The Mamba, Madison and Satoshi: How Decentralization was, and still is, the answer
The late great Kobe Bryant was revered for his fierce competitiveness and indominable spirit. Few players in any sport could match his sheer will to win. What is less appreciated about the Mamba was his intellectual curiosity and sharp analytical mind.
In an interview given to NBC’s Chris Collinsworth during the 2008 Beijing Olympics, Kobe, already a three-time NBA Champion and reigning MVP, called playing for the USA the most important honor of his career because America is the, “greatest country in the world.”
When a surprised Collinsworth asked whether talk of patriotism was “cool to say,”Kobe calmly replied, “It’s a cool thing for me to say. Look at the opportunities our country has given us. I think it is the best.” He spoke with no sense of bravado, nor did he sound braggadocious. Kobe was simply stating the facts as he saw them.
The Mamba was right. What he knew, and what some many have forgotten, was that the unique respect for individual rights enshrined at America’s Founding has created opportunities to advance and prosper at levels never before seen.
For 7,000 years of recorded human history, governments focused on control through a central power. The amazing system our Founders gave us in 1989, builton the work of luminary thinkers like Adam Smith, John Locke and David Hume,was a revolutionary leap forward toward decentralization and permissionless access, addressing the fatal flaws of centralized authority and trust. The depth of the Constitutions impact was profound and, I argue, unequalled until Satoshi Nakamoto released the Bitcoin White Paper in 2008.
Satoshi and our Founders are kindred spirits. While I have never seen Satoshi writeabout the US Constitution, I have little doubt that if the spirits of Washington, Jefferson and Madison could be raised for an evening of discussion, they would love Bitcoin and block-chain technology, and not just because they didn’t like fiat money. The Founders shared the fundamental ideals of Bitcoin, tackling governance problems by constructing a system that sought to be decentralized, permissionless, censor-resistant and immutable. It is through these principles that we must look for solutions to our current state of affairs.
Politicians today make frequent, sometimes eloquent, calls for “unity.” In his inaugural address, President Biden pledged that his “whole soul” was devoted to “bringing America together, uniting our people, uniting our nation.”
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy similarly opined, “It does not matter if you are liberal, moderate or conservative. All of us must resist the temptation of further polarization. Instead, we must unite once again as Americans.”
If we just rally around a central authority, the Politicians say, then we’ll be OK. But these nice-sounding words are, in the end, just propaganda. We were never intended to depend on a central authority in Washington, DC. They ignore whatmakes us uniquely American, our Constitution.
The Constitution is a contract between the People and the Government that lays out rules that the People consent to live and be governed by. The Constitution enshrines our inalienable human rights endowed by God or nature, and strictly constrains and limits the power of government. We all have the right to our lives, our liberty and the fruits of our labor.
The Founders, having defeated a tyrannical King a decade earlier, saw a strong central authority as the greatest threat to the civil contract. Therefore, the Constitution created not a democracy, but a decentralized Republic.
The Constitution made clear and simple promises: it gave us sound money, guaranteed our inalienable rights and enumerated the specific powers of the central government. Power was intended to be kept as local as possible, and states were expected to nullify unconstitutional laws. A clear set of checks and balances were constructed to stop the accumulation of power in any one branch. Power andauthority were distributed.
James Madison famously told us, “As a man is said to have a right to his property, he may be equally said to have a property in his rights.” This simple but powerful statement explains the core of the American contract. We own our rights. They belong to us and us alone, and we cannot be justly deprived of them by any person, group or government.
What made the founding of the United States unique was not that it created a sovereign nation, but rather a nation of sovereign individuals. For the first time in known history, the People were governed by their own consent, and gave that consent with the expectation that the contract would be strictly adhered.
As the great philosopher and abolitionist Lysander Spooner wrote, “A man's natural rights are his own, against the whole world; and any infringement of them is equally a crime; whether committed by one man, or by millions; whether committed by one man, calling himself a robber, or by millions calling themselves a government.”
The Federal Government was intended to be far less powerful than the leviathan into which it has evolved. It was given no power to levy an income tax, keep a standing army or emit bills of credit (print money). Money was defined as units of gold and silver, and the Senate was elected by state legislatures. Alexander Hamilton even promised in the Federalist No. 78 that the Supreme Court would be the weakest branch of government because it had, “no influence over either the sword or the purse,” and had, “neither FORCE nor WILL, but merely judgment.”
Thomas Jefferson and James Madison championed the doctrine of nullification, a concept that has been unfairly vilified but is in fact deeply American and patriotic. They asserted that the federal government was an agent of the States with certain specified, delegated powers, and that States should simply refuse to comply with, or nullify, any federal use of power not expressly authorized.
