Hard Money and Hard Men
What happens when Bitcoin wins?
A year ago Aleksandar approached me with a request of a literary nature. He was working on a book, The Bushido of Bitcoin, and was in need of an editor. The unreformed weeb in me was immediately intrigued by the title,「Bittokoin no Bushidō desu ka? Sugoi omoshiroi desu ne!」, and, despite the fact that I’d never actually edited a book before, I foolishly agreed, thinking that it would be finished in a few months. Hah! But here we are, a year later, and after many revisions, expansions, deletions, rewrites, additions, and consolidations, it is finally complete … or at any rate in the capable hands of the typesetters, meaning that it’s no longer my irresponsibility.
The book comes out at the end of the month. To whet your appetite, I talked Aleksandar into sharing an excerpt from the book’s introduction, which I hope you will enjoy. The book trailer is a lot of fun, too. Definitely watch that first.
- JC
They say that it is always darkest before dawn. That the hero must be struck down before he is to rise again. The hydra-haunted hellscape we are up against will surely get worse before order is carved from the chaos like David from Michelangelo’s marble.
Amongst the deluge of distraction and degeneracy, it is all too easy to find yourself lost. You find yourself isolated, overwhelmed, and gaslit into believing it is only you who feel this way. Only you suffer from a splinter in your mind that insists that something is most terribly wrong.
Born from the desire to be a catalyst for change and a leader of tomorrow, you seek what you should do. Today, I’d like to offer you a second option. I want to propose that you first seek who you should become.
Only great men can create good times. And what makes men great is not only that they can do what others cannot, but that they do because they can. Alexander crossed the Bosphorus into Asia, conquered Egypt and Persia, and reached the ends of the Earth, not because it would make him wealthy - but because he was born to do it. It was his calling. His destiny. He was the man who could, and so he did.
How many men, who have greatness in their DNA, choose to settle instead of reach? Too many.
History is shaped and molded by those who choose greatness over mediocrity. These men have the blood of warriors pumping through their veins, and no amount of globo-homo propaganda or gaslighting will change that. It’s time Western man awakens from his slumber, and to do this, he must be reminded of a code which defines WHO he is. With that foundation, he can then discover WHAT he must do.
Despite the title, The Bushido of Bitcoin is not a book about Bitcoin, but about virtue. Bitcoin merely provides a solid and honest base layer for civilization. The book is a playbook for a new socio-economic standard. It’s a moral code for the victors of the future. The book is about the sort of qualities and behaviors future leaders will have to embody and practice once shit hits the fan, so that we may rebuild a life-affirming civilization from the ashes of clown world.
What follows is an excerpt from the introduction. A reminder that all is not what it seems, and that when given the choice between being a warrior or a gardener, it is the former you must choose if we are to bend the arc of history back toward the true, the good, and the beautiful.
The Age of Strong Men
I’ve always felt as though I was born in the wrong era. My wife tells me this on a regular basis and I am consistently drawn to stories from a time for which only an echo remains. An age of heroism, honor, valor, and hand-to-hand warfare.
There is something deeply inspiring about the feats of courage performed by our ancestors. The fact that we made it this far, without things like toilets, sanitation, electricity, refrigerators, supermarkets, and the like is mind-boggling if you think about it. Men crossed hundreds of miles on foot, with no Nikes or special military footwear, carrying armor, weapons, and supplies on their backs, over mountains, valleys, and rivers, to challenge each other, to fight hand-to-hand, smelling the very sweat, bile, blood and excrement of their enemy, and in the process, getting stabbed, slashed and wounded; but still, somehow, surviving. Overcoming all of that, they went on to build the monumental foundations of the civilisation we live in today.
Humanity when viewed through such a lens is truly awe-inspiring, and it’s unfortunate that most people don’t appreciate this.
Much of the corpus of modern anthropo-historic study suggests that the story of humanity is a progressive one. The general view is that humanity evolved from savagery to barbarism, and from there into civilization. In fact, if you ask Francis Fukuyama, in the last few decades we reached the end of history! We finally transcended our savage roots and are now more representative of… civilized (domesticated?) humans? Obedient little pets? Who knows.
