Selective Adoption

Before I get into my overview of Isaiah’s Job, I want to (hopefully) challenge you.

  • Mass Adoption
  • Equality
  • It’s for everyone
  • We’re all in this together
  • We are all one

“We must achieve mass adoption in Bitcoin”

I wrote an essay a couple years back called: “DO NOT BUY BITCOIN”, and in there I mentioned the idea of Selective Adoption. In fact, I’ve spoken about this multiple times at conferences and meetups, to a mixture of either strong support & hesitant agreement as if what I said was blasphemy…

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

Today we have the calendar, the engine, the computer and mechanical flight thanks to Remnants such as Galileo, Newton, Einstein & Neils Bohr.

The poster child of “The Masses”

An Homage to Albert J Nock

The following contains excerpts from Isaiah’s Job, and commentary by yours truly.

“The official class and their intelligentsia will turn up their noses at you and the masses will not even listen. They will all keep on in their own ways until they carry everything down to destruction, and you will probably be lucky if you get out with your life.”

Has a better paragraph describing modern society VS Bitcoiners ever been written?

“There is a Remnant there that you know nothing about. They are obscure, unorganized, inarticulate, each one rubbing along as best he can. They need to be encouraged and braced up because when everything has gone completely to the dogs, they are the ones who will come back and build up a new society; and meanwhile, your preaching will reassure them and keep them hanging on. Your job is to take care of the Remnant, so be off now and set about it.”

When I’m asked: “why do you write” or “why do you speak out”, or “why do you run a Bitcoin-only company, you could make so much more money by listing {insert shitcoin}”, the above quote and the below quote are why.

“The line of differentiation between the masses and the Remnant is set invariably by quality, not by circumstance. The Remnant are those who by force of intellect are able to apprehend these principles, and by force of character are able, at least measurably, to cleave to them. The masses are those who are unable to do either.”

For every one Remnant who gets it, there are tens of thousands of masses who don’t. And whether it’s more nature or more nurture it doesn’t matter because the precise blend is impossible to know. What counts is that one in every ten or hundred thousand will always rise above the rest.

His first, last and only thought is of mass acceptance and mass approval. His great care is to put his doctrine in such shape as will capture the masses’ attention and interest.

The main trouble with all this is its reaction upon the mission itself. It necessitates an opportunist sophistication of one’s doctrine, which profoundly alters its character and reduces it to a mere placebo.

If a writer, you aim at getting many readers; if a publisher, many purchasers; if a philosopher, many disciples; if a reformer, many converts; if a musician, many auditors; and so on. But as we see on all sides, in the realization of these several desires, the prophetic message is so heavily adulterated with trivialities, in every instance, that its effect on the masses is merely to harden them in their sins. Meanwhile, the Remnant, aware of this adulteration and of the desires that prompt it, turn their backs on the prophet and will have nothing to do with him or his message.

The Shitcoiner, the Blockchainer, the VC trying to sell you their next pre-mined pump and dump wants to create a “message for the masses”.
Diluted, ephemeral, miasmic, vague, vanilla and lost in the ether of platitudes heard daily from the politically correct intelligentsia the masses have been brainwashed by.

Isaiah, on the other hand, worked under no such disabilities. He preached to the masses only in the sense that he preached publicly. Anyone who liked might listen; anyone who liked might pass by. He knew that the Remnant would listen; and knowing also that nothing was to be expected of the masses under any circumstances, he made no specific appeal to them, did not accommodate his message to their measure in any way, and did not care two straws whether they heeded it or not. As a modern publisher might put it, he was not worrying about circulation or about advertising. Hence, with all such obsessions quite out of the way, he was in a position to do his level best, without fear or favour, and answerable only to his august Boss.

The Remnant, on the other hand, want only the best you have, whatever that may be. Give them that, and they are satisfied; you have nothing more to worry about. The prophet of the American masses must aim consciously at the lowest common denominator of intellect, taste, and character among 120,000,000 people; and this is a distressing task.

The best you have, the best you are, and the best you can be. This is not only what The Remnant will produce, but what The Remnant will demand.

What chiefly makes it so, I think, is that in any given society the Remnant are always so largely an unknown quantity. You do not know, and will never know, more than two things about them.

First, that they exist; second, that they will find you. Except for these two certainties, working for the Remnant means working in impenetrable darkness

This excerpt reminds me of the movie Fight Club, and once again reminds me of Bitcoiners as a group of people. We have infiltrated every layer of society. We signal this in subtle ways that only other Bitcoiners would appreciate.

