Thread by @kofinas

1/ Crypto is the only industry or intellectual realm I've ever waded into in my life where a non-consensus view about something as important as money and the public good is regularly dismissed as some form of piggish envy, resentment, and greed.

2/ What's most dispiriting about this reading and line of attack is that it elevates money & profits above integrity & epistemology.

It embraces cynicism in its highest form by presuming that everyone is playing the same game. That no one cares about truth or is acting honestly.

3/ Of course, this is not true. It's a transitory function of the modern world.

Much of today's pop culture is about giving individuals permission to live selfishly & celebrate their riches at the expense of the broader society in which they live & upon which their lives depend.

4/ The more time I spend immersed in this culture, the more I've come to understand this adaptation as an outgrowth of institutional failure & corruption, existential angst, and a portending sense of societal and even ecological collapse.

5/ And while these underlying causations are important to understand and should arouse our empathy, they do not excuse our adoption of misanthropy and perpetual distrust as organizing principles of modern life.

6/ When I think about the challenges that we are now beginning to encounter, from ecological catastrophes, to refugee crises, to various conflicts, resource wars, & economic dislocations, I cannot help but feel we have yet to really acknowledge the struggles that lie before us.

7/ I wish I had a quick and easy fix to propose, but I don't.

The only thing I know for sure is that global-scale problems like those we face today require some amount of self-sacrifice, love of neighbor, and a commitment towards the common good that we currently seem to lack.

8/ And while Adam Smith's invisible hand has a role to play in this new future, if we want to survive & thrive over the yrs to come, we need to abandon this ahistorical view that government is inherently incompetent & corrupt and that "technology" and markets alone will save us.

10/ I know it's a tall order to ask people to have faith in government again, but it's always darkest before the dawn.

After all, people, organized through government have achieved some of the most incredible feats in human history.

11/ We've been through many decades of decadence, incompetence, & corruption. This won't go on forever, but we've convinced ourselves that this is the natural order of things and that nothing is ever going to change.

This isn't true. It's just a story, and it doesn't serve us.

12/ My objective with @HiddenForcesPod is not only to expose my listeners to new ideas and interesting people, but also to new ways of thinking about the world and the problems we face as a society.

13/ Some of the episodes I'm most proud of deal not with the more heady topics of technology, markets, geopolitics, etc., but with our common humanity.

Episodes on love, morality, self-discovery, purpose, and so on.

I couldn't list them all; there are so many.

14/ This obsession with understanding life as an authoritative experience and us as something more than the sum of our parts has been with me since the very beginning.

My first recording (published as episode 3) was ultimately a mediation on life itself.

hiddenforces.io/podcasts/mark-…

15/ I've been encouraged by how many people continue to seek out the podcast and find resonance & meaning in the topics and stories we cover.

I feel privilege to be in a position to facilitate these conversations and I will continue to do so, until it no longer feels needed.

16/ If you feel the same way, I encourage you to share this thread with others, and to share your feelings and thoughts about the show as a review on @ApplePodcasts.

It's the one place where you can see how many people have been touched by this show. 🙏🏻

podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/hid…