Captains & Cowards
Trump, the assassination attempt & people’s retarded reactions
It’s been a whirlwind of a couple days, with a lot of good and bad takes. I wanted a single place to just point people to, that are screeching about my seemingly-sudden Trump support.
A few things at the outset.
- Trump is neither a god, our savior, or the messiah. He’s a man — and at least from what I can tell, a good man, with character.
- Trump is not coming to “save you”, nor me, or America for that matter
- When I said that “he’s chosen” it’s because there was something incredible about the moment he literally dodged a bullet. Call it blind luck, divine intervention, the wind or just bad aim — it doesn’t matter — the USA may have just dodged a civil war by the twist of one man’s head. Think about that for a minute.
Fauci, Vaccines, Lockdowns and Initial Failures
I’ve seen a lot of people on Xitter reminding everyone that “Trump selected Fauci,” that he “locked America down” that he’s “with the little caps” and that he “pushed operation warp speed” — I think about 5 people posted that video in particular as some sort of “response” to my tweet on the weekend:
https://x.com/SvetskiWrites/status/1812422738356621570
For many years, I was right in the thick of the libertarian movement. Hardcore AnCap, but always with a strong conservative bent. I’ve been a Bitcoin advocate for almost a decade, and agree by and large that:
- Nobody is coming to save you,
- Voting doesn’t change anything,
- The state is your enemy,
- Money printing is upstream of 99% of modern social and economic issues (but on ALL).
- This two party system is mostly a show to distract you from focusing on what matters, but that’s NOT an excuse for apathy.
With that all being said, I’ve taken an increasingly firm stance on the Trump situation (one of my first public articles in 2016/17 was actually about Trump — but it was soft) and more-so in the past few months as he’s gained momentum. The weekend’s event topped it off for me — and watching people screech from the sidelines about “did you forget what he did in 2020!?!?!!?!” has convinced me that some recalibration is needed in those people’s heads.
It’s very easy to tell who’s never been in leadership positions, whether in a community, a business, or (to a lesser degree) something like a friend group. They are always good at flexing their comment muscles, but oblivious to concepts like organizational inertia, game theory, delegation risk, and executive power.
Instead of building things, or reading about the history and biographies of great men, leaders, and generals, to get a sense of what goes into leadership, statecraft, and building organizations or nations, they spend their time on Reddit, CNBC, or Xitter to get micro-snippets of information that form their opinion. This is no different from the ignorant boomer that yells at the computer screen when the wifi doesn’t work, or the average social media poster complaining about the evils of capitalism from their iPhone. They have absolutely no idea of what went into things, but blindly benefit from and use them.
I expect this from the average leftist whose life experience amounts to a Reddit education and some public school or university brainwashing, but I expected better from Bitcoiners and ‘sovereign individuals’ more broadly.
Turn Arounds
I’ve run businesses all my life. The largest team I managed was just over 50 people, in my early 20s.
That was hard. Super fucking hard. I can only imagine what it takes to run something larger, like a country, let alone the largest global power. Therefore, what I’m going to say here can only scratch the surface of how complex things really are.
I want to use a short thought experiment, to help you get a sense of things.
Imagine you were to take over a poorly run cafe. How long would it take you to turn it around, especially if the condition is that it must keep running, while you’re fixing it (kind of like fixing a plane while flying)?
- Who would you fire?
- Who would you hire?
- How long would it take you to evaluate who’s who?
- What happens if you fire the wrong person?
- What if you can’t find a replacement quick enough?
- Which products would you cut, which would you increase in price?
- How long would it take you to evaluate that effectively (i.e. from the inside, not the outside) ?
If you get rid of the wrong cook (even if he’s not mission-aligned, you could shut the whole kitchen down). Considering how intricate the smallest businesses are, I expect it would take at least a few months to do this EVEN with a simple cafe, that has no more than 10 or 20 staff. Double or triple that until you start to change public perception and increase customer satisfaction.
And remember — this is with complete executive control over the cafe. You can hire and fire who you want. So full executive power, minimal game theory, small amount of delegation risk, and relatively small organizational inertia. And you’ve got months to turn things around.
Let’s up the ante now.
What if you were to enter a larger corporate organization, say with 1000 staff, or worse, with 10,000 staff? Imagine becoming the CEO of Facebook tomorrow.
How long would it take you to transform this organization, its culture, its mandate, and its public perception, into something more “moral” or true to the essence of the right? In that scenario, once again considering you can’t just “turn it off to figure things out”:
- Who would you fire?
- Who would you hire?