Others such as Friedrich Nietzche, Oswald Spengler, Julius Evola and, more recently, Bronze Age Pervert have pushed back on the notion of ‘progress’, and made a case for history being cyclical. In their view, ancient man was closer to “the gods”, while modern man is but a husk of his ancestral greatness, who over the centuries has exchanged his honor and virtue for the material comforts of a soft civilisation.
I used to be in the naive camp of the former, believing that the story of humanity has, besides a few troughs along the way, been one of “progress”; but I’ve come to reconsider this and cede mental territory to the latter arguments. While there has certainly been a general undercurrent of technological progress, the social, structural and moral fabric that binds us is undoubtedly more cyclical. Sure, we live in a technological golden age, but we also live in a moral, intellectual, emotional, and physiological dark age - a perspective that more people are beginning to agree with, not least because of the growing amount of supporting evidence.
Obesity rates in the most materially affluent countries have skyrocketed in the last fifty years, as have rates of anxiety, depression, drug addiction, autoimmune diseases, autism, sexual confusion, loneliness, and childlessness. Birth rates are floundering and the nuclear family is being actively attacked in an attempt to dissolve it. We’re told that “we live longer on average”, but this is primarily due to lower infant mortality. The actual human lifespan has not changed that much at all - but we are fatter, sicker and uglier than we’ve ever been, and there’s no averaging that can hide it.
Our nihilistic age is characterized by a pervasive, nebulous sense of hopelessness and creeping disquiet. We are trapped in a longhouse of our own making, managed by an administrative class to whom we’ve ceded ever more power. The world has become one giant HR department run by crazy cat ladies and a never-ending horde of bureaucrats.
It’s no wonder we have a populace gripped by endless hysterias of every kind. Be it the fear-mongering by climate catastrophists who’ve been predicting the end of the world “next decade” for the past century, the more recent mass lockdowns and paranoia over flu variants, or the current panic over AI. Add to that the never-ending stream of nonsense coming out of mainstream media, Hollywood, Netflix, reality TV, celebrity tantrums, and social media meltdowns, and you’ll get a sense for what I mean.
We used to have hand-to-hand wars involving real warriors. Now we have either invisible wars, or “Hollywood Wars” involving actors, mainstream media, and Time Magazine. Some of it is so clearly ridiculous that you don’t know if it’s made up or the result of a confluence of mass stupidity and LARPing. Either way, it has led us into the Golden Age of Scamming, both visible and invisible. While you work, these bureaucrats literally scam you through inflation and taxation to fight bigotry, inequality, terrorism, drugs, Russians, North Koreans, and whatever the new flavor of boogeyman is this week. Then, to add insult to injury, people like Sam Bankman-Fried who, instead of being held to account by those he robbed, are actually protected and praised by the media, and allowed to fly first class in time for Christmas with the family.
I’m not sure we’ve seen a time in human history so strange and absurd. There are even multiple accounts on social media dedicated to ridiculing this “Clown World” - for it truly is.
But despite all of this… there are glimmers of hope. There are cracks in the facade, where rays of light can enter the darkness. People are thinking and talking about Rome again. They are hungry for beauty. The Hopf cycle and midwit memes have become commonplace in online discourse. There is of course Bitcoin, and the promise it brings - and most important of all, is the reawakening of the human spirit and the rekindling of its highest and most valiant expression: the warrior archetype. It is this energy I will speak to throughout and do my best to inspire in you, because this is most representative of life-force.
Whether you subscribe to the progressive theory of history, or the rise and fall theory, you cannot deny that it is made up of seasons and cycles, which encompasses both. While history may not exactly repeat, it certainly rhymes, but it also spirals upwards. The parallels between the modern West and the Roman empire are inescapable, and if you have the courage to truly open your eyes and look around, you’ll get the inner sense that we’re both “at the end of an era” and that “we’ve been here before.” It’s an eerie mix of feelings that many people are experiencing and searching for a way to understand. Hence the growing desire to read from ‘taboo’ authors such as Evola and Spengler. But as much as this should concern you, it should also give you hope, because we made it then - and if we are intentional, we will make it through again.
