"Crypto metaphysics" — London, Wed 12th March

A talk about the spirit of crypto (and everything else), not just the mechanisms

I don’t tend to do formal talks these days, despite having a long professional history as a public speaker, as my nervous system is a bit wrecked from years and years of psychological warfare in a covert global conflict. That said, when some of my most treasured friends ask me to speak at their own crypto event, what can I do other than say “yes”? So on Wednesday of this coming week I am one of two speakers at “Crypto Wednesdays”. I am no longer in the technology industry itself, and the Internet of Value isn’t my focus, but I do have things to say on the overall subject matter.

Here is the nutshell version of what I plan to say.

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Crypto is a tool and technology, and it is easy to get lost in the mechanisms (say Bitcoin or smart contracts) and lose sight of its ultimate purpose — ideally freedom and peace. Whatever spirit you are operating in — “creator” or “competitor” being the key ones — you will get a lot more of it when you hyper-accelerate everything via blockchain. This can be a problem both at the product level (there are evil uses as well as benign ones), as well as the personal (“crypto millionaire” can be a hidden curse). I would probably have destroyed myself if my tiny crypto holding had “mooned” a few years ago.

Without a language to discern spirits, you may end up serving the wrong spiritual master, or caught between two different masters. Everything “smart” puts us under the law; that’s not a failure, just a fact — it isn’t governed by faith. The regulatory framework is legalistic, by design, and that’s OK — just not at the cost of faith in our lives. Discussion of matters of spirit is polluted by organised religion (“turn to the right”) or New Age thought (“turn to the left”), so tends to lack a commonality of understanding. As a simple example to bring it to life, we can distinguish between “truth” (you can be wrong in your beliefs, so not true) and “spirit of truth” (humbly seeking truth even if misguided at times, so always in the spirit of truth).

The technology is neutral to the spirit it is deployed in, including all those automated agreements and recorded claims. This does matter — but it falls more on those consenting to the smart contracts than the architects of the coins and chains. There is no toggle switch for good or evil mode. Where we really get into trouble is when we “succeed” and are suddenly endowed with great provision, but potentially lack spiritual purpose. Many people will approach us, seeming to have a purpose for our provision, but that is when we are really tested. Can we distinguish which spiritual master a potential crypto-fuelled project genuinely serves? Are we being quietly co-opted as a cog in a machine that doesn’t ultimately aid humanity to escape fiat debt slavery?

If there is one life skill that a newly minted crypto millionaire needs to acquire, it is awareness of “narcworld” and how much of our social relationships are built upon narcissism and narcissistic abuse. Some of my audience may be abusers, even, locked into arrested development from early life trauma; I am sorry you have to live that way. Others will be victims of this kind of hidden abuse and coercive control. The essence of it is that the narcissist doesn’t love themselves too much, but rather not at all; they lack a true self, so must maintain a false self (and false narrative) at all costs. Narcissists will target people with provision and no (or defective) purpose. Sudden crypto wealth can be your undoing.

The narcissistic spirit is absolutely everywhere — business, government, families, courts, hospitals, schools. There is an ontology of dysfunction to discover: gaslighting, invalidation, love bombing, manipulation, devaluation, triangulation, blame-shifting, projection, isolation, smears, golden child, scapegoat. The motives and behaviours are often hidden, which is where there is a spiritual crossover with crypto — the clue is in the name, the technology conceals as much as it reveals. Crypto shrinks the space for some forms of narcissistic abuse, such as editing history, via an immutable ledger and arrow of time. Conversely, it possibly opens up new avenues for accusers to bear false witness, fortified by “the blockchain said it is so”.

All contracts entered into via the blockchain are in the free will of the parties. That doesn’t mean their will aligns to a divine purpose; or that it is necessarily a spiritually fallen or even criminal endeavour. Businesses operated in a “spirit of creator” can celebrate that someone else made a better product and had more sales; the 3D loss is a 5D gain. Those in the “spirit of competitor” will seek revenge for their business failure and humiliation. No technology — transistor, CPU, relational databases, Web, or blockchain — can solve a spiritual problem. Only we can do that. The first step is to recognise that there is a metaphysical dimension to crypto, and that “spirit of competitor” is embodied via narcissistic abuse.

The narcissist will always seek retribution — fuelling a cycle of violence in some form — because they cannot separate rejection of the offering from a rejection of themself. That is because they lack a true sense of self: the offering is who they are, from their perspective. Just as a website is an offering to connect on the legacy Internet of Information, blockchain is a technology for making offerings to transact in the Internet of Value. We probably aren’t going to solve these spiritual problems with better software; more likely is that we recognise symptoms of narcissism and abuse in our workplaces and business partnerships, and address them at a higher level entirely.

There is one part of narcissistic abuse that does deserve consideration as a technical architecture matter in the crypto world. The ONLY lasting solution to such abuse at the personal level is to go “no contact” with the abuser, and refuse to be hoovered back in to their cycle of seeming to care, only to turn on you, and then discard you again. This is why we have a “block” button on social media; we have to be able to not only cease communications, but also disassociate ourselves from the abusers. The same pattern will play out in every possible sphere of online interaction, and the architect of the system has to consider how the abused can permanently disconnect from the abuser.

In the long run, your success in crypto will not be measured in material terms. “There are no pockets” in a shroud, nor is there a place to keep your ledger keys beyond this life. Provision can bring temporary relief from material woes, but comes at the cost of having to face our demons more starkly. Everyone in crypto, as is the case in life in general, has a choice of two spiritual paths — self-will or divine will — and at some point they diverge. Self-will leads to narcissism and a cycle of control and abuse. Divine will leads to peace and true prosperity. As someone who would have previously partied himself into oblivion on crypto coins, I am speaking from experience of having seen the fork in the road, and taken it, as the joke goes.

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The event is from 6pm to 10pm at the Hiver Taproom at 56 Stanworth Street, SE1 3NY. You can sign up here — it’s free — this is to manage numbers: