The First Amendment Goes Too Far, They Say

in #society • last month

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The above image was made by @amberjyang with Midjourney using the prompt 'Lady Liberty crying, dna money helix in the background.'

In a recent survey of 1,000 Americans, "fifty-three percent of respondents agreed with the statement "The First Amendment goes too far in the rights it guarantees" to at least some degree." Hearing this stopped me in my tracks. I knew things were bad but this seemed incomprehensible. It meant that we'd slid so far into dystopia that more than half of the country now opposes liberty.

These people likely don't want to give up their own freedoms. They want to limit the freedoms of their ideological enemies. This anti-liberty crowd may also have arisen as a social coping mechanism. As more and more of our rights were stolen from us by the control regime, voices that rationalized the theft were elevated by the regime, convincing many people that the real problem was the Bill of Rights.

Something similar has been happening in the economic realm for decades. As the control regime was systematically stealing our individual economic power, it was also convincing us that the market was impersonal and neutral, despite every aspect of the financial world being heavily manipulated.

Hooks in Our Biology

Artificial scarcity is embedded in our monetary system. The assumption of perpetual growth underpins our economic system, as do various forms of fraud and extortion. These things lead to widespread resource shortages and disruptive boom-and-bust cycles. Until the system is fundamentally changed, there will always be another financial crisis on the horizon.

Of course, there are for all practical purposes two economies. There's the economy that individuals and small businesses depend on, and there's the economy used by our control regime. In the everyday economy, money is survival and credit is extended only to people and companies advancing the regime's agenda. At the level of government and big business, money is little more than a game used to make people do things they otherwise wouldn't do.

As weird as it may sound, our financial situations are programmed into our biology. As I've written before, financial losses activate the part of the brain that processes fear and pain. Here's a good Science Daily quote on this:

The researchers found surprising similarities between the response to financial losses and a system that they had previously identified for responding to pain, which they believe allows the brain to predict imminent harm and allow immediate defensive action to be taken. "Clearly, none of us want to lose money in the same way that none of us want to experience pain," says Dr Seymour. "It would make sense that the way that we learn to predict and hence avoid both of them should be linked." The reward and defensive systems relating to financial loss were very similar to motivational systems previously identified in rats, which suggests they have hijacked an evolutionarily old system connected to avoiding fear and pain.

A paper titled The symbolic power of money explains further:

Six studies tested relationships among reminders of money, social exclusion, and physical pain. Interpersonal rejection and physical pain caused desire for money to increase. Handling money (compared with handling paper) reduced distress over social exclusion and diminished the physical pain of immersion in hot water. Being reminded of having spent money, however, intensified both social distress and physical pain.

Beyond this, there's evidence that lacking power impairs executive function and poverty impedes cognitive function. So not only is financial standing programmed into our bodies, low financial standing actually gets in the way of thinking clearly.

Walking on Eggshells

The enemies of freedom are multiplying. People are saying yes to censorship and propaganda online. And offline, they're walking on eggshells. According to the survey story referenced above:

1 in 5 respondents said they were "somewhat" or "very" worried about losing their job if someone complains about something they said. Eighty-three percent reported self-censoring in the past month, with 23 percent doing so "fairly" or "very" often.

Much of eggshell culture is grounded in economic insecurities. Cancellation means income loss and blacklisting. Fears of these things are compounded by the rapid decline of the dollar's purchasing power, and by increasingly impossible conditions in many sectors of the economy. Many people are understandably afraid of the prospect of economic insecurity.

The way out of this isn't to abandon the First Amendment. The way out is to get over our baggage and start talking to each other, get the control regime's financial hooks out of us, and reclaim the economy for ourselves. Not everyone is interested in doing that. Most people would never even think in these terms.

There are however more and more of us connecting with each other to lay the groundwork for better alternatives to legacy system economics. Soon there may be an inflection point, as the general population scrambles to stay afloat in our crumbling economy. People could start plugging into the emerging blockchain economy in a variety of ways. And they'll be much more likely to do so if the decentralization movement gets its act together and starts communicating in ways that more people can relate to.

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