Becoming Decentralist: Morality and Meaning Beyond the Technology_Max Borders

thank you i i don't know if you expected to come to a decentralist tent revival today but that's what we're going to do um first thing i want to point out is that in the world but also in in particular the united states we're losing our religion uh church membership is dipped below 50 for the first time it's in all this state has been recorded for many a source of morality and meaning has been lost nature as they say abhors a vacuum and unfortunately too many people are turning to a different kind of religion the church of politics this is the church of the one true way our way or the highway it is a life philosophy based on domination trust the institutions were told which often means outsource all your sense of responsibility to power they're supposed to be the state is supposed to be omniscient and on omnipotent the voting booth is a kind of prayer booth in the sense that you cry your teardrop in the ocean and you expect the tide to turn every four years or so and otherwise moralistic in groups engage in these sectarian or partisan proxy wars we see it online every day it's tearing us apart imagine one day you woke up and you looked at your smartphone and there were two apps on it the red app and the blue app this is dos that we're still living in the democratic operating system and i think it sucks personally decentralism is a different way of looking at the world and each other it's a life philosophy based on consent the consent of the governed uh where have we heard that before there is no one true way there is only pluralism difference and experimentation in different ways of life authority is something to be questioned and checked after all power corrupts and absolute power no one is omniscient society cannot be planned by technocratic means we create society when we show up and work together that's how society is created so in groups affinity groups should create peaceful experiments in living that's the idea of decentralism daniel dennett in his great book darwin's dangerous idea says it eats through just about every traditional concept and leaves in its wake a revolutionized world view with most of the old landmark still recognizable but transformed in fundamental ways he was talking about evolution but he could have been talking about the evolutionary processes in crypto in this movement so i just i'm i just finished writing a book about this which will be out in about three weeks um that's that's my my goal is to get it out in three weeks maybe a month uh they usually say pr you use the law of pi or you multiply it by 3.14 and that's how long it's actually going to take but i hope i can get it out in a month so we're bearing witness why why should i write a book like this we're bearing witness to the creation of a worldview accelerated by the promise of technology and decentralism must evolve as a secular religion in parallel with encounter two centralism but decentralism is more of more than just trinkets and tokens and nfts and yield farming and all that stuff although that is awesome it must be about something more comprehensive it must embody mission morality and life meaning and that's how we together become a cultural vanguard i'm just described i can't do it alone so when i'm going to take you quit through a brief tour of the book but i want to note that i've hand drawn some fun little images that will go in the book and this is to to to to sort of establish a more intimate connection with the book but also to the wider decentralist movement so each image will represent be represented and linked out to an nft if anybody buys them after buying the book they'll go to my non-profit social evolution and our mission is to spread the ideas of decentralism and as more people read the book they'll be interested in nfts but also first movers on the book will be incurred you know encourage first mover readers so i'm trying to establish a nice synergy between between worlds and i'll speak more about this at the end so here's the tour of the book i start off in the introduction asking what it is we all share what is it that we all want as human beings and i think it's it's it's one of the most complicated answers but perhaps one of the simplest paradoxically as well we all want happiness fulfillment life meaning everybody on earth wants that for themselves and their families their friends and indeed i want it for all of humanity um i believe that this unites us this this if anything unites us and that i believe requires a peaceful revolution decentralists seek a global society based on consent which will amount to different societies but all of them coexisting peacefully if a consent based order was never possible before you guys are making it possible through technological means but we are under no illusions whether or not they use the red app or the blue app the decentralists want to control us they want you to live by their conception of the good not by yours and not by those in your affinity group thus we have to understand under throw and i'll come back to this concept in a minute two hands if if we have anybody from china in the room please you know help correct my help correct my language on this but i use the metaphor of bao kwan li which is the fist wrapping right in martial art comes it comes from the east and i believe this metaphor captures two major mechanisms of social change in the world at the two active mechanisms of social change compulsion and persuasion that's all we have that is the only two means at our disposal or persuasive means or coercive means compulsive means baon lee the fist rapping right says that wisdom and restraint the open hand of persuasion and wisdom restrains the powerful fist that's why when you bow in martial arts you'll often see this configuration so restraint begins with what i call what is called the three governors this is not for me this is ancient comes from the vedic traditions um we're all familiar with it but the idea is that we have to better align our cognition our emotion and our intuition our head heart and gut when we don't align so we become susceptible to to fear and that there's a there's a fear industry out there we've all seen it and it makes us go crazy okay so aligning our three governors through conscious and continuous practices is absolutely important to being decentralists okay this is all this is not just individual dynamics although that's where it has to start it's also in group dynamics so if you have a bunch of head people in your organization you should probably find some heart and gut people they're the heart people are relators they know how to relate to other human beings really well gut people know how to lead they're going to be out front going come on guys you need all the head the head folks there are tons of them here and it's blowing my mind i'm learning so much but we need all of these in alignment internally in alignment and on our teams speaking of susceptibility to fear there are four primary forces in us and therefore in society that we have to look out for um it comes from the basic masculine effeminate energies and all both masculine and feminine is in all of us so this has nothing to do with endocrinology gender sex all that stuff this has to do with basic forces um within us all and each of the masculine and feminine have generative and destructive aspects okay those map onto a matrix whose mantras are basically exert control end it now or burn it