This book will help you make sense of these feelings, understand what’s happening today, why it is happening, what happened to the great civilisations whose shoulders we stand upon but have lost touch with, and ultimately come to terms with the fact that winning requires competing. You can’t complain your way to victory. With that, my goal is to inspire you to become a better person through better thought, action and an ascendant attitude.
We all have battles to fight, both externally and internally. There will be times you want to take the easy way out of a situation, but your inner voice, the one which taps into the greater truth of your higher self, will tell you you’re not on the right path. You are sinning, or “off the mark” in the original sense of the word. Listen to this one. The inner battle to do what’s right, even when it’s hard, will call upon the better parts of you. It is for these battles that the virtues discussed hereafter will be most useful.
History and its stories are incredible teachers - and if you decide to be a receptive pupil, there is much to learn. You will know you’ve found truth when it shakes you to your core, moving you viscerally and emotionally. This is your soul speaking to you. Inviting you to be and do more.
My goal is to open the door for moments like this when you read the words that follow.
A Warrior in a Garden
A warrior is he who brings order and peace through the application of disciplined violence, when it is necessary. The Chinese ideogram for warrior 武 (wǔ) is in fact a blend of the symbols for “weapon” and “stop”.
The top part 戈 (gē) represents a "weapon" or "spear," underscoring the martial aspect of the warrior, and the readiness to engage in combat or to defend.The bottom part 止 (zhǐ) means "to stop" or "foot," symbolizing both cessation—of bringing conflicts to an end—and the mobility or groundedness of a warrior.
It reminds me of an Internet legend, that the word 'meek' is poorly translated into English from the Bible's original Greek word “praus”, and that the true meaning is something more like “those who have swords, and know how to use them, but choose to keep them sheathed”. Whether or not this is accurate, the analogy is a powerful one. Those who shall inherit the Earth, are the ones who are prepared. They are “The Remnant”. It of course also echoes the Latin: Si vis pacem, para bellum (if you want peace, you had best prepare for war).
These are but a few of the profound parallels between East and West that I discovered while doing research for the book. Seeing how principles and virtues overlapped in cultures that had no contact, and evolved independently, tells me that there are truths here. Truths we will explore as we progress.
The opening quote of the book is:
“It’s better to be a warrior in a garden than a gardener in a war.”
This is one of those maxims that stuck with you. It encapsulates the soundness of preparation, the quiet readiness of one who’s mastered his craft, and the approach to a life of continual development. These attributes make the warrior the quintessential archetype of man.
No domain exists where the stakes are higher than war. It is why we are naturally drawn to history and, in particular, historic warfare. It moves us. In fact, if we really think about it, what is history if not a compilation of the stories of war and of conflict? Of one man’s will and frame against another? Of battles and their triumphs and tragedies?
Our greatest stories are the battles of Gaugamela, Thermopylae, Waterloo, and Sekigahara. They are Edmond Dantes’ fight for freedom or Tristan and Isolde’s fight for love. These contests always involve some level of violence, because violence is part of our psycho-biological make up. It moves us, and unlocks a deep, primal element in our being. We feel most alive when we are faced with violence. Conflict plays a central role in life and the greatest battles are thus remembered because they call upon the deepest part of us to stand up for what we believe.
Aversion to war and conflict is a major blind spot for libertarians. While I understand why, their disdain for war, violence and conflict may actually be the reason why it is subconsciously unappealing to so many. Growth is conflict in action, and operating from a continually defensive philosophical framework is defeatist. It’s why they are and always will be the number one losers.