Nullification was affirmed in 1798 and 1799 in the respective Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions. In response to our first major challenge to Free Speech, the Alien and Sedition Act, Legislatures in both States took positions that the law was Un-Constitutional and should not be enforced within their borders. The Founders saw nullification as the ultimate check against unjust authority and supportedstates, local governments and juries’ power to nullify. Some of the most prominent instances of jury nullification involved the refusal to convict Northern Abolitionists for violations of the odious Fugitive Slave Act.
The Constitution was at first a hard sell. Debate raged for nearly a year between the Federalists, who supported ratification, and the anti-Federalists who thought the document entrusted too much power to the new Federal government. The Bill of Rights, argued by some as unnecessary, was in fact a compromise to assuage the anti-Federalists, and it further enshrined our protected freedoms for those who thought the Constitution too vague.
This was the Contract that unified us as Americans, and it was only to be changed through a rigorous and precise Amendment process. There may be small tweaking through legislation or legal arguments about interpretation, but changes of substance require an amendment.
As power comes more and more centralized, Americans have grown increasingly divided and political parties seem more like warring gangs than governing statesmen. Our Founders would be dismayed at the state of today’s civil society. They did not even want political parties in the first place, rightly predicting that they would factionalize and divide the country.
In his farewell address, George Washington warned of the “baneful effect” of political parties and wrote that, “they are likely in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.”
John Adams wrote, “There is nothing which I dread so much as a division of the republic into two great parties, each arranged under its leader, and concerting measures in opposition to each other. This, in my humble apprehension, is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil under our Constitution.”
Political parties are disunifying by nature, no matter the charming words of their leaders. They seek conquest by division. Partisans are kept, by design, in a constant state of outrage, and members of the opposing party are branded stupid, evil or both. They are part of a system pushing further centralization of authority, straining our civil contract to the brink of collapse and concentrating power in the hands of elites and the corrupt corporate cartel that captures the bureaucracy.
We have empowered cronyism over innovation, oligarchs over small business, Federal over Local and sadly, Government over People. Central authorities control the economy, pick winners and losers, reward insiders and punish dissent.
Cronyism spawns more of the same. Take, for example, the often-discussed Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996. Under the ironicallynamed “Good Samaritan Clause,” Section 230 allowed internet providers to moderate content, gather personal data and track and surveil their users while retaining broad liability protection.
This legislation was, for many, well-intentioned, and it was even championed by Web visionary Tim Berners-Lee. But the 1991 case Cubby, Inc. v. CompuServe Inc. had alreadyestablishedcommon-law precedence thatproviders of online bulletin boards or “Town Squares” were free from civil liability, provided that they conducted no user surveillance.
As a result, Facebook, Google and Amazon received defacto subsidies of over $3 trillion that shielded them from torts, competition and regulation, and artificially built them into massive oligarchical behemoths that polarize us by design. 230 created the tech surveillance, the pillaging of our personal data and the engagement through enragement model. This unfortunate tale is just one of countless examples of how government subsidizes bad behavior while creating immense wealth and power for a few are our expense. With so much at stake, is it any wonder why the constant fight for control grows ever more vicious?
Everything has become a winner-take-all, zero-sum game, pitting us against one another, making enemies out of neighbors and fueling us with enmity. There is no room for debate or respect for differing opinions. We have undermined the entire incentive structure to find understanding or common ground and created a win-at-all-costs mentality that seeks to subordinate and subjugate, accomplished through demonization and dehumanization.
This sad reality has manifested in the “Cancel Culture” epidemic that is sweeping society. Robespierre-like mobs comb the internet and descend on their target of the day, full of outrage and self-righteous indignation, to bully, silence and dehumanize their victim. Cancel Culture is an attack on critical thinking and destroys the basic rights that make us Free People. Millions of Americans have been digitally exterminated, while untold more bite their tongues and self-censor for fear they might be next.
This attack is insidious. The right to speak freely has been treasured by Americans and seen as essential since our founding. This prevailing outlook has carried forward in the American conscience for more than 200 years; in 1952, Justice William O. Douglas said:
It is our attitude toward free thought and free expression that will determine our fate. There must be no limit on the range of temperate discussion, no limits on thought. No subject must be taboo. No censor must preside at our assemblies. We need all the ingenuity we possess to avert the holocaust.
The task of keeping our civil liberties alive is not an easy one in troubled times like these. But I believe our civilization will supply the necessary men. The people need leadership that makes a virtue of courage, of conviction and freedom of expression.
