The Nietzsche Mutilation: Debasing the Modern Pronoun Condition

Jon Gulson
Coinmonks
5 min readAug 12, 2018

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Moving away from the headlines can bring us closer to reality, even if the asymptotic nature of [such] is not obvious.

Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea illustrates in a tale of will and endurance — where a fisherman is pitted against a giant marlin — how [reality] can elude. In proving himself to peers and after days in pursuit, the marlin is caught — only for sharks to be attracted by the resulting blood trail, leaving a mutilated carcass as reward for the fisherman’s exhaustion.

Beholding and Becoming

When beached and looking at the sea anew, the temptation is in succumbing to lurking and reductive definitions.

Postmodernism is compelled to make a conceptual leap and deconstruct such ‘privilege’; believing every expressive act is embedded in a network. This network uses the same tools or language to condemn [that] it opposes, so is always at risk of becoming the thing it beholds.

Nietzsche — the forefather of postmodernism — out of obvious context in this regard, asserted the impossibility of an evolutionary explanation of the human aesthetic sense. Chris DeRose tweets:

Wolves Inside the Fence

And here we arrive at a cryptocurrency mantra code is law — a reference to the immutability of an automated instruction set.

Nietzsche

This sentiment echoes certainties of an older order— the same certainties which caused Nietzsche to enquire; laying seeds for postmodern type thinking.

And high energy physics arrived from a realisation such old certainties contained paradoxes and inconsistencies. Niels Bohr invokes William Blake’s auguries in the following [observation]:

“We must be clear that when it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images and establishing mental connections.” (Wikiquote)

Bohr was among the earliest of his generation of physicists to sense [some] of the difficulties were attributed to the [sign systems] being used. Henri Poincaré also pointed out, along with the possibility of compromise at the heart of calculus:

“We have put a fence around the herd to protect it from the wolves but we do not know whether some wolves were already enclosed within the fence.” (Great Math Quotes)

Will to Power

The affect of the new physics and its (re)quest for a unified reality, has implicated in many other areas (including linguistics). David Bohm devised rheomode when realising formal noun based English fragments [too easily, when] seeking grounding for a continually transitory sub-atomic world.

Nietzsche’s will to power — his most prominent concept — is relevant, but left open to interpretation as it was never systemically defined. It is believed to describe a [will] to attain the highest evolutions, rather than advocating the explicit motivations or pursuit of [power].

Nietzsche

The sublimation of will to power from a primordial desire into creative, growing, durable life-affirming acts are not necessarily explicitly understood — and possibly why Nietzsche found an evolutionary explanation of the aesthetic sense, impossible (just as the new physics ‘sensed’ the limitations of the sign systems they were using).

Nietzsche too sensed an inconsistency in the location of the ‘self’: that it may not necessarily be within, but above: the Übermensch would be capable of ‘a monster of energy, without beginning, without end…my Dionysian world of the eternally self-creating, the eternally self-destroying…’ and a this-worldliness which afforded Nietzsche to pronounce God dead.

And so we see how the postmodern trends tend to move in irregular fashion, compared to those previous and how they move away from a pronoun standard. We are about to see too, how a new type of economics has evolved; taking us to the point where DeRose questions if we will be the first generation to lose history?

Bitcoin in an Inflation Targeted World

Money is perhaps the last bastion to be challenged by postmodern thinking: it’s issued by commercial banks and managed by central banks on a Consumer Price Index (CPI) trend, also known as inflation targeting.

A well-known economist recently commented “the merit of an inflation target is that it acts as a signal of the central bank’s intentions with regard to prices and it’s easily understandable to the public”.

Another prominent monetary economist takes a differing view: “..inflation is complicated because money is complicated. Defining inflation as “increase in the money supply” doesn’t eliminate the complication.”

The same economist elaborates here:

Do we really understand inflation?

This [same] economist has criticised Bitcoin for its inelastic and fixed issuance, saying there ‘is nowhere near enough of it’:

The ‘sign signals’ being used here are framing Bitcoin in a language which can’t itself decide on the commonly held definition holding the CPI measure together. In this context, what is meant by ‘enough’?

As imagined in Parallel Control?

Whilst monetary economics has been untouched [by the new trend], standard economics has been transformed by game theory; the godfather of whom is John Nash and awarded a Nobel prize for his work in Nash Equilibrium.

Nash also in 1954 wrote a futuristic paper called ‘Parallel Control’, imagining a non-Turing complete type network where processing units used the same components but shared a singular memory field.

And in the autumn years of his life, Nash wrote and spoke of an Ideal Money; where the comparative qualities of monies achieve parity by stabilising against a global trend.

In this context, it becomes possible to see Bitcoin as a convergence toward a singularised, trusted and unforgeable memory field (the blockchain) which allows Nash Equilibrium to affect international money markets and high level settlement between peers.

And while we can observe the difficulty for governments and economists to give up their attitudes [by] which approaches and careers are based; we can — in light of the postmodern experiences in particle science— observe a debasing of the pronoun condition.

This observer tweets:

Implicit and Meditative Markets

In concluding, an obvious question may be how is a non-explicitly understood technology (Bitcoin) optimised?

The only answer to be reached is that any explicit purpose attached to [Bitcoin] can be deconstructed in the language we seek to (re)move; that the dynamics of Nash Equilibrium allow us to understand how formal noun constructed English is too prosaic, concussive, static and ill equipped to deal with the continual movement of today’s digital markets — and when applied to the macro monetary environment, the analogue and discursive nature of the CPI trend will be revealed as antiquated.

Like the fisherman who returned only to dreams of his youth in an African savannah; and the affirmations in reality which Nietzsche inspired— we can observe that trust optimises implicitly.

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