“I’ll sleep when I’m dead” may be the calling card of the young and stupid, but there is truth in this statement. There is the promise of adventure and conflict. There is life and vitality in it. Peace is a weak state because it ignores both the necessity for war, and the virtues which warriors must embody.
Peace is at best, the period between conflict, and is ultimately what we experience after life, i.e., in death. In fact, I’ve come to believe that without war, peace is meaningless. For that matter, without peace, so too is war. They are forever entwined, like Yin and Yang. Life, chemistry, physics all require tension and polarity to exist.
Life itself is in a constant flux and battle. It’s a struggle to get out of bed in the morning, to ensure your kids are fed, that your home is orderly, that your career is on the right track, that you’re building wealth, that you’re having an impact. The Lion struggles to catch the deer and the deer struggles to flee. The food on your plate had to struggle to get there. Billions of sperm had to be discarded and lose the battle of individuation in order for one to win and create you. All of life involves conflict and, at times, there are real battles. We must recognise this. To ignore it is to ignore reality - which only leads to weakness, emptiness and death.
This is why it’s better to be a warrior in a garden and, paradoxically, why only those who are prepared for war deserve peace.
Resisting mediocrity
"Violence is not necessary to destroy a civilization. Each civilization dies from indifference toward the unique values which created it."
- Nicolas Gomez Dávila, Scholia to an Implicit Text
A culture that embraces homogenization is signing its own death warrant. A culture that ignores its unique DNA and works to consciously or unconsciously dismantle the hierarchies and structures that hold it together will fall apart. A culture that rejects myth, theology, spirit, and a moral dimension to existence, will soon find that nothing is sacred. From this point, relativism, nihilism, and debauchery follow.
If any of this sounds familiar, it’s because it is exactly how we got here. Jash Dholani – the old books guy on X – reminds us that while “Reason is a useful tool, it can't become the sole yardstick for judging ALL of life.” We as a civilisation (especially in the West) are suffering not only from irrationality but also from over-rationality.
"The modern tragedy is not the tragedy of reason defeated but of reason triumphant."
- Nicolas Gomez Dávila, Scholia to an Implicit Text
Myth and tradition both deal with deep and timeless questions. To discard them is to be left with trivialities that harbor only a rational dimension. This is a shallow existence and one we’re experiencing today. Dávila said that: "The enemies of myth are not the friends of reality but of triviality."
The opposite of mediocrity is greatness and nobility, in the same way that the opposite of shallowness is depth. Mediocrity is shallow. It has roots like astro-turf. It’s the plant in the pot, the nomad with no territory. Nobility runs deep. It has roots like an ancient Oak Tree. Its territory is its line, extending back through time. A society that has no reverence for the noble will ultimately find itself shallow and mired in mediocrity.
"Those who proclaim that the noble is despicable end up by proclaiming that the despicable is noble."
- Nicolas Gomez Dávila, Scholia to an Implicit Text
It’s no wonder the people telling you to untether yourself from your ancestors by convincing you they were savages are the same ones telling you to ignore your body, and the same people who want you to eat the bugs, to feed you tumors and fake meat, to block out the sun, to print unlimited money, and to make you a helpless dependent. They are the same people who will slander the Napoleons, Achilles, Caesars and Alexanders of history by calling them tyrants, homosexuals, dictators and “short power-hungry men.” Such people cannot appreciate beauty, because they are ugly inside. Instead of seeking to climb to the level of those better than them, they choose to tear them down. Nietzsche said that resentment was the most vile of emotions and drives. He could not have been more accurate. It’s not that power corrupts, but that power corrupts the weak and resentful. The noble use power to reach higher. The weak use it to tear things down. They revere nothing. They are not the same.
Ayn Rand echoed this when she said: "Kill reverence and you’ve killed the hero in man." While she was a materialist, she had a deep appreciation for beauty. She knew that virtues such as excellence, integrity and honor are sacred. She did not frame them as guilt-laden, altruistic facades, but as what they truly are - acts of nobility. They were something of a higher order. She had many more layers than the midwits can notice.
