Forget about left vs. right, republican vs. democrat, and liberal vs. conservative for a few minutes. This article has nothing to do with that, it is about the bigger picture.
I believe there is a revolution brewing up in our country, and it’s starting with the way we talk to each other. During work, during parties, and during commutes, Americans have started speaking out about the imbalance of power in this country, and the inherent corruption that has made its way into every facet of our lives. From corporations abusing their abundant wealth in every way imaginable, to governments illegally spying on their “free” citizens, the list of corrupt entities in this country goes on and on.
At some point soon, the world is going to realize that there are nearly 8 billion people on this planet that have a voice. It will not be long before the voice of the many begins to outweigh the power of money and stature in our country.
It begins with people like Greta Thunberg and Andreas Antonopoulos, speaking out to anyone who will listen. Before long, they were speaking to massive crowds with more individuals than seats to fill. Not long after, they will be speaking to the entire country, and not long after that, the entire globe. Because when you start to look around you, it is very easy to see that we have placed our future in the hands of the world’s most rich and powerful entities, and these entities seem to share much different values than you and I.
This is the story of how I realized that America is quickly approaching its tipping point.
Corporate Imbalances
Last week I took a business trip to Seattle for my legal automation startup (read: not finance/economics related). We had a booth set up at the local conference, where attorneys would come stop by on their breaks between sessions. While talking to a young attorney in his 30s about our service, he brought up the fact that services like ours are becoming very necessary as hiring good paralegals is becoming impossible these days.
He mentioned how firms with more money are poaching all the talent because they’ve got deeper pockets. This is not the first time I’ve heard this, though it is the first time I had heard it after experiencing it first hand at my own company.
This is the same thing that’s been happening in the tech industry — any developer worth their salt is being poached by the likes of Amazon, Google, Apple, Netflix, Facebook, and Tesla, because they can offer massive compensation packages unrivaled by any smaller companies. But this isn’t the real disparity, no, the problem is that most of those developers at those massive companies are developing code that will never see production, and their managers know it.
These tech giants are churning mills for teaching developers how to develop code in the “Google way”, or the “Amazon way”, and while they may be learning valuable lessons for their future employment, these developers are often not adding any immediate value to these companies.
So you have massive amounts of talent being wasted, because they have been poached by larger companies with near infinite budgets, while the smaller companies struggle to find employees to fill any of their positions. It is no wonder that almost every start-up is just looking to get a quick exit. No company wants to compete with the massive tech giants for any longer than they have to.
Legislative Handcuffs
The next day, at an after party for the conference, I got talking to another attorney in her 50s. At some point, she brought up the fact that she was gravely concerned about the future of our country. She expressed concern over the growing, unimpeded power of the executive branch, and the massive financial incentives leading our nation’s policymakers. In essence, she thought the legislative branch had lost all power to fairly create and maintain laws in the country.
She asked me what my generation thought about these issues. I told her that I believe there is a growing number of individuals in this country that voice the same concerns as her. I briefly mentioned the DeFi movement, the injustices revealed by Edward Snowden, the failing war on drugs, the power of money in government through lobbying, and a few other concepts that were often brought up by my peers while I was in college, and went on the explain the ideals I believe my generation and those after mine are striving towards: freedom and anonymity, to prevent the growing control and suppression of people and ideas.
To my surprise, she was ecstatic when she heard my response. She told me she was so worried that her generation, and those generations before and after hers, had led the world down an un-reversible path for her two children, both in their 20s like me. She was worried that power and greed had taken ahold of our country, but these ideas gave her hope for a brighter future for her children.
Power Inherently Corrupts
That’s one reason why I’m writing this article. Most people cannot turn off all their devices to sit in a quiet space and just think for a few minutes. We are constantly being bombarded by exponentially higher amounts of information than ever before, about every subject you can imagine, and no human has the mental capacity to understand the true implications of it all. For that reason, we all give all of our attention to the few things we do understand, and hope someone smarter than us has the rest figured out.