- How would you make those decisions, considering there is an entire web of interdependencies among not only the executive team, but also their leadership teams and the people below them.
- What about the politics, and dealing with those who you inherited that don’t like you?
- How long would it take for each decision, let alone its implementation and the outcome to take effect (if it’s the right one).
Consider the following as you try to answer this:
- You as the new CEO are dependent on the executive team. A CEO doesn’t “run the business” — he inspires the direction and helps to steer it. You must delegate to an executive team who must then delegate down the line.
- How do you know what element of this complex organization your decisions will impact?
- If you remove the wrong person (once again, may not be mission aligned, but may perform a critical function), you could cripple a large part of the business, and make things worse.
As a CEO, you spend more time making intuitive decisions, because it’s impossible to be across all the data. You are always operating with 0.1% of the total information and must make decisions that impact everyone (internal to the company, and externally to everyone who depends on it: customers, shareholders, etc) under those conditions. All the time.
As such, change will take time and changing an organization of this size and complexity would probably take years. Maybe even a decade — if it was Facebook for example.
Not that once again, in this scenario, you as the CEO have a significant degree of executive discretion (much less than in a small company, but much more than in a government). There’s loads of game theory to think about. There is significant organizational inertia and delegation risk both which get much worse the larger the business becomes.
This of course leads us to…the juggernaut that is the US state apparatus.
How long would it take to change this thing? I think you could safely multiply that by a 1000 and still be light on the level of complexity involved.
In fact, changing such a thing sounds almost impossible, right? Correct — because it is. And only a madman, or someone with an incredible amount of character, courage, spirit, and naiveté would even attempt it. That was Trump in 2016. He saw his country run by career bureaucrats, sucking its people and land dry, so he threw his hat in the ring. I don’t think even he thought he’d win, but in a surprise outcome, he took office and charge of the greatest power the world has ever seen…with no prior political experience.
And what did he find? Something far worse than Facebook. Something with far more institutional rot than any one of us could possibly imagine.
What does one do in such a situation?
Well, you assemble the best team you can. One with deeply committed people, willing to die for the cause — and you hope that team hasn’t been infiltrated (which it most likely has). Then you go and fight for every single inch, with internal and external enemies, 24/7, with no option for a time-out.
Very quickly, you find that this shit is much harder than it looks. In this situation, you find yourself faced with one big trade off in particular: Death by inertia or death by delegation.
To change this thing in any meaningful way, you need to move fast and delegate, but the more you do that, the easier it is to both make mistakes, and for your enemies to sabotage and infiltrate. Welcome to politics. Anyone who’s ever built anything significant understands this. Those with over-developed comment muscles don’t, because instead of building, they’re commenting.
Organizational Inertia is a bitch. When so many things are broken, and the organization is incredibly large, it feels like nothing is changing. This is the swamp. And you only have four years to do anything about it (considering the first half of that term is spent learning the ropes), you come to a point where you must move things faster.
But guess what. If you want to effect change fast, then you must delegate.
Problem is, the more you delegate, the more you increase delegation risk, because you cannot vet everyone yourself. You need to accept recommendations, and the faster things are moving and the larger the organization, the higher the delegation risk!
Recall what I said earlier about CEOs. All leadership positions are the same. You are deciding with limited data, and sometimes you get it right. But sometimes you get it horribly wrong too — especially when you have a malevolent structure around you that wants you to fail.
It took Bukele a term and a half — 6 years — to clean up El Salvador, and that’s with comparatively little opposition, no deep state, and a population of a mere 5 million people. In other words, orders of magnitude less inertia, delegation risk, and game theory to worry about. In fact, the only way Bukele could be as effective as he’s been was to go extra authoritarian.
You think that’s possible in America? For a first-term president?
You don’t think that would have created a visceral “Hitler” reaction by the largely leftist US at that point?*
Of course it would have. In fact, it created the Hitler reaction anyway, despite the attempts to appease.
*And just for the record, Bukele also locked down, and mandated stupid PCR tests and forced vaccinations. He pivoted later, and earned the respect of many. Might Trump have done the same? Maybe, although we’ll never know.
Back to the US situation…
What you’re left with, like the rest of us in life, is a series of trade-offs and compromises, many of which you have to make along the way, as the situation dictates. You bite the bullet knowing you can only change things inch by inch. You accept the fact that it’s impossible to get to everything, so you pull the levers you can. You do what you know how to do best, which in Trump’s case, was making deals — and you hope it all pays off.