"Don’t let anything remain sacred in a man’s soul— and his soul won’t be sacred to him."
- Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead
Her master works put these virtues on display. Her heroes were not just businessmen; they were noblemen. They acted “first hand” - as she would call it. Her villains were the opposite. She drew a deliberate contrast with the hero, depicting her villains not as ‘dark evil characters’ but as ignorant, jealous and mediocre people fueled by resentment, who lived what she called “second-hand” lives. In her words, people who “don't want to be great, but to be thought great," who “don't want to build, but to be admired as a builder," and who put the "the impression of doing" over the act itself.
This class of resentful parasites has been despised by every great and noble culture since the dawn of time, from the ancient Macedonians to the Samurai. They are Nietzsche’s slaves and Last Men, and BAP’s bugmen. They were illustrated in Rand’s books, and today we deal with them in real life, as the moochers, the looters and the mediocre globohomo class. The ones who, too lazy or inept to create, are all too ready to take, leech and destroy.
We must resist this at all costs, for in Rand’s words: "Enshrine mediocrity—and the shrines are razed."
Excellence is not the opposite of ‘bad’, but of ‘average.’
When you seek equality, you cannot get excellence, but by definition, average and mediocre. There is a reason why the greats, whether Socrates, Aristotle, Alexander, Voltaire, Napoleon, Carlyle, Nietzsche, Spengler, Sowell, or Hoppe have been so critical of democracy and equality. They identified them as the antitheses to greatness and excellence. Nietzsche, in particular, expressed it powerfully:
“Here everyone helps everyone else, here everyone is to a certain degree an invalid and everyone a nurse. This is then called virtue.”
- Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols
In such an environment, strength and excellence are frowned upon, while weakness and mere adequacy are glorified. In such an environment, humans devolve into crabs in a bucket; this is where we are now, the age of participation awards and the twilight of the West…
The only way to build something better is to reject average and to aspire to be elite. The elite, etymologically speaking, are the ‘selected’ which, by definition, must be the ‘select few’. Notice how those who today claim the word ‘elite’ are anything but excellent, and instead the embodiment of average, emerging from the seemingly endless sea of mediocrity. This must change. Those of us willing to tap into the vitality of life must learn, train, practice and ultimately rise to place the word ‘elite’ back upon the shrine where it belongs.
Will it be easy? Of course not ... but ease is not the goal. Excellence is.
The age of strong men is upon us. A new elite is forming, built on foundations of virtue, character, and excellence. This might sound grandiose, but it's true. After every fall, something new rises. The greatest cultures from history all had their genesis in the demise of the prior - and importantly, the most successful were those which took what worked previously and transmuted it.
That’s what Christianity did with Rome and the Pagan World - or from another angle, what the European Pagans did with Christianity. Whichever you prefer to believe, the outcome was the same: a new West.
The future is precisely what we make it. The goblins and ghouls might outnumber us, but they’ve never truly been a match for the Knight. The challenges we are up against are great and many, but this is nothing to be mad about. In fact, it’s cause for celebration, for this is where glory and a life of meaning is found.
The Warrior lives at the brink of life and death: at the moment between the old and the new.
If you feel as I feel, and are moved in some way by these words, I invite you to:
Join me at The Remnant Chronicles where I explore these ideas in greater detail
Pre-order or keep an eye out for the release of “The Bushido of Bitcoin”
Thank you again to John Carter, not only for lending me this platform but for the invaluable feedback and suggestions during my writing of the book.
Aleksandar Svetski
It would be unseemly for me to ask you to subscribe after you’ve just read an excerpt for a book, of course, I hope you will purchase and enjoy. So I won’t. But I will, as always, extend my deepest and most sincere appreciation to all of my supporters, whose generous patronage enables me to spend time not only writing my own work with you, but providing a platform for others to develop and share theirs. - JC
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Thankyou again for everything JC. It's been a journey.
He writes very well. It is my favourite style; Short declarative sentences. He says it directly; Irony free. I am so sick of irony.