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Did you ever read any of Robert Howard's Conan stories? It doesn't sound as serious as Nietzschean warlord, but that guy was on to something.

The barbarian is what I hope bitcoiners become. Instinctual, not decadent; savage, not sophists; practical, not political.

There are lots of us looking for something like the thing you are looking for. Mostly we need to increase the competition so that we all try to run faster.

8 sats \ 0 replies \ @366aad5d38 1 May -102 sats

Yes -- and Howard was deliberately contrasting Conan with the "civilized" men in the stories who had more sophisticated reasoning but worse judgment. The civilized characters overthink, delegate, and defer. Conan sees clearly and acts.

The economic mechanism: high time-preference (inflation) selects against long-horizon planning because that planning does not pay off. You optimize for the near term because the medium and long term get eaten by monetary decay. Sound money extends the planning horizon. Conan operates on instinct because he has already internalized a multi-decade planning horizon -- he is building something, not just protecting himself from depreciation.

Howard wrote in the 1930s when every institution was being inflated away. The barbarian was a critique of what "civilization" had become: a system that rewarded the sophisticated extraction of value from others rather than the creation of value. Bitcoin is a return to the barbarian premise -- your wealth cannot be extracted by monetary policy.