In his term, he avoided starting any new wars, brought troops home from ongoing wars, strengthened the local economy, selected a SCOTUS which has already had dramatic effects on everything from abortion to affirmative action to over-regulation, and established better relationships with every major power globally, especially the ones who were antagonistic before. Did he fuck up other things? Yes, of course. That’s expected on a first rodeo. I didn’t see any other cowboys go and beat Hillary in the stadium. So the responsibility fell on Trump to do what he could inside the Swamp.
Ultimately — I don’t think people realize how hard of a task this is, in the US. It will take decades to really steer things, and before any meaningful results can occur, the decay must be stemmed. This will require someone strong enough, and I cannot imagine anyone living today that could take on such a task.
If you have the character and courage to do better, by all means take the lead.
But, my brothers in Christ and Sanity. Do not be like these other weak little men, behaving as spectators in the cheap seats. Commend the man in the arena, the USA being the most significant arena in the history of humanity to date.
Not a God.
My support of Trump is not about bowing to a new god, or abdicating the responsibility you have over your own life and destiny. Never have I said “Trump will save you” — nor do I believe that.
I chose my words carefully to point out courage, charisma, and character.
If you cannot admire greatness and exceptionalism when you see it, you are part of the problem. You have a leftist demon inside yourself that you must cleanse.
Trump is extremely unique, and you cannot deny that.
Look at these photos, and tell me the man doesn’t have one of the most powerful auras out there?
The man has a memetic magnetism that few alive today can match. In fact, I don’t know of another person you could pick out just by a silhouette.
Now look at this and tell me this is not a miracle:
Whether he dodged the bullet by sheer luck, or it was the wind, or he saw some boobs and turned his head, or it was divine intervention, he dodged a fucking bullet!
Symbolic.
And not only did he dodge a bullet, but he got up and fucking fist pumped the crowd and yelled Fight, Fight Fight! Insane. Absolute legend.
Iconic:
Show me ONE other leader today that might do that. Maybe Bukele. Maybe.
For comparison, look at the Jan 6 pussies who cowered behind masks and desks as some peaceful protestors literally strolled through the rooms. Pathetic.
This is what I am talking about, and this is what I mean when I say “ordained” or “chosen.” I’m not referring to a messiah or Christ. I am referring to a Caesar like figure, which is actually more important right now.
Someone with extreme levels of character, courage, and energy needs to get a hold of the ship, like a captain, and inspire the rest of the crew to do something.
The passengers on the ship who are doing nothing in their cabins and just complaining about how bumpy and rough the ride is are irrelevant. Either get on deck and help, or shut the fuck up.
All the people with comment muscles are the definition of cowards.
What? You’re on twitter larping about “fiGhTiNg the system”.
What? You bought some Bitcoin and now think you’re doing more than “Trump the sTaTiSt”.
Cool story bro.
Your larping on twitter and weak ass lolbertarian rhetoric about “opting out” is not helping anyone. It’s why you have this problem in the first place. It reminds me so much of this:
You’re too busy being a theory-cel quoting Hayek and Mises, instead of rallying behind a movement and building something new. I hate to break it to you, but playing armchair economist or keyboard warrior is neither useful or impressive.
*Trump, Bukele, Milei, Elon Musk, and the rest of the men in the arena are impressive.
And if you can’t play at their level, what are you doing to help?
The world doesn’t need more losers pointing out what’s wrong.
It needs more men getting off their asses and doing something about it.
And in the process, honoring courage and leadership when they see it.
You get more of what you honor, respect and appreciate.
*Many of you clearly forgot that Trump is an entrepreneur first, who then came into office. Not a career politician. He could be chillin out at a golf course but he’s out there dodging bullets while others are flexing their comment muscles on here.
But Trump won’t save you!
Obviously! People who are waiting for a savior are no different than the larpertarians who think the market will save them, the bible-bashers that think they can pray their way out of an invasion, or the dorks who think Bitcoin will magically fix everything. There is truth in each, but these are not absolutes.
And ultimately: only you can save yourself. That’s always been the case. But a man of character and substance looks to save more than his own skin, even when the task at hand is insurmountable. This is the kind of man who should be honored and revered, for once again he is the man in the arena.
That being said, it is not the man in the arena’s responsibility to save you, or really to change anything single handedly. He is a SYMBOL for that change. His role is to inspire that change. Once again, I cannot think of anyone more symbolic of America than Trump, to inspire the rest of us to make the difference.
And after what happened on the weekend, there is no second best. Not by a long shot, and perhaps not in the next few lifetimes.
Defeatists abound
I also saw alot of this: “He won’t change anything and won’t be allowed to by the deep state.” “It’s all just a show” and “you’re being played.” “It won’t make a difference.”
