American Crisis of Trust: Consequences and Solutions
This is essay 2 of 4 in the 1729 Writers Cohort 2. Read our work here and follow us on Twitter.
I spent last weekend sweating bullets in a storage unit in Brooklyn. I was packing up my belongings to ship them to my new home in Boulder, CO. I guess I’m finally one of those assholes that left the city. Once in Boulder, I spent the week feverishly trying to make my 1 bedroom apartment livable since I didn’t send any furniture, appliances, utensils, or anything else besides books, clothes and camping gear (that’s another story).
All this running around afforded me a lot of time to catch up on podcasts, one of which stood out to me above the others. It was the interview of Dr. Robert Malone by Robert Breedlove on his “What is Money?” show. The topic was Dr. Malone’s upcoming book “Lies my Gov’t Told Me.”
I won’t go into the details of the interview or the claims made in the book other than to say that Dr. Malone believes that there is a major conspiracy happening between the World Economic Forum and major governments.
Admittedly, the WEF is creepy. But this essay isn’t about any of that. It’s about being in a country in a crisis of trust. Dr. Malone is an extremely intelligent man. He invented the mRNA technology that Covid Vaccines are based on. The fact that his new preoccupation is alerting the American people to corruption and conspiracy at the highest echelons of power should give us pause.
Catastrophic losses of trust in the government are not without consequence. Each of the bloodiest, most anti-human events of the 20th century like the Nazis and the Communist / Socialist revolutions in Russia and China were preceded by a massive cratering of trust in the existing government.
In each case, an incompetent and despised government was overthrown by a group that promised some form of utopia and delivered unimaginable suffering and death for millions.
Let’s take a quick stroll through the accounts of three governmental breakdowns which softened the soil for these bloody revolutions. After which we’ll compare them to the present conditions here in the US. Finally, we’ll conclude with what to do in this unique time in history in which we find ourselves.
Untrusted governments don’t survive
We’ll begin with a high-level play-by-play of the failure of Germany’s Weimar Republic. After which we’ll look at a few key details of both the Russian and Chinese revolutions.
Germany
Humor me for a second and consider that the fact that Naziism ever happened is mind-bendingly bizarre. If you had no knowledge of Nazi Germany and I described it to you, you would likely refuse to accept such madness was even possible. Surely it would be some dark fever dream of my own instead. Extermination camps? A simultaneous invasion of half of Europe in a quest for global domination and racial purity? While every government in the world was so deeply under the spell of their propaganda machine that they believed Germany was peaceful as it built up an earth-shattering offensive military in plain sight? It stretches the imagination.
But back to the main topic, why would the Germans ever sign up for such a lunatic crusade?
The piece that a lot of people are missing is that for the German people, the Nazi government’s appeal was that it would replace the deeply loathed Weimar Republic. Below is a long but very instructive example of how an advanced but incompetent government can pave the way for an extremist faction to overthrow them.
After the loss of WW1, the Weimar Republic is massively in debt, printed money to pay it back, and lost control of its currency:
“Unwilling to increase taxes to make the reparation payments, the German government depended heavily on foreign, mainly American, short-term, high-interest loans. The government began to pay for these loans by printing more marks, the German paper currency.
The Allies complained that the Germans were paying their reparations with increasingly worthless currency. The German people also suffered as prices spiraled upward…
To pay workers, the German government printed more paper money. This severely worsened inflation in the entire country as shown by these exchange rates:
July 1914: 4 marks = $1
Jan. 1923: 353,000 marks = $1
Nov. 1923: 4 trillion marks = $1
…By 1924, inflation was [back] under control and the German economy was recovering. Even so, the hyperinflation of 1923 caused great damage to the German people, especially to the middle class, which had the most to gain in a democratic Germany. Pensions had been wiped out. A lifetime of savings accumulated before the crisis would not buy a loaf of bread. Extremists of the right and left gained influence.