Douglas, an FDR appointee to the Supreme Court and broadly seen as a liberal, expresses here a concept that once unified Americans, from the Founding forward, across many divides: respect for free speech, enshrined in our Constitution and Bill of Rights, is at the core of what holds America together.
Amending the Constitution is difficult by design. If a contract is easily changed, it has little value. Legally amending the Constitution is possible only when Americans have reached a broad consensus. It is intended to take be deliberate andthoughtful and requires that people be persuaded, not forced. Difficult though it may be, the Constitution has been duly amended 27 times, the 13th and 19th times correcting grievous shortcomings and scoring major leaps forward.
Our civil contract created a system where significant change required significant agreement and guaranteed due process. It is American to argue. It is American to persuade. It is American to win over fellow citizens where possible and tolerate when we cannot.
Cancel Culture is as un-American as you can get.
The First Amendment reads, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”
It enshrines our right to religious freedom, a free press, to assemble and to dissent, and is held together by free speech. Free speech is the glue, and if it can be cancelled, so can the entire First Amendment. The First Amendment is how we defend the rest of the Bill of Rights and without it, no other rights are secure.
Cancel Culture must be seen for what it is: an attack on our civil contract. It seeks to change to the Constitution and destroy our rights by force and violence.
Society advances itself through doubt and questioning. “All censorships exist to prevent anyone from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions,” wrote luminary thinker George Bernard Shaw. “All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions and executed by supplanting existing institutions. Consequently, the first condition of progress is the removal of censorship.”
Cancel Culture, if left unchecked, will make progress impossible. At the same time, it strips us of our defenses. History is littered with horrific examples of tyrants using force to quell dissent, leaving decent people with no ability to stand up. The philosopher Etienne de La Boetie wrote, “It is incredible how as soon as a people become subject, it promptly falls into such complete forgetfulness of its freedom that it can hardly be roused to the point of regaining it, obeying so easily and willingly that one is led to say that this people has not so much lost its liberty as won its enslavement.”
From the Salem Witch Trials to the Inquisition, from Mao Zedong’s re-education camps to the Khmer Rouge, governments time and again exploit kernels of well-intentioned sentiment to do horrible things. These are just a few examples of what can happen to a society that gives up the right to speak freely, dissent and challenge authority.
We are today on a dangerous path– a march towards centralization, cronyism, corporatism and even Socialism.
Socialism has become trendy in some Western circles because few understand what it really is, mistakenly thinking Socialism just means free stuff and a big tax bill for the Rich. They do not understand that socialism means an end to individual rights, personal freedoms, property rights and our civil contract. Socialism is a form of indentured servitude. Instead of working for yourself or your family, you work for the State. Your life is not your own. The State owns you and the fruits of your labor and decides what portion they will allow you to keep. There is no consent of the governed, only submission to the central authority. Dissent is not allowed.
In the end, Socialism is the complete opposite of the principles that once unified us as Americans. Power belongs only to the State, while the Individual is limited and restrained. The collective has rights, and the individual has none. Central authorities are free to use unrestrained force to compel citizens to comply, while the individual has no protection or recourse.
“We live in a world in which people are censured, demoted, imprisoned, beheaded, simply because they have opened their mouths, flapped their lips, and vibrated some air,” wrote Harvard Phycologist Daniel Gilbert. “Yes, those vibrations can make us feel sad or stupid or alienated. Tough shit. That's the price of admission to the marketplace of ideas. Hateful, blasphemous, prejudiced, vulgar, rude, or ignorant remarks are the music of a free society, and the relentless patter of idiots is how we know we're in one. When all the words in our public conversation are fair, good, and true, it's time to make a run for the fence.”
A time of reckoning is approaching, and the stakes are clear. Corporatists and their cronies want to further centralize their power and cement their control. They want to end whatever we have left of Capitalism and replace it with Socialism. They want to take away our most sacred property, our inalienable human rights, and leave make indentured servants to the central authority.
Their vanguard is the Cancel Culture mob destroying our right to free speech, our First Amendment and our power to dissent. Sadly, they are winning a lot of battles.
The Founders, like Satoshi, were revolutionary thinkers who realized the power ofdecentralization. They have the answers. We can stop this march to totalitarianismif we listen.
Reject centralized authority and re-energize respect for our civil contract. Own Bitcoin. Embrace the pursuit of trustless, permissionless technologies. Listen to others. Speak freely. Practice tolerance. Love your neighbor. And, refuse to be silenced or intimidated.