However, it seems the world is finally beginning to wake up to the fact that at the top of all of our government agencies, and all of our massive corporations, and sitting in the seats of our nation’s most powerful positions, is an evolved chimpanzee just like you and me, who most definitely does not have it all figured out. Yet, we’ve trusted them with more power than any generation that has every come before us, with the hope that they know what they are doing this time.
If you have read the book Animal Farm, by George Orwell, or heard the stories from history the book is based on, this might all be sounding very familiar to you. And if that’s the case, then you are likely staring blankly at the massive elephant in the room that nobody else wants to look at: this time is the same as last time, and the time before that.
It turns out that just like Napoleon, the pig from the book, our leaders today do not know how to handle massive amounts of power in a fair way. Any time you give a specific individual or entity too much power, that power becomes abused. Take a look through history at the most powerful empires and you’ll notice they were all built upon the backs of slaves and oppression. There’s a saying that has been around since the mid 1800s:
Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Even as a 16 year old boy I was becoming astute to this fact and writing essays on the matter. If the problems caused by the corruption of power and money in our society were this apparent to me, a child who only cared about girls and video games, then things have clearly gotten wildly out of hand.
How did we get here?
Now let’s take a step back to think about the world we currently live in.
There has never been a time, like today, where the issues plaguing society were ignored as much as they are now, due to the power of money. It is as if we are so enticed by the dollar that we have forgotten its purpose to begin with: to facilitate meaningful interactions between individuals. The purpose of money was never to allow massive empires to be built on the backs of entire populations of people, yet that has what is has become.
We have drifted so far from the original vision of our forefathers, they would be disgraced to see the state of our nation today.
In today’s world, the legislative branch has lost all power to maintain a fair set of laws for our citizens to follow. There are so many new laws and regulations constantly being passed, each with their own set of confusing, seemingly ambiguous terminology. The only way to keep up and ensure you are not breaking the law is to hire an attorney to follow you around all day and watch your every move.
The world we are creating is unsustainable in every way.
The dichotomy between the “left” and the “right” in our country has created such a massive divide, that people no longer focus on the actual issues at hand, but rather the people they are arguing against. Take the latest debates about Ukrainian intervention, for example. Rather than our politicians debating about how to fix the slew of issues in our country, they are constantly debating about which politician is better for the job.
At the same time, it has never been easier to influence national, and arguably global politics, with the signing of a simple check. There is a reason pharmaceutical companies spend over $4B a year lobbying to our politicians to keep drug prices criminally high and fatal drugs like fentanyl legal… It is the same reason oil and gas companies spend over $3B a year lobbying and spreading misinformation about climate change, so they can continue to incinerate the atmosphere for profit… because it works.
Simultaneously, the executive branch has never had as much power as it does now to do whatever it wants, unchecked by any other branch, without any real consequences. The total number of executive orders given by presidents has been increasing at an alarming rate since the turn of the century, the total number of wrongful police killings has been skyrocketing since the start of the drug war, and the total number of times we’ve gone to war without the approval of Congress or the general public at this point should be criminal!
Should be criminal…
Hold on to that thought.
Criminal is Defined by the Crooks
On my way home from the conference, I took an Uber ride to the airport. I got talking to my driver, who was in his mid 40s and told me he was the owner of a “dive bar” in downtown Seattle. He expressed similar concerns to the attorney I had talked to on the first day of the conference about larger companies having all of the power and crushing his small company due to not having the resources the larger companies have.
At this point, it is necessary that I mention that I did not start any of these conversations. While I obviously have a tendency to talk about things I am interested in, such as the economy, all three of these individuals expressed their own concerns to me about their personal lives, without me asking about the situation.
We got on to talking about the economy, and I mentioned the recent bailouts to the overnight repo markets. He was appalled, not only by the fact that he had not heard of this new form of quantitative easing, but also by the fact that the banks are again being bailed out instead of being held accountable for their terrible business decisions. No other industry gets handed loans and piles of printed cash by the government any time they accidentally spend too much money.
