Robert Malka is a board member of the Bitcoin Today Coalition and works with Mi Primer Bitcoin to develop the curriculum for its K-12 bitcoin certification program in El Salvador.
We stand at the crossroads between the death of Fiat and the revival of generational wealth, where the possibilities are endless.
Through Bitcoin, the economic foundation of our society will be a commitment to truth rather than inflationary lies; a commitment to meaningful work rather than endless speculation; and a commitment to generational wealth rather than wasting our efforts. This opens up endless possibilities, one of which is the chance to infuse our society with a new cultural DNA.
Globalization has robbed local cultures of their distinctiveness and turned high culture into a stale affair. We must replace them with the incubation of new cultural aspirations. If decent people choose a bitcoin world, they will look to each other, improve their bodies, and glorify their natural God-given abilities. The results of this collaboration are unpredictable.
Let’s take a moment to consider one possibility among many in this potential cultural renaissance.
We start with Adam and Eve. They bite the apple naked, and when they’ve swallowed it, they look for fig leaves. They have recognized their nudity and that they have to hide something about it. They are ashamed of their genitals, their lust, and their disregard for God. This is a profound story worth exploring, but I propose another ideal: imagine hiding your genitals because your lust tempts you to play a game – dress, just with that the other can take them off again.
Why is this such a tempting idea for me? Because when we hide something, we rarely do it (although rare things aren’t always hidden). What we make rare, we arouse desire. What we want from health, we learn to love. In the case of our bodies, we are sexualizing what we rarely do. This principle is intuitive for Bitcoiners insofar as hard money and high culture are rare. In my imaginary portrayal of Adam and Eve, this rarity creates a layer of separation between them and their lover that needs to be revisited, re-explored, and removed in order to renew and deepen their intimacy—without the weight of shame.
We’re a long way from such a game in this onerous fiat world. Today we have layers between us and ourselves, us and our work, and us and our communities. We forgot how relevant we were. We need goals that inspire us to love life for its own sake.
Enter the Ancient Greeks: They were a people who created naked statues of themselves and their gods so that the commoners could see at all times the ideal they had to pursue. While today we post images with filters or reduce nudity to a morbid transaction – trillions of images, permanently on the airwaves, for mere unconnected masturbation, the ancient Greeks dreamed of being the Riace warriors: haughty, proud, inspiring an ecstatic mix of awe and terror.
Today we strive to be TikTok influencers, endlessly mimicking seas of recursive imitators and crashing down to the lowest common denominator. But the Greeks saw in the tragedy of life and life one more reason to love it and to distinguish themselves through this love.
how did we get here Although it didn’t start in the world of fiat, by dramatically lowering our time preferences, bitcoin is a great reset (if I may) that makes us see ourselves in new ways. We need to reevaluate what we allow ourselves to become. For the first time in human history, the future belongs to us.
With Bitcoin, we can envision far into the future — not in the next minute, getting stuck on PornHub or Tinder while plowing mysterious meat into our mouths — but to thinkto aim high, to discover a real pursuit that offers real value. After generations of discipline against these efforts, people become beautiful. They work. you eat well They compete against each other in performance competitions. And then, most importantly, they become proud of their excellence and show it.
They increase what it means to be rare – rare, not by hiding something, but by achieving something hard. It’s hard to be sexy. It’s hard to have a Viking’s body. It’s hard to be the best artist, warrior or entrepreneur. It’s even harder in this world to be proud of it and then proudly reveal it. And the first thing that becomes beautiful in a person – that is a proof of his excellence – is the body.
Seriously, I think the boldest of us will shed our clothes, even in the midst of the elements. We will rediscover the honor. We will look for a partner by walking barefoot and naked across the marketplace. At first our puritanical nature will cringe, but the sheer awe of men and women before us will encourage us to reconsider. I am speaking of Adams and Eves who learned to transform their lust into a beautiful becoming being, laying shame in their fig leaves.
And from there, maybe the world will follow — until clothing just becomes another form of play, as we sometimes see in our better moments. May the world one day have a day when it celebrates its beauty in the transparency of nudity – as all other animals dare.
This is a guest post by Robert Malka. The opinions expressed are solely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of BTC Inc. or Bitcoin Magazine.
