Good Morning Everyone,
The notion of needing permission and also the psychological dynamic it creates is really interesting to me and something I’ve been giving more and more thought to. It is something that is baked into our cognitive operating systems from a foundational level as children, and certainly expanded upon through traditional schooling and into adulthood and in the workforce.
We are built and conditioned for obedience & compliance, and to seek permission from a figure of authority from day dot. As a child in school, you typically need to put your hand up to be able to speak or ask a question - likely even to go to the toilet. As an employee, If you want to take time off you must seek permission.
In the time of COVID Hysteria, you need permission to enter shops and businesses and even to travel from Australia during the last 21 months - you needed to request permission and provide your reasons for wishing to travel. At one point permission was revoked to even allow you to visit a park.
This extends into the realm of payments, and your ability to interact with another individual and express or receive value. If you want to be able to pay someone for a good or service across some distance whereby cash does not function, a bank account is required. To obtain a bank account you must seek permission from an institution providing this service, and then again to send a payment.
If this is not available to you or not granted what do you do?
If you are required to seek permission, it highlights your position in a system or a hierarchy. If it were your system, or you were higher or more dominant in the hierarchy you would be the one providing this permission, as opposed to seeking it.
If we apply this understanding to our current monetary system, it highlights that this is not our system - it is someone else’s.
It is a system we do not control. It is however a system that we participate in. Unknowingly to many, and for the most part willingly.
Thinking about the current system of Money via this lens is interesting.
While technically we participate in the current system of money by choice, as it’s to our benefit to do so. It’s predominantly a function of it having been the best option available. Prior to Bitcoin, there were very few alternate ways to operate beyond this system. To send gold coins around as payment is slow, it carries greater risk, the fee to do so is higher and most merchants would not accept them nor know what to even do with them.
Given how significant the system of money is within society, this seems suboptimal.
Money whether we like it or not has a profound impact on how we exist. It is a technology that you interact with likely every single day and often multiple times per day on some level. The amount of money you have determines where you can and cannot live, where you can or cannot go, or travel to. What food you buy. The types of clothes you buy or can’t
buy. The type of education your children are afforded, or not. The tools and technology you have access to. The list goes on.
This impacts the communities and groups of people you interact with and has a huge impact on you, and others, very fundamentally. Affecting the standards you may accept, the societal norms you learn, the choices you make, your habits, behaviours.. even your thoughts. Extrapolate this for everyone of us, and you have a wild simplification of the impact money has on you, me, and human society as a whole.
To suggest that we need permission to express value, which is a fundamental expression, is as absurd as suggesting we need permission to communicate, or that any entity has power over who we communicate with or express value to.
We now have a system to enable this. That is no ones system, and it is everyones system. It exists everywhere. It is a system that requires no permission to participate. It is completely flat. No network participant is dominant over any other. It is not controlled or governed by any central group or entity whose permission we require.
You can choose to plug in to this system, and operate within the rules of the network, and the network will facilitate your request providing the rules of the system are not breached.
One can hardly imagine how this is going to alter our way of life, when you consider the wide ranging implications of the current monetary system and the acceptance and normalization of a hierarchical power structure being built into this base layer technology and conditioning us to seek permission, often without even realising it.
Exciting times.
Hope you had a great Christmas, and i’ll speak to you tomorrow.
AK
