The Mamba, Madison and Satoshi: How Decentralization was, and still is, the answer Part 2

(Continued) By Jeffrey Wernick, with Jesse Benton

John Adams wrote, “There is nothing which I dread so much as a division of the republic into two great parties, each arranged under its leader, and concerting measures in opposition to each other. This, in my humble apprehension, is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil under our Constitution.”

Political parties are disunifying by nature, no matter the “charming” words of their leaders. They seek conquest by division. Partisans are kept, by design, in a constant state of outrage, and members of the opposing party are branded stupid, evil or both. They are part of a system pushing further centralization of authority, straining our civil contract to the brink of collapse and concentrating power in the hands of elites and the corrupt corporate cartel that captures the bureaucracy.

We have empowered cronyism over innovation, oligarchs over small business, Federal over Local and sadly, Government over People. Central authorities control the economy, pick winners and losers, reward insiders and punish dissent.

Cronyism spawns more of the same. Take, for example, the often-discussed Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996. Under the ironically named “Good Samaritan Clause,” Section 230 allowed internet providers to moderate content, gather personal data and track and surveil their users while retaining broad liability protection.

This legislation was, for many, well-intentioned, and it was even championed by Web visionary Tim Berners-Lee. But the 1991 case Cubby, Inc. v. CompuServe Inc. had already established common-law precedence that providers of online bulletin boards or “Town Squares” were free from civil liability, provided that they conducted no user surveillance.

As a result, Facebook, Google and Amazon received defacto subsidies of over $3 trillion that shielded them from torts, competition and regulation, and artificially built them into massive oligarchical behemoths that polarize us by design. 230 created the tech surveillance, the pillaging of our personal data and the engagement through enragement model. This unfortunate tale is just one of countless examples of how government subsidizes bad behavior while creating immense wealth and power for a few at our expense. With so much at stake, is it any wonder why the constant fight for control grows ever more vicious?

Everything has become a winner-take-all, zero-sum game, pitting us against one another, making enemies out of neighbors and fueling us with enmity. There is no room for debate or respect for differing opinions. We have undermined the entire incentive structure to find understanding or common ground and created a win-at- all-costs mentality that seeks to subordinate and subjugate, accomplished through demonization and dehumanization.

This sad reality has manifested in the “Cancel Culture” epidemic that is sweeping society. Robespierre-like mobs comb the internet and descend on their target of the day, full of outrage and self-righteous indignation, to bully, silence and dehumanize their victim. Cancel Culture is an attack on critical thinking and destroys the basic

rights that make us Free People. Millions of Americans have been digitally exterminated, while untold more bite their tongues and self-censor for fear they might be next.

This attack is insidious. The right to speak freely has been treasured by Americans and seen as essential since our founding. This prevailing outlook has carried forward in the American conscience for more than 200 years; in 1952, Justice William O. Douglas said:

It is our attitude toward free thought and free expression that will determine our fate. There must be no limit on the range of temperate discussion, no limits on thought. No subject must be taboo. No censor must preside at our assemblies. We need all the ingenuity we possess to avert the holocaust.

The task of keeping our civil liberties alive is not an easy one in troubled times like these. But I believe our civilization will supply the necessary men. The people need leadership that makes a virtue of courage, of conviction and freedom of expression.

Douglas, an FDR appointee to the Supreme Court and broadly seen as a liberal, expresses here a concept that once unified Americans, from the Founding forward, across many divides: respect for free speech, enshrined in our Constitution and Bill of Rights, is at the core of what holds America together.

Amending the Constitution is difficult by design. If a contract is easily changed, it has little value. Legally amending the Constitution is possible only when Americans have reached a broad consensus. It is intended be deliberate and thoughtful and requires that people be persuaded, not forced. Difficult though it may be, the Constitution has been duly amended 27 times.

Our civil contract created a system where significant change required very broad consent and guaranteed due process. It is American to argue. It is American to persuade. It is American to win over fellow citizens where possible and tolerate when we cannot.