When Elijah escaped by the skin of his teeth, believing he was the final remnant, the lord informed him:

“And as for your figures on the Remnant,” He said, “I don’t mind telling you that there are 7,000 of them back there in Israel whom it seems you have not heard of, but you may take My word for it that there they are.”

A Remnant of 7,000 out of a million is a highly encouraging percentage for any prophet.

As I said earlier. For every One Remnant, there are 100,000 of the masses.
But just as importantly, when you think you’re the only one, remember there are “7000 back there” who you’ve not yet heard of. They exist, and they will find you so long as you remain true.

The other certainty which the prophet of the Remnant may always have is that the Remnant will find him. He may rely on that with absolute assurance. They will find him without his doing anything about it; in fact, if he tries to do anything about it, he is pretty sure to put them off. He does not need to advertise for them nor resort to any schemes of publicity to get their attention

No group of people exist on Earth that have more consistently & successfully called our frauds, scammers, LARPers and idiots from all walks of life. Some of my favourite Bitcoiners in this regard are DeaterBob, Francis Pouliot, Saifedean Ammous, John Carvalho and Giacomo Zucco.

If, for example, you are a writer or a speaker or a preacher, you put forth an idea which lodges in the Unbewußtsein of a casual member of the Remnant and sticks fast there. For some time it is inert; then it begins to fret and fester until presently it invades the man’s conscious mind and, as one might say, corrupts it. Meanwhile, he has quite forgotten how he came by the idea in the first instance, and even perhaps thinks he has invented it; and in those circumstances, the most interesting thing of all is that you never know what the pressure of that idea will make him do.

Ever wonder why we all seem to converge onto such profound truths separately, individually but collectively?

The Great Stories

There is a reason why the greatest stories are those in which a hero or group of heroes prevail against insurmountable odds.

The Matrix is a system, Neo. That system is our enemy. But when you’re inside, you look around. What do you see? Business people, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of that system, and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system that they will fight to protect it.

- Morpheus

These people. These masses. They are everywhere. They make up The Construct, but are not players in the game. They are like the background; always there in some shape or form.

Inertia

The masses resemble inertia. The dumb, deaf, blind default that will not change unless a new force is applied. They are the 80% of the Pareto distribution that make 20% of the difference.

Democracy.

A minor detour, but very related is the idea of Democracy. A form of rule supposedly ‘for’ and ‘by’ the masses.

Democracy at it’s best.

Sophisticated Theft

Democracy emerged in the west as a reaction by the masses, to the prosperity created by the free markets of The Remnant. The rising tide lifted all the boats and with it came a wave of new capital that the parasitic masses could feed on. Hence they created, rather mindlessly, a more sophisticated way of stealing from people. The idea:

Monsters exits, but they are far too few in number to be truly dangerous; the most dangerous monsters are ordinary men (and women) ready to believe and obey without asking questions

Primo Levi

Monarchies are at least run by hereditary title holders with skin in the game. Hence why they can fail or correct much faster. I believe Bitcoin will usher in a new age of natural, competent elites, many whom would be considered “royal” in the classical sense.

Democracy basically means….

Speaking to the Remnant

In the beginning of this piece, I mentioned that I was not aware of the “Remnant” terminology until I had met Francis Pouliot, and did not appreciate its meaning until I’d read Isaiah’s Job.

Let me tell you why you’re here. You’re here because you know something. What you know you can’t explain. But you feel it. You’ve felt it your entire life. That there’s something wrong with the world. You don’t know what it is but it’s there, like a splinter in your mind driving you mad. It is this feeling that has brought you to me.

Morpheus

The blue pill is for the masses. The red pill is exactly the one a Remnant would seek out and take. In fact, they are the only ones who would actually hear the call, whilst the masses remain.

In closing

Bitcoin is for The Remnant.
Crypto is for the masses.

By Aleks Svetski

Writer, Radical, Founder of Amber, the world’s first Bitcoin Only DCA app:

Blog on Bitcoin Magazine

Twitter:

@TheAmberApp
@GhostOfSvetski
@TimelessBitcoin
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Aleksandar Svetski

Host: Anchor.fm/WakeUpPod, Editor @ bitcointim.es and Founder @ amber.app. Bitcoin, Money, Psychology, Philosophy, History, Entrepreneurship & Thinking