the essays

“The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is the rule. We must arrive at a concept of history which corresponds to this. Then it will become clear that the task before us is the introduction of a real state of emergency; and our position in the struggle against Fascism will thereby improve. Not the least reason that the latter has a chance is that its opponents, in the name of progress, greet it as a historical norm. — The astonishment that the things we are experiencing in the 20th century are “still” possible is by no means philosophical. It is not the beginning of knowledge, unless it would be the knowledge that the conception of history on which it rests is untenable.”

— Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History

Our conception of history is one that is untenable.

Over the course of the 20th century humanity witnessed genocide after genocide, each being conducted with more precision and barbarism than the one before it. Again and again we see that the state–any state–has entitled itself to unlimited power and a total right over every life through the “emergency situation” which it will always find to expand and extend its power to an unlimited capacity.

By the very fact of what the 20th century was, and the testimony of those who touched bottom all throughout that century of unequivocal violence,  the law has shipwrecked itself on the reef of insanity that is state totalitarianism. To be governed is no longer about any kind of social contract or obligation to one another, but about the pure oppression of the freedom and liberty of all for the sole benefit of a callous few. It is the awful and horrific truth that no one wants to look at, for the wickedness that it is, the pure evil it represents.

All States have re-established bellum omnium contra omnes (‘The war of all against all’) as bellum se ipsum alet (‘the war that feeds itself’). The true hidden nature of state power, arcanum imperii,  is not to end the war of all-against-all as a great peacemaker, but rather to subject people to the parasitic nature of a continuous total war that encompasses all of biological life.

It is the sinister prophecy of homo homini lupus (‘man is wolf to man’) and the guilt of innocence that has consigned all people to the concentration camps we call life. It is a future of a boot stomping on a human face forever.

Under the glare of rifle scopes, and the glistening of pistols the hips of police gangsters; people willingly go into the camps, on their own free will and volition to be subjects of exploitation, molestation, and liquidation for those who occupy the places of decadences and power. Bleating the state’s hypnotic slogan, “arbeit macht frei” (work will make you free) they walked under the gates which will never give freedom, but only ash and regret. We bear witness to the transformation of Plato’s Cave into the gridded city of cold steel and unforgiving concrete where the State’s panopticon rules with the shadowy slogan:

Such warnings were ominous, we each listened as the distant thunder of deathly machinery grew louder; but with its arrival we all fell deaf, as we did blind. Even in this blinded and confused state we should have angrily shouted, “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” (Who watches the watchmen?) Rather we fell into a slack-jawed, starry-eyed, hypnotized gaze at the spectacle before us, the charm of the Siren’s call and her promise of ‘safety and security.’

Suffering the quivering defeat of this life, we bow in silent capitulation, waiting for our friend Death to take us in his warm embrace and show us where our home in the world should be.

Each of us in our own unique way now hold up a cog in this vicious mechanical web of death, the apparatus of oppression we call the state and law. We each silently obey every order that is given, forfeiting every right we had, and surrender ourselves into the darkest of nights under the powerless knowledge that nothing is right.

A false nihilism has collapsed us into its event horizon of a public life that is not worth living. There is no light to be found, only terror and darkness that envelopes all. Each breath we take, flinch we make, every thought we have, is monitored for the safety and security of a repressive state apparatus that will destroy us at any moment’s notice for whatever reason it sees fit.

The prattling paranoia has turned everyone into a potential enemy, destroyed the very idea of community, and obscured the political into nothingness. Privacy is now only a mark of total suspicion, a crime that marks each of us with guilt and testifies towards our most heinous crime of thought. Each of us now finds ourselves in our own private cage of modern life, the permanent state of emergency where the state rules totally over every facet of life, prostituting our very being to the highest bidder in their slave auction economy.

This is the crisis of modern life, the invisible iron cage that has ensnared the entirety of life–this is the permanent emergency that we now live within. We live under the real threat of not just the abolition of privacy, but what it means to live as subjects of suspicion to always be monitored, to always remain a potential enemy combatant, and to always be stripped of the right to life at the state’s bidding.

To know this crisis is to know that whatever ’emergency situation’ might exist, we will always be stripped of all our rights to become something other than human to the totalitarian state that seeks to control everything.

Introducing The Real State of Emergency

It is only in the darkest of night that the faintest light shines the brightest…

Only in a world that has lost all reasoning, that has given itself over to the pointlessness of a worthless life, and surrendered itself to living under the state of emergency does Bitcoin create the fullness of its meaning, the grandeur of its purpose and cause. It is the hidden gem of light that offers us a path towards its liberation beyond the night that has become life.

Like a spectacular encrypted jewel of destiny, Bitcoin arrives like a ghost from the black of the internet with its messianic promise hidden within it. A secret promise that can liberate all of humanity from the chains and shackles that ensnare it – but only if we choose it.