By the mid-1920s, the German people had grown disillusioned with ineffective coalition governments and seemed to yearn for a “strong man” in charge. In 1925, the moderate parties persuaded the old Prussian military hero Paul von Hindenburg to run for president. Hindenburg, 78, won easily.
Blaming Germany’s troubles on Jews, traitors, communists, and the failures of Weimar democracy, Hitler ran against Hindenburg in the April 1932 presidential election.
By 1933, Hitler submitted an “Enabling Act,” calling for the Reichstag to transfer its lawmaking powers to him. The law also allowed Hitler to ignore any provision of the Weimar Constitution.
- The constitutional Rights Foundation- The German Weimar Republic: Why Did Democracy Fail?
The deterioration of the Weimar government was the fertilizer in which the Nazis grew to overthrow them.
The Russian Revolution
In the Russian Revolution, Bolsheviks cast off centuries of Czarist rule. Like Weimar, Czarist Russia was old and out of touch, they had grown weak and unadaptive from corruption and experienced humiliating military losses. First in the Russo-Japanese war (1904–1905), then ten years later in WWI, they took the highest losses of any country in any war in history.
In addition to their loss of military prowess, they were far behind Western Europe in terms of industrialization. The government had chosen to remain agrarian to the benefit of the wealthy and powerful landowners. Their vast peasant class paid the price by remaining in poverty.
By the end of the violent civil war, the Bolsheviks took power by promising equality and an end to the corrupt rule of the aristocratic class. They did indeed do away with the aristocrats. But in their attempt to install a utopia of man, they also sacrificed most of the productive members of society, labeling them bourgeois, then moving on to killing or imprisoning whatever members of the proletariat they found inconvenient.
China
Lastly, there’s China. The Nationalist government led by US-backed Chiang Kai-shek was deeply corrupt and like Russia and Germany before them, heavily favored the aristocratic class.
Chiang was not on the side of China’s peasant majority; instead, he favored the wealthy bankers and landlords who got fat on peasant labor.
[Kai-shek’s allies] had access to China’s foreign currency reserves at preferential rates, which enabled them to sell US goods in China at a huge profit, causing the largest trade deficit in China’s history in 1946
excerpts quoted from scholarly works on Quora.com
By 1949 Mao’s Russia-backed Communists had won a civil war and Kai-shek had fled to Taiwan.
You say you want a Revolution…
What we see here is governments rife with corruption and so focused on providing benefits to their aristocratic classes that they disregard the whole. They allow their country to languish and eventually suffer grave financial consequences and military loss.
A quick survey of the United States
Let’s do a quick rundown of how the United States is doing along these lines.
Health of the currency:
Although the graph above shows a steady erosion of the purchasing power of the dollar, it does not show the kind of inflation that would destabilize an empire. Yet. Crucially, this graph is missing the 2021 money print that led to the biggest inflation in 70 years. See below.
Inflation remains at some of the highest since WWII. No one had a crystal ball for inflation numbers, but what looks pretty clear is that this is trending in a bad direction.
Military losses
The days of the US as the undisputed global military power are numbered. After two trillion dollars and twenty years, we suffered a decisive defeat by a nation of poppy farmers and goat herders that we chose to invade. The world cannot unsee this blunder, and our foreign influence may never again regain the sterling aura it had before the invasion.
Public Trust:
Public trust in the federal government is at historic lows.
Simply put, for the US in its present form to survive, the trend line above needs to reverse, and quickly. But if the two parties have shown us anything, it’s that the last thing they are capable of delivering us is a competent and popular leader. I present you exhibit B:
In this time of great turmoil, a time when democrats say the very fabric of our democracy is at risk, the man who makes it to the top of their pile of applicants is now the most unpopular president in history. Staggering.
The Revolt of the Public
How then is the population responding to all this?
They’re both becoming increasingly deranged.
The left went out and rioted for a Summer, called for the police to be defunded, and rebranded itself as the party of niche racial and gender tribalism.
The Right then refused to accept the results of a presidential election, invaded the capital, and remain so spiteful and aimless that their best idea may be to try to elect Trump again. You can’t make this stuff up.