down let things flow and let things go these forces are out of balance we have been too long in the first two in the masculine paradigm of exerting control and ending it now that is what our society is essentially based on is dominance hierarchies dominance hierarchies are created through this idea of exerting control it's not to say we need to completely get rid of that it means to say we need to bring the feminine into balance so the feminine energies can ascend crypto ecosystems are designed to facilitate free flows and they support the ascent of the feminine that needs to come into balance against this masculine urge to control that predominates in society once we have our together it's time to start disrupting in these five areas which i go into deep in detail in the book governance finance enterprise aid and defense i can't go into these all here i don't have time but suffice it to say underthrow is one of the primary mechanisms that we need to use to disrupt in these five major areas we need to create overwhelming value in the alternative system that's step one you guys are creating value and alternative systems every day you know that you have to do that and be customer focused about it in in creating value for the for your counterpart to your users we need to expose the diminishing benefits of the status quo we need to reduce switching costs between systems make it easy for people don't just design things for geeks design things for people like me change people's perceptions of the alternative market show how much show people how much they're gonna love it as they opt into it and continue to create value within the alternative system okay that continuous creation of value within a system attracts new participants now this i believe is the most important part of the book and this is what to a great extent we've lost as people have lost their religion is their morality and i don't want to come up here and sound like a preacher too much but let's enumerate these six non-violence integrity compassion stewardship pluralism and rationality these are important values that must be restored must be respected must be venerated and not just venerated as abstract rules that you pull out of the sky from time to time which is a very western way of looking at morality we need to turn east and see morality as conscious continuous practice these six fears are to be practiced every single day in thought word and deed patanjali and the yoga sutras said ahimsa that himsa is to be practiced and there's a guy who interpreted patanjali on the yoga sutras and talked about the monks in the meditation forest that the cow and the tiger would drink from the lake next to each other because the monks in the meditation forest exuded radiated non-violence and we must as well so but in practicing in moral practice that happens must happen every day we have to use rituals sometimes ritual is wonderful there's a reason that religions of the world have ritual and part of it is to find the space okay victor frankl spoke of uh the sp between stimulus response there is a space and in that space is our power to choose our response in that response lies our growth in our freedom and of course he was a holocaust survival who developed a whole a whole set of ideas in psychology in a whole set of practices but to find yourself in that space requires practice of its own and i offer seven rituals that will help anyone i believe do that prayers acts and symbols all of which can help get us into the space which helps us align the three governors and begin to go out as sovereign entities into the world and make change despite some of the connotations of elitism of stage theory i think we have to acknowledge that people can level up in their cognitive and psychosocial development and by leveling up i mean continuously improve but sometimes that improvement will take us to new stages entirely and as we adopt value systems with these stages people will tend to cluster in them okay but all of these stages are important in different life contexts so we must respect and venerate all these value systems especially as orders of their own so i build these in as orders to be respected and venerated all value systems and yet we're trying to achieve a level of because our life conditions are becoming so complex we're going to have to adopt the systems of higher order complexity in our values and in our cognitive capabilities to the extent that each of us can in our own constraints like i don't know if i'm ever going to be good at yield firming tokens but maybe someone can teach me but i don't know but that cognitive i'm going to have to ascend cognitively to get into that likewise i'm going to have to ascend spiritually and in my in in my moral presence of mind through conscious continuous practice the nine principles uh the the more of these things that chapters have prac uh packed into them the less i can talk about as a near the end but the major punch line here is that the major couple of punch lines is that there are basic economic fundamentals that we can't miss and we must respect economic realities including the limits of formal hierarchies that they themselves have baked into them certain limits on scarcity uh information problems for example so the major punch line here for the meta punch line is that sis the systems of entrepreneurship and innovation that give us better faster cheaper stuff can also gives better faster cheaper governance systems we're starting to see that in the dial space now and it's a beautiful thing it's going to show the world the way we self-organize as peoples so we go from being subjects to being citizens and that was a pretty good leap and it sounds bourgeois as hell but we need to go from being citizens to being customers in other words we need to learn how to serve each other better in our governance systems i know that sounds crazy but like when you're making a dow you're going to have to figure out how to bring good people in and keep them and that's an entrepreneurial effort okay finally the ten keys what's the meaning of life no everyone has a different answer but there are a set of processes for discovering life meaning and i talk about that in the book because this is really what it's all about folks this is what we all share so the plan i'm going to launch the decentralist book uh nft images in the book will link to dedicated nft uh nfts and those will eventually grant access to a decentralist dow but i need help right so the mission is going to be spread decentralism far and wide but i've got some challenges i'm not an i'm not an uber geek right so first thing i want to do is find thoughtful decentralists who share my values and my hopes and dreams uh second form a proto-dow for example on discord or telegram i understand that that's a good next step like a good intermediate step um and then structure value into dow access nfts and organize a campaign for that express purpose so our basic whys do you want to seek happiness and life meaning do you want to ascend together as cognitive and moral beings do we want to live in peaceful sustainable societies built on consent and mutual aid do we want to solve the world's problems together if your answer to those is yes i hope you'll contact me please you can either email me use the twitter handle or i would love it if you gave me your information um where the qr code is it's an opportunity to give me your name because i will reach out to you and thank you so much for listening [Applause]