Bitcoin may be the expected change

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We live in a make-believe world with make-believe ideals, make-believe money, and make-believe language. A world of quick fixes and quick cash, where the road to success no longer requires hard work, it is enough to cover the flaws that emerge. If something doesn’t seem as perfect as the movies or your neighbor’s life, we take medicine, we whitewash, we dress in fancy clothes and decorated facades until we convince ourselves. themselves and everyone inside is not corrupt and failing, but respectable and prosperous.

Throw your deflating money against the cryptocurrency wall and maybe you will earn some gold. Take your investment advice in a Tik-Tok video, buy GameStop options on a whim, and pray for a miracle. When it fails, complain about the injustices of capitalism instead of locating the underlying problem: a strong time preference and the inability to take responsibility for one’s life choices.

We rely on fake energy, with rooftop solar panels and wind turbines in the desert, plains, and ocean edges, and then we’re surprised when power outages hit and electricity bills soar. arrow. The government and environmental thinkers said they were clean and threw grants in your path, so naturally they must be good.

If there is an abnormal virus that is spreading hastily across the world, we are up against all the mighty force of the great government, assisted, of course, by the central planners of the world. We don’t let people take responsibility for their health – encouraging them to eat better, exercise more, be outdoors – but we lock them in their homes where disease spreads more easily, and they don’t renew. their vitamin D stores. We claim the solution is medical invasion, a quick fix, rather than a healthy body and a strong immune system.

We claim we can fix problems if only we get the right central planner to apply minor pain relief after the fact.

With a simple adjective we can change the world

In my professional life, I sometimes have the thankless task of dealing with writers who have well integrated this vision of the world. A few years ago, The Guardian, Britain’s leading left-wing newspaper, praised the world when its editors updated the use of the newspaper’s language. Climate change would henceforth be called “climate emergency” or “climate crisis”; climate skeptics as “climate science deniers” or the most terrifying “climate deniers”.

Earlier this year, I noticed that the Financial Times – on its own or under pressure from its peers – has followed suit. In an article denouncing the energy consumption of Bitcoin (which, in reality, is quite minor), the editorial staff felt the need to write: “There should be no trade-off between the so-called democratization of finance and the climate emergency. ”, As if the use of stronger words had something to do with the subject of the play. And it wasn’t the first time either, as the editorial board on at least two occasions last year (here and here) used this exact wording in opinion pieces. Just a few years ago, the FT regularly used more conventional language to discuss climate change.

For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out what was the reason for this obsession with puns. Could it really be that what was preventing the world from embarking on the aggressive climate policies that the upper echelons of our intellectual class so desperately desire were the words used by these same elitist journalists detached from reality?

A similar thing happened with ethnicity last year. Simmering in the underworld of race wars, many activists had urged their news providers to capitalize “Black” to indicate that this was a unified ethnic group of heritage (such as Latinos or Native Americans) , rather than just a physical description, a simple adjective. It wasn’t until George Floyd’s protests last summer that the New York Times internalized this important battle of our time: to respect and honor the historic sacrifice of African Americans – symbolically revalorizing a letter. The Associated Press, setting standards for many other publications, issued similar guidelines and plunged straight into culture wars by refusing to similarly capitalize “white.” “Whites,” the ad read, “have a lot less shared history and culture” and therefore did not deserve the upgrade.

I don’t mind varying the writing styles. I make a living editing newsletters, quarterly reports, and academic journal submissions. Most outlets use a different style and format; some capitalize the titles while others do not. Some write full names while others rely on initials. Some require some letter-and-number convention (for example, numbers one through nine spelled out, but 10 and up using numbers). This is the path of decentralized and emerging orders like language. To each his own. During Black History Month last year, I even recommended a client to follow this new activist spelling practice because her article specifically dealt with the suppression of black writers in media and education. , and the spelling convention was a relevant touch.

Spelling conventions, neutral pronouns, or other superficial labels don’t really bother me – they’re just the icing on the cake, wrapping a gift. What annoys me endlessly are the moralizing elites who substitute real and meaningful change for false charades. If you really believe in the importance of your cause, you should do something about it instead of playing puns or dressing your new ones with fair facades. If people care about your writing, it’s because of the content of your work, not the spelling convention you choose to wrap this message. This is why the British spelling conventions (eg “work”, “defense”) or punctuation, while unusual for an American audience, hardly distract them from the appreciation of Churchill or Orwell.

Speaking of Orwell, our body of journalists seems to have embraced the opposite sin that Orwell attacked in his “Politics and the English Language”: instead of obscuring the truths by using euphemisms, writers exaggerate the truths to the point. to mentally numb their readers. If the crisis is now our daily inventory, how can we talk about real crises once they appear, double crises? If rectifying inequalities can be done with the stroke of an editor’s pen, why don’t we already live in a paradise of equity and abundance?

Do we really think that we are healing the deep-rooted hatred towards the race, gender, or sexuality of others by updating the spelling of articles that objects in our mocking gospels are unlikely to read? Most likely, you are just annoying and polarizing people before you walk away from the very people whose minds you most want to persuade.

In “The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature”, Steven Pinker of Harvard wrote of the “treadmills of understatement”, the linguistic idea “that concepts, not words, are paramount in the minds of people. people “. If you update the name of something, the neologism inherits the connotation of that thing. “Give a concept a new name, and the name becomes colored by the concept.”

Over the past few decades, a “cleaner” has become a “janitor”, then a “caretaker” or “keeper” and then “facility manager” (and soon, I guess, “material removal manager” ). Yet whatever disdain that lowers the status that may or may not exist for the people who clean the desks of our journalists who have become semantic crusaders remains fairly intact (not that it should, as their value to society probably exceeds those of us. that school principals serve).

St. Thomas More, a 16th-century statesman, author and lawyer, is often credited with saying:

“Some men say the earth is flat. Some men say the earth is round. But if it is flat, could Parliament get around it? And if it is round, could the king’s order flatten it?

Replace “leaders” with “journalists” and “earth” with “the problems of our time”, and Sir Thomas could speak to our society five centuries later.

Instead of aiming for greatness, self-actualization, or a safe and comfortable life, we correct our false ideals with quick fixes. We portray a glorious life on Instagram and jealously drool over the latest filtered photo of our friends from Aruba, Bali, or a beach on a Greek island. We relax, dreamily, with a surprisingly addicting telenovela or Netflix show – not with the treasure of human literature, human connection or a sunset.

Once the initial burst of joy has passed, we take the opioids the doctor so readily prescribed or the antidepressants that we think are keeping us out of the deep. If we have high blood pressure or type 2 diabetes, we think we are in desperate need of expensive drugs – not a workout or balanced blood sugar provided by cutting out grains and carbohydrates or following the carnivorous diet.

In our hassle of everything wrong, we forget about the hard work that could actually improve our lives – the proof of work for our money, the proof of the workout for our health, the proof of the relationships that are the reward for our continued attention to. them.

There’s a lot that Bitcoin and its Cyber ​​Hornets don’t fix – but at least it gives the semblance of honesty and refusal to accept bullshit. It pushes its users to take responsibility for their own lives and finances, to look up from immediate pains to future gains and meaningful changes rather than cosmetic updates.

Fight semantic, stylistic, political, and medical battles as much as you want, but don’t pretend it brings your lofty ideals one step closer to reality. Quick fixes don’t fix a world that is drowning in pretension.

This is a guest article by Joakim Book. The opinions expressed are entirely theirs and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc or Bitcoin Magazine.

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