This action alone, of choosing Bitcoin over fiat money, introduces the real state of emergency; a declaration of molon labe (come and take it) against each and every state. We must always remember that the messiah does not arrive as the Redeemer, but as the vanquisher of the Antichrist. Those of us who understand this encrypted message veiled in Bitcoin know its secret truth that it is the real state of emergency; the final eschatological crisis that will destroy the state once and for all without shedding a drop of blood.

Bitcoin is the real state of emergency (aufzuheben) because it recognizes and nullifies the total state of emergency (ausnahmezustand) that we are always forced to live under. Bitcoin activates a secret total civil war (stasis) against all power structures through the ontology of cryptography and what its hidden meaning is. From the very beginning of Bitcoin, with Satoshi Nakamoto’s first appearance, he recognized that using cryptography was the only way that one could protect themselves from the state and its physical power, and that it was the only path forward towards creating a radical new commonality of wealth beyond violence or the authority of the state.

In order to fully understand the crisis that we live within, we must admit to ourselves that the crisis is not something outside or foreign to us, but something found inside of ourselves. It is the line between good and evil that divides every man’s heart, the boundary between his best self and worst self, and is the hidden capacity in any one of us for evil. To truly understand the radical power that is Bitcoin, we must assume that anyone–including ourselves–could be the real enemy, the oppressor who seeks to ‘do good’ beyond any and all reason; including evil. It is because of these possibilities that Satoshi understood that we must use cryptography to organize ourselves according to new principals that understand this state of emergency that we live under.

The state of emergency is the life that we now live each day; it is the struggle that all people everywhere share with one another, like a hidden commonwealth.. This life under the state of emergency shows us that the only thing we now hold in common is our oppression, the only wealth we currently share is our poverty. It is against this, and the crisis that our lives have become, that we seek to fight back and reclaim that which is rightfully ours: Our wealth, our lives, and our freedom.

The Civil War for Freedom

Let me be clear, there is a civil war to be had.

The state and its agents will come after each and every one of us. They will cage our bodies, crush our bones, rape our minds, and attempt to take everything from us. They will threaten us personally, our families indirectly, destroy our businesses, and sully our names with falsehoods and lies–but they will not have our wealth. And that alone is the most powerful action that can take place.

Through the dangerous and insane brinkmanship of state power, and its sociopathic demand to control all wealth so it may make war on any person it labels enemy, the state has unchained itself from any notion law, justice, or consanguinity to show its face for what it really is: evil.

It is evil for it does not acknowledge any limits to its power, any crisis that it cannot overcome. It is evil for the millions it has killed under the ‘state of emergency’ that it has used to allow itself to legally conduct every major genocide of the twentieth century. It is evil for it does not recognize any right of ownership beyond itself, any security that it cannot provide, any wealth that it cannot expropriate. And it is with these hideous facts that we come to recognize the secret of state power as it has always been:

“The obligation of subjects to the sovereign is understood to last as long, and no longer than the power lasteth by which he is able to protect them. For the right men have by nature to protect themselves when none else can protect them, can by no covenant be relinquished”

–Thomas Hobbs, Leviathan

It is against this evil that we declare our war. A war against those who seek to control all wealth for the ‘safety and security’ of a few. It is against those who want to rule with fear and terror, and seek to have only a commonwealth of cowards who demand we obey beyond everything else. It is against these men in government of every creed and color, against their minions and officers who say they were only following orders, against the surveillance of everything that we object and that we will make war against.

We pleaded with them for our commonality and consanguinity that they should stop and join our side. That we humbly ask them to walk away from their part in this atrocious mess, and that we will hold no ill will towards them. But for those who believe that they have some right, some kind of duty towards a corrupt state whose robberies and crimes can never be atoned for, who think they are allowed to steal and terrorize simply because they have the power to do so, we say that they are our enemies, and we shall treat them as such.

Prudence will dictate that we shall not simply make violence against them, as all prior movements have indicated that such a way is the path towards failure. More importantly, we must refuse violence, not for it is not a valuable tool in the fight against oppression, but for that is now the indicator that allows for the state to respond with all of its might and force. No, such a stratagem has constantly ended in failure, or even worse, with the oscillation of power to a new regime whose violence is only greater and more sadistic than the one before. A totally new strategy against the state must be employed, and this strategy is the utilization of cryptography in order to create new kinds of sovereignty that is beyond violence of any kind.

This is the real state of emergency, the final crisis of law and authority where no longer are people looking for a change of affairs, the replacement of one kind of insanity with another, but a true and radical change that is beyond revolutionary. The first move in this volutionary civil war against all governments everywhere is to first strike at their money, the life-blood of their system of power, the primary mode of their exploitation.

For striking at money is to strike Goliath in the eyes, to blind him and render his strength and size a moot point, and to make him vulnerable for his final fall. Together we can take down the giant, but only through introducing the real state of emergency where we no longer recognize their fiat money or false authority, but choose to create new and better ones for ourselves and our posterity.

By choosing to use Bitcoin and the radical power that lies hidden and waiting for us inside its cryptography, together we can change everything.

Erik Cason
Nov 2020