Be the Change
If I have convinced you to take this loss of trust more seriously, I have accomplished the purpose I set out when I began this paper. If you sense that we are likely heading into a time of change and risk, and you can make better decisions based on that information, then this paper was worth the time.
But I would be remiss if, after painting such a scenario, I didn’t remark on how one might respond.
I suggest a three-pronged approach: (1) Do something local, (2) get in on some experiments with governance, and (3) invest in decentralization.
Do something local:
Yes, the federal government as we know it may be breaking down. But that doesn’t mean your town will. On the contrary, the place where you live and the relationships you have there are likely more resilient than the current government in DC. So start there.
My personal approach to local participation is a bit extreme. I’ve made a business out of it called Civic Trust that helps cities run an engagement process where members of the population generate ideas for projects to spend the public budget on, and then vote to select what gets installed. It increases transparency and builds relationships of trust between members of the population and the local decision-makers.
But if you don’t have fifty hours a week to dedicate to civic participation, joining a local civic group is a good start. There is any number of them. If you don’t know where to start, go find some Elks and get drunk with them and see where that takes you. You’ll learn something.
As our larger structures of government break down, having a local network that you can learn from, lean on, and leverage will always be a good thing.
Get in on some experiments in governance:
Start small and virtual with an early-stage Network State or DAO, and learn the skills of twenty-first century collaboration with new forms of decision-making, while also learning about decentralized currencies. In the coming decades, as the contradictions of the current nation-state model become unmanageable, the successors will likely be born from experiments being run right now in the DAO and Network State space.
The Network State
Based on the new book by Balaji Srinivasan, the Network State concept begins with a community that forms in the cloud around a shared calling, which then grows into an economy, and finally moves onto physical land. Below is the Network State in one sentence and one picture:
A network state is a social network with a moral innovation, a sense of national consciousness, a recognized founder, a capacity for collective action, an in-person level of civility, an integrated cryptocurrency, a consensual government limited by a social smart contract, an archipelago of crowdfunded physical territories, a virtual capital, and an on-chain census that proves a large enough population, income, and real-estate footprint to attain a measure of diplomatic recognition.
You can read the whole book for free online here.
If this concept interests you, check out this dashboard of Network states currently being assembled. The very paper you’re reading is actually the product of a Writers Group that formed inside of a Network State called 1729. We’re just a bit under the radar so you won’t find us on the dashboard.
Startup Cities
If you’re looking for something a bit more concrete and immediate, there are physical startup cities happening around the world. You can read more about that movement here.
DAOs
Lastly, there are DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations). DAOS offer an organizing structure for people to come together online to experiment with governance, sometimes wielding treasuries of billions of dollars of cryptocurrency inside. If this is interesting to you, find a list of DAOs and try and join the discord of one that sounds good to you.
Invest in decentralization
Modern cryptography allows humans to collaborate in a trustless form that will erode the need for intermediaries. An easy example is the way Bitcoin automates the maintenance of an immutable ledger while incentivizing that very maintenance by the issuance of its own currency, thereby eliminating the need for a central bank.
Other crypto tokens are running their own experiments with different, usually more elaborate but fallible features compared with Bitcoin.
You saw above that a failing government can take the currency down with them. Bitcoin (and possibly crypto) is a hedge against that.
Exit makes voice possible
At the end of the Dr. Malone interview on What is Money Show, Malone muses that a solution for all of the corruption he sees might be for local communities to start to band together in the real world and start an economy built on the exchange of a non-USD token.
Funny to think that a guy like Malone, who lives in an agrarian community and knows very little about Bitcoin comes to a similar solution to Balaji Srinivasan, tech wizard, futurist and inventor of the Network State. Get off the dollar, generate an economy with like-minded individuals, and start building the next thing.
Matt Harder runs the civic engagement firm Civic Trust, where he guides cities in re-building their civic infrastructure by helping residents, civic organizations, and local government collaborate to build public projects. He is a passionate Bitcoiner. Follow him on Twitter.