Cancel Culture is as un-American as you can get.

The First Amendment reads, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”

It enshrines our right to religious freedom, a free press, to assemble and to dissent, and free speech coheres the entire amendment. If it can be cancelled, so can the entire First Amendment. The First Amendment is how we defend the rest of the Bill of Rights and without it, no other rights are secure.

Cancel Culture is an attack on our civil contract. It seeks to change to the Constitution and destroy the rights of others by force and violence.

Society advances itself through doubt and questioning. “All censorships exist to prevent anyone from challenging current conceptions and existing institutions,” wrote luminary thinker George Bernard Shaw. “All progress is initiated by challenging current conceptions and executed by supplanting existing institutions. Consequently, the first condition of progress is the removal of censorship.”

Cancel Culture is a regression, not a progression. History is littered with horrific examples of tyrants using force to quell dissent, leaving decent people with no ability to stand up. The philosopher Etienne de La Boetie wrote, “It is incredible how as soon as a people become subject, it promptly falls into such complete forgetfulness of its freedom that it can hardly be roused to the point of regaining it, obeying so easily and willingly that one is led to say that this people has not so much lost its liberty as won its enslavement.”

From the Salem Witch Trials to the Inquisition, from Mao Zedong’s re-education camps to the Khmer Rouge, governments time and again exploit kernels of well- intentioned sentiment to do horrible things. These are just a few examples of what can happen to a society that gives up the right to speak freely, dissent and challenge authority.

We are today on a distructive path– a march towards centralization, cronyism, corporatism and even Socialism.

Socialism has become trendy in some Western circles because few understand what it really is, mistakenly thinking Socialism just means free stuff and a big tax bill for the Rich. They do not understand that socialism means an end to individual rights, personal freedoms, property rights and our civil contract. Socialism is a form of indentured servitude. Instead of working for yourself or your family, you work for the State. Your life is not your own. The State owns you and the fruits of your labor and decides what portion they will allow you to keep. There is no consent of the governed, only submission to the central authority. Dissent is not allowed.

In the end, Socialism is the complete opposite of the principles that once unified us as Americans. Power belongs only to the State, while the Individual is limited and restrained. The collective has rights, and the individual has none. Central authorities are free to use unrestrained force to compel citizens to comply, while the individual has no protection or recourse.

“We live in a world in which people are censured, demoted, imprisoned, beheaded, simply because they have opened their mouths, flapped their lips, and vibrated some air,” wrote Harvard Psychologist Daniel Gilbert. “Yes, those vibrations can make us feel sad or stupid or alienated. Tough shit. That's the price of admission to

the marketplace of ideas. Hateful, blasphemous, prejudiced, vulgar, rude, or ignorant remarks are the music of a free society, and the relentless patter of idiots is how we know we're in one. When all the words in our public conversation are fair, good, and true, it's time to make a run for the fence.”

The stakes are clear. Corporatists and their cronies want to further centralize their power and cement their control. They want to end whatever we have left of Capitalism and replace it with Socialism. They want to take away our most sacred property, our inalienable human rights, and leave us indentured servants to the central authority.

Their vanguard is the Cancel Culture mob destroying our right to free speech, our First Amendment and our power to dissent. Sadly, they are winning a lot of battles. As Edward Snowden reminds us, “Businesses that make money by collecting and selling detailed records of private lives were once plainly described as "surveillance companies. Their rebranding as "social media" is the most successful deception since the Department of War became the Department of Defense.”

The Founders, like Satoshi, were revolutionary thinkers who realized the power of decentralization held the answers to our problems. We can stop this march to totalitarianism if we listen.

Reject centralized authority and re-energize respect for our civil contract. Own Bitcoin. Embrace the pursuit of trustless, permissionless and censorship-resistant technologies. Respected privacy and the Fourth Amendment. Reject the surveillance regime. Listen to others. Speak freely. Practice tolerance. Love your neighbor. And, refuse to be silenced or intimidated.