People get all starry-eyed over the financial success Elon Musk has achieved by producing groundbreaking innovations and now believe everything he says on any subject.
Such is life in America, where anyone who has made a little money is worshipped without scrutiny. That’s why we elect peanut growers, movie stars, and real estate moguls, knowing nothing about our evolutionary challenges as Presidents. And you wonder why nothing works.
Serving online payments as Paypal’s cofounder, Elon’s affection for Dogecoin is as flawed as believing in cryptocurrency valuations without trust in value. Now, he is on his way to turn the installed base of Twitter into an audience for his upcoming financial network, X, saying in an interview money is just a record in a database. He could not be more wrong.
Money is the exchange of trust in products or services rendered. And while money can come in many forms, including through blockchain constructs, establishing trust cannot. Crypto is the proverbial horse before the cart.
Trust is the cause that leads to the exchange of money as a consequence. The presumption of money as the cause of trust is the grave depravity of reason, in the words of Nietzsche, that leads greater-fools to believe the valuation of a cryptocurrency represents an economy. It does not, thankfully.
Here is how the value chain of money ought to work:
Evolutionary Merit => Trust => Value => Money => Currency => Valuation
Elon’s misplaced understanding of money and crypto is as dangerous as his desire for humans to live on Mars, as humans will, by evolutionary principle, become Martians. Living on Mars is the fastest way to kill humanity. Exchanging money without the evolutionary merit of money is a sure way to destroy the trust in the collective interests of society.
I greatly respect what Elon has achieved, but we cannot let his explorations of a fantasy world prevent us from adapting to nature’s reality. The excitement to wake up every day should not come from the mindless endeavor of turning life into a videogame but from improving our understanding of nature’s gameplay, which we have no choice but to adapt to.
