I’ll avoid getting too far off subject here, but would encourage you to simply contemplate that fact.
We Don’t Trust Each Other Because We Lack Confidence In Ourselves
The journey is long, we know we are nowhere near our ideal self
Our entire lives, we grow up knowing our faults. We know where we fall short of where we would ideally like to be. Our culture, at least in the West according to my own experience and the experiences of others that I’ve observed, doesn’t do anything to protect us against our worries or to encourage us. Rather, we are indoctrinated to believe that it’s a dog-eat-dog world out there and you better bring your gloves because it’s going to be a battle out there.
Not getting great grades in school? No scholarship.
No scholarship? No college.
No college? No job. No job? Well, how does that sound to you?
Over time, perhaps we begin to gain confidence in ourselves. There are various ways of doing this. Self reflection, external acknowledgement of accomplishments, achieving our goals continually, but perhaps most importantly and in my opinion the simplest method for achieving confidence in ourselves is to think critically and always try and be truthful.
No matter how hard it is, tell the truth.
Have you ever heard the phrase, “The truth will set you free”? The phrase is true.
The truest manifestation of truth is arrived at through love. However, we need confidence to love, because love is scary. True love means that someone can rip your heart out.
You have to give someone the keys to your soul knowing that if they go away, you lose some of your soul. You have to have the trust and confidence in someone to love them so passionately that they open up new modes of existence to you that you never thought previously possible. At that point, your confidence and trust become abundant and you are free to be your true self.
Before you reach that point though, you must admit your faults. You must understand where you fall short of where or who you want to be before you can begin to reach toward those self-evaluated ideals.
Once you admit your own faults, you begin to find less reason to maintain vitriol towards others. It’s in this honesty that comes about through love that we will achieve a state of abundance.
Think about how, in Wall-E, the pursuit of shallow vanity nearly ruined the human race
Love & Understanding: Key to Achieving Worldwide Abundance
Through the heart we can see greener pastures
In order to achieve abundance, we must learn how to distribute goods so as to fulfill the needs of individuals living all over the world. Those needs include but perhaps are not limited to shelter, clothing, food, water, medication, and human contact. We have all of those things all over the world but yet we still have murder, hunger, starvation, people dying of thirst, unhoused, preventably sick.
Why do we have these terrible tragedies in some places and not others?
The answer comes down to a lack of trust and love for one another.
Since we don’t love each other or at least understand each other, we can’t really trust each other. If we can’t trust each other, then we have to have legal entities in place to protect ourselves from someone trying to make a quick buck off of us.
If we could trust and love one another, not in a romantic way, but in a way that one member of a species should have for another member of the same species, then we could begin to unravel this tense twine that’s put us in a bind where we can’t share the wealth.
We don’t need capitalism. We don’t need socialism. We don’t need another ism. We need competition, but we need to orient competition in a way that we compete to be the most generous, most giving, most kind, honest, creative, passionate, hard working (towards the betterment of humanity, not some silly job) individuals that we can.
Enter: Blockchain
Old forced value, meet new voluntary value
Society, not societies rulers, now determine what is valuable and what has worth
Daniel Jeffries wrote a brilliant article summarizing what he says ‘everyone missed’ about crypto. I wouldn’t say everyone, but I’m also going to try to avoid nitpicking as we all get the point. Everyone appears to be more interested in making a quick buck (again—quick bucks—not good) through some other stupid ICO from some fork of Bitcoin or rather. Now, that doesn’t do service to those working hard to create innovative and brilliant systems with the technology, but again, I hope you get my point. I’d highly recommend reading that article if you haven’t. Dan is a brilliant writer and thinker who I’m indeed going to continue brown nosing until perhaps one day I’ll earn the right of having his ear for a conversation.
The conclusion of this article is actually quite concise if everything I’ve written above makes sense. Whenever we consider what is valuable and ‘good’ in society, previously that has been the end of the conversation. Now, however, we have the ability to take what we determine that good and that valuable to directly translate towards an economic prosperity.
That said, we need to do this in a way where we don’t go about completely derailing the entire system, as it isn’t really that bad. As is ever going to be the case, we need to remove the traditions that are too inflexible while also maintaining the lessons from our ancestors. We need to use those lessons combined with critical thought, honesty, cooperation, and great communication to continue to improve everyone’s stake.
The way to improving everyone’s stake is not going to be through our current means of competition. It simply won’t work that way. Corruption follows money. It always has and always will.
HOWEVER, if we can design a technological system that can promote honesty, kindness, compassion for your fellow man, transparency and cooperation, then we can at least take a step in the right direction.
Certainly, the solution is not to argue about why this isn’t possible but it is to begin the conversation around the guiding philosophy of the project, how the project can be manipulated, and to come up with robust technical solutions to each problem.
I’ve begun the process in a brief initial summary of this idea below.
I’ve also begun creating a methodology for giving back to people who watch, pay attention, and provide constructive criticism where it’s due.
A video explaining that, and where I’m still giving away around $60 can be found here.
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Please also feel free to rip this up with comments! I love all feedback, just please make it as constructive as possible. I want to improve way more than you want me to. Thanks again!
Hi Michael, check out @ressolid and the Ressolid project, we are dreaming the same dream, and there's many of us
I very much appreciate Daniel Jeffries as well and had read that piece you refer to a while ago. I have also reflected on the topic in an older post you might find interesting:
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