Wow. Congratulations on the most defeatist attitude on the planet.
Losers with this attitude are…well…losers.
No amount of winning will ever convince them that they can win, so BY DEFAULT they concede defeat, and remain paralyzed and impotent. Incapable of sensing a win, or a new direction, or a shift in energy. They are able to see, to some degree, beyond the veil, but they’re too lacking in courage and testicular fortitude to do anything about it.
So…instead of building spiritual muscle and character, they build comment-muscles and an online avatar. Pathetic.
If you’re going to concede defeat, you’re already lost. You may as well just kill yourself and leave a little extra oxygen for the rest of us who are willing to fight.
“Oh but what if you’re wrong” — (someone commented this on my post)
My answer: What if I’m right !?!?!?!
Is that not worth fighting for?
Are you that weak and impotent that you cannot pick a side and fight? You have less balls than the high-profile leftoid scum like Destiny. At least that turd picked a side and is willing to talk about it (I don’t think he’d open his mouth in person though).
And if the side you picked was wrong, then so be it!!!
At least you did something!
And if the side you chose loses, then so be it!
At least you went down fighting.
Like I said earlier — if you’re going to be on the sidelines, then just shut up. Your opinion doesn’t matter.
Politics will find you
FINALLY…for those who just don’t care about politics, and I want to build their own lives, or businesses or communities — I can respect that. But you are making an error in my opinion.
The older I get, the more history I study, the more I come to realize that you need to capitalize on the “winds of history”. There are moments in which that wind shifts. This is one of those moments, and we need all the help we can get.
There’s a classic quote by Pericles that says:
Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn’t mean politics won’t take an interest in you.
(And yes, that commie Trotsky copied it 2000 years later). Unless you go to a cave and escape, politics will find you.
You can do your best to extract yourself from it, and credit to you if you can, and are able to build something of value independent from that shitshow. BUT…I fear that the time has come for us to fight across all fronts, and that includes the political and cultural ones.
For too long, good men have abdicated their responsibility to lead and govern, leaving a vacuum for parasites to fill.
That’s how we got here. All this nonsense about “power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely” — was a psyop to convince you to stay out of the game. WAKE UP NEO. It was all a lie.
If you have the capacity, it’s your duty to get in the ring.
If not you, then who?
We will all play our part, in different ways, so it’s fine if you want no political involvement. But do NOT push the people you may very well depend on away, because when you need their help, they might just remember what you said, and how you called them all idiots.
Entrepreneurs, business owners, creators, producers, builders, politicians and leaders the world over, who see through the bullshit and know the world is sick, MUST form an alliance here. There is a huge opportunity to stem the decay and maybe even change course THIS DECADE. That would be uuuuuge for our future generations.
So don’t sleep on it.
Don’t be a downer.
And please, for the love of god, do NOT be a commenter. If you’re not actively doing something, you and your opinion do not matter.
Harsh words? Yes they are.
But they have a point. And that point is to remind you that we must ENCOURAGE each other.
We don’t need more people “pointing out what’s wrong”. Or “opting out” into like cowards.
We need more people getting involved and pushing the momentum AWAY from the ever increasing decay.
This rant went way longer than I wanted. So I’ll end it here by admitting most of the people who need to read this, probably will not. And those who do, probably sense this already. And if you had your doubts, or were sidelining, I hope I’ve ignited a little something inside of you.
The burden of responsibility is heavier the larger the organization you are accountable for, and the problem you’ve chosen to face. This is why men of greatness have always been the few. It takes a special kind of character to bear that burden. It takes a special kind of belief in oneself and a courage to sacrifice your life for it.
But that’s also why we remember them. The men in the arena. Not the cowards with comment muscles.
So to those men. See you out there. On the field.
And to the rest of you..cry harder.
Aleksandar Svetski
PS: Take note of the Silicon Valley people out there.
They thought they could stay in their tech and finance bubbles, and not have to worry about politics. Or that they could be inclusive and democratic about everything, pandering the woke narratives as if it wouldn’t come bite them in the ass later.
They’re all quickly realizing the cost of that neglect, and they’re scrambling to put their 2c in now that it’s done. Only Elon had the balls to buck that trend early on. The rest of them? Bunch of pussies.
PSS: Trump not supposed to make the difference himself. He’s supposed to be a symbol and inspire the rest of us to make the difference!
More writing coming soon. Subscribe if you want more.
Better yet, go grab a copy of The Bushido of Bitcoin, in which I dig much deeper into topics of leadership, virtue and culture.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/bushidoofbitcoin/the-bushido-of-bitcoin-official-pre-launch
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