He mentioned the bailouts in 2008 and claimed that it should be criminal to risk the homes and jobs of millions, yet these bankers are consistently being rewarded for doing exactly this and losing their bets!
He’s right. It should be criminal for anyone to consistently gamble the safety of millions of Americans, without a legit plan for recovery when everything goes wrong. Yet, we repeatedly show our central bankers and massive corporations that we approve of this behavior, by bailing them out time and time again and leaving the existing systems in place. When will we learn?
Our banking system has a massive gambling problem and the solution, so far, has been to give them more money!
If you’ve ever owned a dog, you will understand the concept of classical conditioning. The more you reward a dog for a specific behavior, the more they will continue to do that behavior. Humans are no different, yet we are constantly rewarding banks and large corporations for their gross negligence, by giving them more money anytime they lose everyone else’s!
This makes no sense. It’s as if the bankers and the large corporations are the ones making all of the rules in this country… And that’s the entire point.
They are.
The Cartels of America
This weekend, after I had gotten home from the event, I decided to hop onto YouTube to de-stress a little. The first video I watched was a video posted by Andreas Antonopoulos, titled Outside the Golden Cage of Banking. The video discusses the power of the banking industry and the injustices caused the near-sighted views of those making the rules.
In fact, he even goes as far as to say the banks in America have formed a cartel, far more successful and far more powerful than any drug cartel in history. And if you think about it, he’s not wrong.
The banks have found a way to continuously bribe politicians and legislators, abuse and overstretch the power of the executive branch, and get consistently get rewarded for breaking the law. In every other country but America, we call this a cartel.
Andreas, and many of the listeners in the auditorium, expressed very similar concerns to those I had heard all weekend from random strangers, about the corruptness of the power distribution in this country, and how we ended up in this mess to begin with. While this lecture was specifically focused on the criminality of our existing central banking system, the talks Andreas gives cover broad spectrums, from decentralizing finance to achieving real privacy and anonymity in our world.
And Andreas gives talks like this almost every week, to auditoriums full of hundreds of individuals in person and thousands more online. And his community is just one of the many decentralized communities, popping up all over the globe, growing by the minute. All this to say…
The roaring is getting louder.
We are approaching a tipping point in our nation, and possibly in our world. The speed at which the average American citizen is becoming fed up with the unfair distribution of power in the country is increasing. The small guy (and girl) is not happy with how he’s been treated for the last 50 years, and as such, he is starting to express those concerns to random strangers at conferences, at parties, and on his daily Uber drives. And with the massive daily advances in technology, every day there are new ways for the small guy to voice his concerns and take his future into his own hands.
As Malcom Gladwell said in his book, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference,
Look at the world around you. It may seem like an immovable, implacable place. It is not. With the slightest push — in just the right place — it can be tipped.
The Tipping Point
I do not believe in coincidences. However, I do believe in the power of momentum. As I see it, the ideas and concerns in this country are picking up speed, and the more these large companies and agencies try to keep information locked down, the faster these ideas are continuously spreading.
Society, and the freedom of speech that our country was so thankfully built upon, is an unstoppable machine that cannot be silenced by money or power. And very soon, we are going to see the implications of billions of people’s ideas and concerns being suppressed for far too long. And when that happens, we will reach a tipping point.
I’m glad to be alive at such an exciting time, and to be able to take part in such a meaningful revolution. The time is now to take back charge of our future and stop succumbing to the overarching reach of power and money in this country. Your ideas have never been more important than now, in a time when those in power would like nothing more than to suppress them.
If you feel like I do, or like Jack the Uber driver does, or Todd the attorney, or Sharron the mother, the time is now to speak up. Talk to your friends and family about the issues that concern you. Go vote at the next election. Email your congressman. Drive a Tesla. Buy Bitcoin. Just speak up.
Thank you.
Thanks for reading! If you liked this article, or have any questions about something I talked about, I’d love to hear from you! I can also be reached on Twitter at @notadamking.
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